OBITUARY:Les Baxter

Nobody ever called Les Baxter shy. "I want to be innovative," he told Joe Smith for the book Off the Record. "Perhaps I was the most innovative person in our business, I don't know."

A musician-singer-composer- producer-conductor-arranger, Baxter was a concert pianist at the age of five. When rock 'n' roll was at its height, he astonished the music business with Voice of the Xtabay (1950), a Number One album of Aztec songs, sung by Yma Sumac. He wrote music for theme parks. For the horror film Frogs (1971) he created a background score consisting entirely of synthesised frog sounds. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science asked him who had collaborated with him on the score, he replied "The frogs".

After musical studies at Detroit University, Baxter attended Pepperdine College in Los Angeles. There he began playing tenor sax, and was often allowed to sit in and accompany Billie Holiday. In 1945 he left Freddie Slack's band to join Mel Torme's vocal group, the Mel-Tones. They sang with Torme on various radio shows, in the "B" film Let's Go Steady (1945), and on record with the Artie Shaw band.

Shortly after signing a long-term contract with Capitol Records, Baxter arranged and conducted two of Nat "King" Cole's greatest hits: "Mona Lisa" (1950) and "Too Young" (1951). He reached the Top 10 with his instrumental singles of "April in Portugal" (1953), "The High and the Mighty" (1954), "Unchained Melody" (1955) and "The Poor People of Paris" (1956). Eventually he tired of recording other people's music and began writing his own orchestral LPs, albums bearing such globe-trotting titles as Tamboo!, A Day in Rome, Fiesta Brava and Sunshine at Kowloon. Another of his albums, Le Sacre du Savage, included "Quiet Village", a hit for the Martin Denny Orchestra in 1959.

Baxter scored over 100 films, more than half of them for the economy- obsessed American International Pictures. His scores for AIP include The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror, The Premature Burial (both 1963) and The Dunwich Horror (1970). He was particularly proud of his lively score for The Master of the World (1961), a low-budget Jules Verne romp, notorious for its blatant use of stock footage; what purported to be an aerial view of 19th- century London was a shot from Olivier's Henry V.

Baxter composed music for many television programmes, and wrote a series of shows for a marine theme park. In 1981 a journalist asked him why he accepted such a wide variety of work. "Once I made the mistake of turning down composing the ballet Fancy Free for Jerome Robbins," he replied. "I recommended Leonard Bernstein. It was the first great success of his career, and since then I've never turned down anything!"

Dick Vosburgh

Les Baxter, conductor, composer, arranger, singer, pianist: born Mexia, Texas 14 March 1922; married (one son, one daughter); died Orange County, California 15 January 1996.