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Pete Rugolo

Pete Rugolo was a jazz composer and arranger. He was born in San Piero Patti, Sicily. His family emigrated to the United States in 1920 and settled in Santa Rosa, California. He started his musical career playing the baritone, like his father, but he quickly branched out into other instruments, notably the French horn and the piano. He received a bachelor's degree from San Francisco State College, and then studied composition with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, California.

After he graduated, he was hired as an arranger and composer by guitarist and bandleader Johnny Richards. He spent World War II playing with Paul Desmond in an army band. After WWII Rugolo went to work for Stan Kenton who headed one of the most progressive big bands of the time. Rugolo provided arrangements and original compositions that drew on his knowledge of 20th century music, sometimes blurring the boundaries between the ballroom and the concert hall.

While Rugolo continued to work occasionally with Kenton in the 1950s, he spent more time creating arrangements for pop vocalists, including June Christy, Peggy Lee and the Four Freshmen. During this period he also worked for a while on musicals at MGM, and served as an A&R director for Mercury Records in the late 1950s. Among his many albums were Adventures In Rhythm, Introducing Pete Rugolo, Rugolomania, Reeds In Hi-Fi and Music For Hi-Fi Bugs.

In the 1960s and 1970s Rugolo did a great deal of work in television, contributing music to a number of popular shows including Leave It to Beaver, Thriller, The Fugitive, The Challengers, and Family. He also provided scores for a number of TV movies and a few theatrical features. Rugolo's small combo jazz music featured in a couple of numbers in the popular movie Where The Boys Are, under the guise of Frank Gorshin's "Dialectic Jazz Band." While his work in Hollywood has often demanded that he suppress his highly original style, there are some striking examples of Rugolo's work in both TV and film. The soundtrack for the last movie on which he worked, This World, Then the Fireworks (1997), demonstrates his gift for writing music that is both sophisticated and expressive

Tags

1

TV / Film

Pete Rugolo and the Beaver

Pete Rugolo and the Beaver

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

The death of Ken Osmond last week came as a shock to anyone who grew up watching TV's Leave It to Beaver in the early 1960s. The shock for me wasn't that Osmond had died but that he had been alive all this time. The word on the playground in the late 1960s and early '70s was that the guy who played Eddie Haskell had died in Vietnam. Everyone believed it, and why not? Obviously, that wasn't the case, but ...

1

Recording

Rugolo, Kenton and Bardot

Rugolo, Kenton and Bardot

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

When I posted last on Pete Rugolo (here), I left out two major albums in my survey of the arranger's work in a leadership role. They are Rugolo Plays Kenton (1958) and Behind Brigitte Bardot (1959). Both are exceptional for different reasons. Rugolo, of course, began arranging for Stan Kenton in 1944, starting with Opus a Dollar Three Eighty. As the years rolled on with Kenton, he arranged many of vocalist June Christy's numbers with the band as well as ...

Recording

Pete Rugolo's Leadership LPs

Pete Rugolo's Leadership LPs

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Arranger Pete Rugolo is an acquired taste. Listening to virtually all of his leadership albums in the 1950s and early '60s yesterday, I initially dismissed many of them as bombastic, elephantine works that relied too often on shrill trumpets and tympani drums. What's more, many of the albums featured a stray clunker so bad that they made me question Rugolo's taste and judgment.  That was my first listen. By the third go-through, I was in a state of bliss, surprised ...

Recording

Stereo Experiments West

Stereo Experiments West

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

By 1960, the 12-inch album was as commonplace in record-buyers homes as a knife and fork and the stereo format—introduced in 1958—was gaining traction, particularly among single males hoping to impress dates. Meanwhile, the movie industry was having a significant influence on the West Coast's top musicians, who increasingly were being contracted to record soundtracks. As a result, a growing number of West Coast jazz albums began to sound like incidental music for film. With stereo still in its infancy, ...

75

Obituary

Pete Rugolo (1915-2011)

Pete Rugolo (1915-2011)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Pete Rugolo, a jazz-classical maverick in the late-1940s andarchitect of a brassy, West Coast orchestral sound that helped establish Stan Kenton and the music of television and the movies in the 1950s and 1960s, died on October 16 in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 95. [Photo by William P. Gottlieb] Starting in 1944 with his first arrangement for Kenton (Opus a Dollar Three Eighty), Rugolo's music was as sweeping and as grand as California's panoramic landscape—and at times just as ...

114

Obituary

Pete Rugolo, 1915-2011

Pete Rugolo, 1915-2011

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

Pete Rugolo has died in Los Angeles at the age of 95. Rugolo's composing and arranging, particularly for the Stan Kenton Orchestra,had much to do in the 1940s and '50s with the creation of what came to be called progressive jazz. As a discoverer of talent and as a producer, he was responsible for recording a number of artists including Peggy Lee and Mel Tormé. He produced the seminally influential Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions of 1949 and ...

94

Obituary

Jeff Sultanof on Pete Rugolo

Jeff Sultanof on Pete Rugolo

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

Shortly after Pete Rugolo died this week, Jeff Sultanof offered to contribute a piece putting Rugolo's work in perspective. I was delighted to accept and flattered that he considered Rifftides the proper place for his essay. Jeff is a native of New York City, where he lives and works. He is a composer, orchestrator, editor, educator and researcher greatly admired in the community of professional musicians, critics and academics. He has analyzed, studied, edited and taught the music of Gerald ...

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Adventures in Sound

Unknown label
2007

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Study In Stereo

Concord Music Group
1963

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Music From Out Of...

Concord Music Group
1959

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Rhythm Meets Rugolo

Concord Music Group
1959

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The Music From...

Concord Music Group
1959

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Richard Diamond Theme

Concord Music Group
1959

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Videos

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