Biography
Warren Barker entered the world in Oakland, California, and enrolled at U.C.L.A. to pursue a music degree, concentrating on saxophone as his main instrument. During his early twenties he advanced his compositional training under Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco and Henri Pensis, after which NBC appointed him chief arranger for its flagship radio program, The Railroad Hour. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s he remained in constant demand as an arranger and conductor of pop-instrumental recordings, several of which later resurfaced on “Bachelor’s Den”-themed compact discs. He subsequently supplied composition, arrangement, and conducting services to Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox, Columbia Pictures, and MGM, focusing chiefly on their television productions. Toward the close of the 1950s he served as musical director and conductor for the soundtrack LP 77 Sunset Strip, one of the stronger pop-jazz albums to emerge from a television source. Over the following years he participated in the scoring, arranging, and conducting of more than thirty prime-time series, most prominently and effectively the 1960s sitcom Bewitched. In 1970 he received an Emmy Award for his work on the unconventional series My World and Welcome to It, inspired by James Thurber. His motion-picture contributions proved more sporadic yet distinctive: in the early 1960s he created the score for the groundbreaking film Strange Lovers, which addressed the then-taboo subject of homosexuality; at MGM in the mid-1960s he composed for the low-budget feature Zebra in the Kitchen, notable in rock circles for featuring a wholly atypical recording of the title song by the Standells; and at Fox he numbered among the arrangers on the blockbuster musical Hello Dolly. He also prepared song arrangements for Frank Sinatra and created occasional pieces, largely in the band-music idiom. Active well into the opening years of the twenty-first century, his treatments of numerous Broadway and film scores remain in circulation.
Albums
