Earle Hagen

One of the most prolific composers of television soundtrack music from the 1950s through the 1980s, Earle Hagen came to the field after successes in big-band jazz and work in the movie industry as a musician and arranger. Hagen was born more than a decade before modern notions of movie music had even manifested themselves, in 1919. He was musically inclined as a boy and had taken up the trombone in junior high school in Los Angeles. He came of age amid the ascendancy of the big bands, and played with the likes of Isham Jones, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Ray Noble, and Ben Pol...