George Bassman
| George Bassman | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | George Bassman |
| Born | February 7, 1914 |
| Origin | New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | June 26, 1997 (aged 83) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, arranger |
George Bassman (February 7, 1914 – June 26, 1997) was an American composer and arranger.
Born in New York City to a Ukrainian- and Lithuanian-Jewish émigré couple, Bassman was later raised in Boston and began studying music at the Boston Conservatory while still a boy.
He studied orchestration and composition formally, but in his teens he left home against his father's wishes to play piano in an itinerant jazz group, and subsequently worked as an arranger for Fletcher Henderson in New York.
Through that gig, he became part of the burgeoning swing/big band scene and was soon writing songs as well. Bassman peaked in that career when he and Ned Washington wrote "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" for the bandleader Tommy Dorsey. Bassman also worked in radio as an arranger for Andre Kostelanetz, and made the move to Hollywood in the mid 1930s.
Among his earliest film jobs was orchestrating the Gershwin songs in the Fred Astaire movie A Damsel in Distress at RKO. He later went to work at MGM, where he composed music for the Marx Brothers vehicles A Day at the Races, Go West, and The Big Store, as well as writing or arranging music for such musicals as Lady Be Good and Cabin in the Sky. He also worked on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz (for which he orchestrated the background music used in the tornado scene, poppy-field scene and many of the Emerald City sequences), Babes in Arms, and For Me and My Gal. During his work at MGM, he returned to RKO to supervise the adaptation of the Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart musical Too Many Girls to the big screen. He also worked on dramas, including Vincente Minnelli's The Clock and Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice.
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