Jeff Alexander

Jeff Alexander was a classically trained composer/arranger/conductor who spent almost 30 years working in movies and television. He was born Myer Goodhue Alexander in Seattle, WA, in 1910 and studied at the Brecker Conservatory -- his teachers included Edmund Ross and Joseph Schillinger. Alexander joined the movie industry at the outset of the '50s and joined ASCAP as a composer in 1952. His earliest credited assignments in movies were as an arranger and/or vocal director for Call Me Mister and On the Riviera, both 20th Century Fox films. He also wrote the score of Westward the Women (all 1951) at MGM. At the latter studio, he worked variously as an arranger, conductor, or vocal music supervisor on Singin' in the Rain and a string of second-tier vehicles, including Small Town Girl, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, and Athena -- thanks to the movie's constant revival and its use of perennially popular Freed/Brown songs, his vocal arrangements on "Singin' in the Rain" remain some of Alexander's most familiar work a half-century or more later. In his scoring of the Western Escape From Fort Bravo (1953), he wrote the popular song "Soothe My Lonely Heart," the first in a string of songs that he authored in association with movies, usually in collaboration with Jack Brooks or Larry Orenstein. Alexander wrote two film scores a year and served as conductor or musical supervisor on others (including Kismet and Jailhouse Rock). In 1958, however, he had a bumper crop of soundtracks, including The Sheepman, The High Cost of Loving, and Party Girl ;one of his scores ended up getting dropped, however, when the Western Saddle the Wind had to be partly reshot and recut and resulted in Elmer Bernstein's replacing his music. Alexander moved into television at the end of the '50s, scoring My Three Sons, Sam Benedict, and episodes of The Twilight Zone (among them "Come Wander With Me"), in between vehicles such as The Gazebo (1959) and the Elvis Presley vehicles Kid Galahad, Clambake, and Speedway. Following the ironic Western comedy Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and the partial Western misfire Dirty Dingus Magee (1970) he worked entirely in television, on made-for-TV features, and individual series episodes, closing out his career with More Wild, Wild West (1980). He passed away in 1989. Alexander also wrote a fair-size body of serious concert works from the '50s onward, but his film and television work remains his best-known music. In 2004, his unused score for Saddle the Wind was found in the vaults and issued on CD in tandem with the Elmer Bernstein score. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.