Biography
Jeff Alexander was a classically trained composer/arranger/conductor who spent almost 30 years working in movies and television. He was born Myer Goodhue Alexander in Seattle, WA, in 1910 and studied at the Brecker Conservatory -- his teachers included Edmund Ross and Joseph Schillinger. Alexander joined the movie industry at the outset of the '50s and joined ASCAP as a composer in 1952. His earliest credited assignments in movies were as an arranger and/or vocal director for
Call Me Mister and
On the Riviera, both 20th Century Fox films. He also wrote the score of
Westward the Women (all 1951) at MGM. At the latter studio, he worked variously as an arranger, conductor, or vocal music supervisor on
Singin' in the Rain and a string of second-tier vehicles, including
Small Town Girl,
The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, and
Athena -- thanks to the movie's constant revival and its use of perennially popular Freed/Brown songs, his vocal arrangements on "Singin' in the Rain" remain some of Alexander's most familiar work a half-century or more later. In his scoring of the Western
Escape From Fort Bravo (1953), he wrote the popular song "Soothe My Lonely Heart," the first in a string of songs that he authored in association with movies, usually in collaboration with Jack Brooks or Larry Orenstein. Alexander wrote two film scores a year and served as conductor or musical supervisor on others (including
Kismet and
Jailhouse Rock). In 1958, however, he had a bumper crop of soundtracks, including
The Sheepman,
The High Cost of Loving, and
Party Girl ;one of his scores ended up getting dropped, however, when the Western
Saddle the Wind had to be partly reshot and recut and resulted in
Elmer Bernstein's replacing his music.
Alexander moved into television at the end of the '50s, scoring
My Three Sons, Sam Benedict, and episodes of
The Twilight Zone (among them "Come Wander With Me"), in between vehicles such as
The Gazebo (1959) and the
Elvis Presley vehicles
Kid Galahad,
Clambake, and
Speedway. Following the ironic Western comedy
Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and the partial Western misfire
Dirty Dingus Magee (1970) he worked entirely in television, on made-for-TV features, and individual series episodes, closing out his career with More Wild, Wild West (1980). He passed away in 1989. Alexander also wrote a fair-size body of serious concert works from the '50s onward, but his film and television work remains his best-known music. In 2004, his unused score for
Saddle the Wind was found in the vaults and issued on CD in tandem with the
Elmer Bernstein score. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide