Joe Harnell

Born August 2, 1924, in the Bronx, New York, Joe Harnell built a reputation as an easy listening composer and arranger. The offspring of a onetime vaudevillian, he launched piano lessons at six and turned professional at 14, gigging with assorted jazz outfits—including his father’s klezmer ensemble in the Catskills—while still enrolled in school. A music scholarship took him to the University of Miami, yet military service intervened in 1943 when he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and soon earned a chair in the Glenn Miller Air Force Band. Stationed in Paris, he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger; later he worked with William Walton at London’s Trinity College of Music. After his 1946 discharge he returned stateside and entered Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute, where Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein guided his studies. Classical credentials notwithstanding, he gravitated toward jazz and pop, settling back in New York by 1950 to freelance as a pianist with groups such as Lester Lanin’s. Growing acclaim for his writing and arranging led to steady work as an accompanist and musical director; over the ensuing years he supported performers as varied as Judy Garland, Maurice Chevalier, and Marlene Dietrich, ultimately succeeding Burt Bacharach in that role.

Harnell joined Peggy Lee in 1958, shortly after her chart-topping “Fever.” The collaboration yielded two albums arranged by Harnell—Anything Goes: Cole Porter and Peggy Lee and the George Shearing Quartet—while he also contributed piano to Things Are Swingin’. He stayed with Lee until 1961; the following year an automobile crash left him seriously injured. During recovery, Kapp Records tapped him to exploit the bossa nova wave. With sidemen Al Caiola and Tony Mottola, he recorded Fly Me to the Moon, earning a Grammy for his bossa nova treatment of the title track. Three additional Kapp releases—More Bossa Nova Pops, ’Hud’ and Other Movie Themes, and The Rhythm and the Fire—followed, and across his career he fronted nearly twenty instrumental and easy listening albums, among them the Columbia set Bossa Now! (showcasing guitarist Vinnie Bell) and his final Motown outing, Moving On!!.

While based in New York, Harnell also composed advertising jingles; after several successful campaigns for Gray Advertising he became the agency’s musical director in 1964. Three years later he assumed the same post for the daytime talk program The Mike Douglas Show, remaining until his 1973 relocation to Hollywood. The move revived his compositional activity; he first drew attention for scoring the action series The Bionic Woman and subsequently partnered with producer Ken Johnson on The Incredible Hulk, Alien Nation, and V, capturing the 1986 Emmy for outstanding music on the latter. In the late 1980s he joined the faculty of USC’s Flora Thornton School of Music to instruct aspiring film composers. He served as soloist and musical director for the 1991 U.S. tour of Columbia Concerts’ celebration of Cole Porter’s centenary, published the memoir Counterpoint in 2000, and died of heart failure in Los Angeles on July 14, 2005.