Jerry Fielding
| Jerry Fielding | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Joshua Itzhak Feldman |
| Also known as | Gerald Feldman, credited as Jerry Feldman prior to June, 1947 |
| Born |
June 17, 1922 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Origin | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Died | February 17, 1980 (aged 57) Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation(s) | Radio, record, film and television composer, conductor, bandleader and musical director |
Jerry Fielding (June 17, 1922 – February 17, 1980) was an American jazz musician, arranger and film composer who emerged in the 1960s after a decade on the blacklist to create boldly diverse and evocative Oscar-nominated scores, primarily for gritty, often brutally savage, western and crime action genres, including the Peckinpah masterpieces, The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971).
Jerry Fielding was born as Joshua Itzhak Feldman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Hiram Harris Feldman and Esther Feldman, both American Jews. After trying the trombone, he took up the clarinet and joined the school band. He was offered a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute for Instrumentalists. After a short attendance, because of ill health he was bedridden for two years with an undiagnosed ailment. While housebound, he listened to the radio, and became a fan of the big band sound and Bernard Herrmann’s music for Orson Welles’s radio dramas.
Somewhat recuperated, he worked at Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theater (where his fellow players included Erroll Garner, Billy May and Henry Mancini), learning composition and arranging there from the theater's pit orchestra conductor, Max Adkins (as did Mancini and another notable Pittsburgh native, Billy Strayhorn). In June 1941, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, Fielding left Pittsburgh to work for Alvino Rey’s swing band. His arrangement of Picnic in Purgatory in 1942 became highly popular.
This job ended when most of the band was drafted. He was too frail for service. He became vocal arranger for Lucy Ann Polk’s Town Criers and then joined Kay Kyser’s band. He became their chief arranger in 1945. He also arranged for the big bands of Mitchell Ayres,Claude Thornhill, Jimmie Lunceford, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet and Les Brown.
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