Russell Garcia (composer)
Russell Garcia, QSM (12 April 1916 – 19 November 2011)[1] was an American composer and arranger who wrote a wide variety of music for screen, stage and broadcast.
He worked at Universal Studios and MGM, where at the latter he composed and conducted the original scores for such films as George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) and Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961).
Garcia collaborated with many Hollywood musicians and celebrities, including Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Anita O'Day, Mel Torme, Julie London, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Maynard Ferguson, Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Henry Mancini, and Charlie Chaplin making arrangements and conducting orchestras as needed.
[2] When his family noticed the five-year-old Russ standing by the radio every Sunday morning waiting for the New York Philharmonic to come on, it was obvious the child had a special interest in music.
Garcia and his wife fell in love with the location and bought a house on the water's edge of Tangitu Bay in the Te Puna Inlet, east of the Purerua Peninsula near Kerikeri.
[2] They spent many years there, but after they moved to Kerikeri, Garcia continued to compose and arrange, including projects in the United States and around the world.
Together, the Garcias further volunteered their services on a regular basis to teach primary school children in New Zealand about the virtues gained through the use of songs, stories, games and creative exercises.
The evening was hosted by Tierney Sutton and guest speakers included Bill Holman, Duane Tatro and Bud Shank.
By the time Garcia was in high school, he was working five nights a week playing music and earning more than his father, who was a credit manager in a large department store.
[8][9] In 1957, through his Universal Studios contract, he arranged and conducted Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald's record album Porgy And Bess.
[2] Developing a parallel career, not only did he provide arrangements for many singers and instrumentalists, he recorded over 60 albums under his own name, as well as composing for cutting-edge projects such as the Stan Kenton Neophonic Orchestra.
He was considered an innovator with his music using experimental frameworks on which newer and greater presentations could be fashioned, as he proved, assembling his unexpected and groundbreaking four-trombone band[11] with brass players Frank Rosolino, Tommy Pederson, Maynard Ferguson and Herbie Harper.
They spent the next six years on their 13-metre fiberglass trimaran the Dawn-Breaker, as "traveling teachers," anchoring in such exotic locations as Jamaica, the Galapagos Islands, the Marquesas and Tahiti.
In Fiji, in 1969, the "charm" spun again when musicians visiting from Auckland invited Garcia, on behalf of the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission and the Music Trades Association, to do live concerts, radio and TV shows as well as lecture at universities around the country, a perfect fit seeing as Garcia is also known in music circles as the author of what are considered the definitive textbooks on composition: The Professional Arranger Composer Books I and II.
