Fireside Chat

Clare Fischer

Los Angeles

The honourable Clare Fischer is one of the composer/arrangers whose name really gets the crate diggers excited. Born on October 22, 1928 in Durand, Michigan, two-time Grammy Award winning self-styled "jazzer" Clare Fischer worked with a lot of musicians from Detroit as a young man. And one of them was Donald Byrd. And when Dizzy Gillespie heard Fischer’s work with Byrd, he asked him to write for him. It was the resulting arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie's 'A Portrait of Duke Ellington' that kickstarted Mr Fischer’s rise to – if not exactly fame – then notoriety amongst music aficionados. His influences are broad, ranging from Stravinsky to Nat »King« Cole and Latin music, and his symphonic work using Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn themes, 'The Duke, Swee'pea and Me', is performed by symphony orchestras around the world. This multi-instrumentalist scored music for a plethora of TV shows and motion pictures from the 60s and 70s, and though his specialty was the orchestration of organs and keyboards, with the help of his son Brent Fischer (a composer in his own right), he eventually made the leap to popular music, writing charts for people such as the Jackson 5, Prince, Paul McCartney and Rufus and Chaka Khan. Dr Fischer also wrote several albums for Jazz-fusion figure Cal Tjader. Played on some, wrote others. Tip!!