Jack Marshall born 23 November 1921

Jack Wilton Marshall (November 23, 1921 – September 20, 1973) was an American guitarist, composer, arranger, and conductor. He was the father of producer-director Frank Marshall and composer Phil Marshall.

   

Born in El Dorado, Kansas, Jack Marshall was a top producer for Capitol records beginning in the late '50s and early '60s. His musical expertise led him into the combined realm of production and conducting, resulting in classic recordings for vocal artists such as Peggy Lee and Judy Garland.

He also released a number of albums under his own name that featured his own finger-style jazz guitar playing. He was a close friend of Howard Roberts and Jack Sheldon, and produced several of their best albums on Capitol. He wrote his own arrangements, many of which had a big-band, jazzy sound to them. He was officially credited with the arrangement for Peggy Lee's "Fever", although it is now 

believed that Lee herself was primarily responsible for that arrangement, while it was Marshall who arranged the other tunes recorded on the session. It was Roberts who did the finger snaps on the record.

Marshalls own albums highlighted his fine playing on acoustic guitar, much of which swung toward the jazz side of things. Influenced by composer and arranger Billy May, he also concocted his own arrangements, displaying a fondness for loud brass. That Marshall was part of the sonically wild, musically outrageous '50s and '60s hi-fi era can certainly be assumed from some of his album titles. Only the space-age jazz astronaut Sun Ra could have a 
discography with titles in it such as Sounds!, Soundsville, and Sounds Unheard Of. Marshall was a close associate of fellow studio guitar whiz Roberts, producing all of this artists' mid-'60s albums on Capitol.

Marshall directed Tommy Tedesco, Al Hendrickson, Howard Roberts, Bobby Gibbons, and Bill Pitman as Guitars Incorporated. The collaboration of these studio players was more along the lines of the Ventures, and actually seems to have been influenced by an earlier Marshall project, the Guitar Ramblers.

The question of influence is permanently settled if the notion of "cheesiness" as an artistic quantity is taken into account. While many critics have praised tracks by Guitars Incorporated for being wonderfully cheesy, there is nothing that begs more for this adjective than the title of a Guitar Ramblers album from 1963, Happy, Youthful New Sounds. Also in 1963 Marshall stepped out from session and production work to make a few records of his own. His album “Tuff Jack” is an amazing blend of twist and mod-brass sounds. The title track released as a single was written for Jack Marshall by Billy Strange.

                             

With the public becoming fanatic about the sound of the guitar, particularly the new electric model, Marshall and his buddies eliminated the sometimes controversial vocals and lyrics from '60s pop and cut versions of tunes such as "Come Together" and "Whiter Shade of Pale," or entire 
projects dedicated to country performers such as Eddy Arnold and Roger Miller. On the straighter jazz side of things, Marshall also nearly put his fingers in a permanent knot playing in a guitar duet with Barney Kessel, which recorded several albums

Marshall is perhaps best known for composing the theme and incidental music for the 1960s TV series The Munsters and the 1966 tie-in film Munster, Go Home! (the theme music was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965). He also composed music for the movies The Missouri Traveller (1958), Thunder Road (1958), The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and Kona Coast (1968), as 
well as The Deputy, a western television series starring Henry Fonda, The Investigators and The Debbie Reynolds Show.

The range of the man as a composer should never assumed to be limited to goofy ditties, however. He composed the extended "Essay for Guitar," a mini-concerto which was performed in concert by classical guitarist Christopher Parkening and conducted by the great film composer Elmer Bernstein. Marshall also performed the works of classical composers Stravinsky and Webern.

Marshall had scored over 300 TV and film scores and had effectively given up his career as a guitarist to compose. He died September 2, 1971 in Newport Beach, CA., (age 51). His interment was at Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery. Following his death, a scholarship fund for young guitarists was set up in his name at the University of Southern California.

(Compiled and edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)