Jerry Fielding (born Joshua Itzhak Feldman; June 17, 1922 – February 17, 1980)[5] was an American jazz musician, bandleader, arranger, and film composer.
His notable film scores include The Wild Bunch (1969), Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Straw Dogs (also 1971), The Mechanic (1972), The Gambler (1974), The Bad News Bears (1976), The Outlaw Josey Wales (also 1976), Demon Seed (1977), and Escape from Alcatraz (1979).
[7][8] During the ensuing decade, Jerry briefly experimented with the trombone, then took up the clarinet and joined the high school band,[9] eventually earning a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute for Instrumentalists.
Too frail for service, Feldman became vocal arranger for Lucy Ann Polk's Town Criers[16] and then joined Kay Kyser's band.
[17] In addition, he arranged for the big bands of Mitchell Ayres,[18] Claude Thornhill, Jimmie Lunceford, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet and Les Brown.
In the spring of 1947, having suitably impressed prospective employer, radio emcee Jack Paar (and his production team), Feldman was compelled to change his name as a prerequisite to securing the position of providing live on-air music (records were still not allowed on the air in 1947).
[21][22] Fielding later recalled the reasons for doing this: "So a couple of [professional jazz] guys formed little bands, not to go in buses on the road, but to record with, do a few weekends at the Palladium, just rehearse, and keep the thing going.
[23] Though never a Communist, Fielding was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in December 1953 during the anti-Communist hysteria, particularly in Congress, and the FBI, who were in the throes of punishing the many talented FDR supporters in entertainment who had helped to defeat isolationists before Pearl Harbor.
All integration and equal rights to black performers were deeply offensive to some HUAC members,[citation needed] and to FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover.
[citation needed] Fielding took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to divulge the names of any colleagues who might be suspected of "Communism", doing so knowing that pleading the Fifth would damage his thriving radio and television career, as it did.
In Las Vegas, Nevada he led a band at the Royal Las Vegas Hotel; in addition, he toured for the only time with his name orchestra, which also released several albums during this period, first for a little-known independent label, with Jerry Fielding Plays a Dance Concert (Trend, 1954), followed by Sweet with a Beat (1955), Fielding's Formula (1957), and Hollywoodwind Jazztet (1958), all on Decca.
[24] Television had been a surreptitious haven for the blacklisted writers, directors and composers for many years, and it was Desilu Productions, founded by Lucille Ball, who'd briefly been a member of the Communist Party and also dragged before HUAC in the early 1950s, who backed Hutton's choice.
Fielding was now also free to write television scores for hit 1960 shows, Mission Impossible (1966) (though not the best known theme, which is by Lalo Schifrin) and Star Trek in second and third seasons.
A neo-noir Western with a wordless, staggeringly violent final shootout still imitated to this day, The Wild Bunch's quartet of taciturn, bitter gunmen, led by William Holden, are given power, humor and voice largely through Fielding's brilliant score.
"The Wild Bunch gave me a chance to illustrate to the public, and the entertainment industry, that if a composer is given real freedom to create, he can produce a score that is unlike any other ever written", Fielding said later.
The following year, in Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), a troubled production starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Fielding's score was removed from the final picture.
In this black comedy Fielding again expresses the despairing subtext and unspoken whimsy of his frequently inchoate collaborator, this time in a film whose exercise in futility seems a personal statement by Peckinpah indeed.
His last film for Winner was the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, starring Robert Mitchum and considered a classic[citation needed] of 1970s neo-LA Noir.
[27] Fielding, assuming he was scoring a popular young people's Western novel, researched and included Irish folk tunes from the Civil War, creating another newly explored direction for period films and winning his third and final Oscar nomination.
On that Oscar night, Fielding was up against Jerry Goldsmith's The Omen, Lalo Schifrin's Voyage of the Damned, and the two final scores by his former hero in 1930s radio, prolific Hitchcock favorite Bernard Herrmann, for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and de Palma's Obsession.
Other notable scores were for Demon Seed (1977), that included electronic instruments and atonal passages; and The Bad News Bears (1976), inspired by the 19th century opera Carmen by French composer, Georges Bizet.