Joseph Harnell (August 2, 1924 – July 14, 2005) was an American composer, musician, and music arranger.
His father was a vaudeville performer who also played in jazz and klezmer ensembles. Harnell began playing piano at age six and was performing in his father's ensembles by the age of 14. He attended the University of Miami on a music scholarship in the early 1940s, and in 1943 joined the United States Army Air Forces, playing with Glenn Miller's Army Air Forces Band. He studied with Nadia Boulanger when stationed in Paris and then under William Walton at Trinity College of Music in London. After his discharge in 1946, he studied at Tanglewood under Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
Eschewing the art-music world, Harnell sought work in pop and jazz, working as a for-hire pianist after returning to New York City in 1950. He played in Lester Lanin's band at this time and found work as an accompanist for singers such as Judy Garland, Maurice Chevalier, and Marlene Dietrich. From 1958 to 1961, he was Peggy Lee's full-time accompanist and arranger for the albums Anything Goes:Cole Porter and also Peggy Lee & the George Shearing Quartet. In 1962, he was hurt in a car crash, and while he recovered, Kapp Records asked him to work on writing potential hits in the then-hot genre of bossa nova.
Harnell's biggest success was with his arrangement of "Fly Me to the Moon", which was a hit in the US in 1963 (reaching # 14 on the Hot 100 and # 4 on Billboards Middle Road Singles Chart) and which won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. The song also peaked at number 6 in Harnell's hometown, on WMCA in New York, on January 16, 1963. The album from which it was taken went to number 3 on the Billboard 200. Harnell went on to release nearly 20 easy listening albums, on Kapp, Columbia, and Motown among others.
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| Joe with Dionne Warwick |
Harnell was also an integral part of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show as the "house pianist" on many episodes. Often at the end of a show Shore would gather round Harnell at the piano and she and her guests that evening would make requests of him for a song they wanted to sing. Some of those guests were John Raitt, Gisele MacKenzie, and very often, Janet Blair. It was a low key and warm way to bring the show to its conclusion. The show ran on NBC from October 1956 to June 1963.
Starting in 1964, Harnell worked with Grey Advertising as a jingle writer, and from 1967 to 1973, he worked as musical director of The Mike Douglas Show. In 1973, Harnell moved to Hollywood and worked in film score and television composition, composing over 400 hours of original music for shows such as for The Bionic Woman, Alien Nation, V, The Incredible Hulk, including "The Lonely Man Theme" with which all episodes of The Incredible Hulk ended, playing over David Bruce Banner walking down yet another lonely road, Alien Nation, and V, for which he received an Emmy nomination in 1983. He also did several television commercials for Japan, one of which was awarded the Japanese equivalent of a CLIO.
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| Joe with Jerry Lewis |
In May 1982, with the release of "Rocky III", Harnell also wrote the famous signature tune for the United Artists logo introducing United Artists movies in the early 1980s, during the MGM merger with United Artists, as well as the theme music for the NBC daytime soap Santa Barbara. Following this he became a faculty member at USC's Thornton School of Music as an instructor in film score composition.
Harnell self-published an autobiography entitled Counterpoint in 2000, co-authored with television producer/director Ira Skutch. Harnell died on July 14, 2005 in Sherman Oaks, California at the age of 80. His cause of death was revealed as heart failure.
(Edited from Wikipedia)