Dick Jacobs

b. 29 March 1918, New York, USA, d. 20 May 1988, New York, USA. A graduate from the city university, Jacobs was to be one of the few producers for a major US record company in the 50s who catered for rock ‘n’ roll consumers without finding the form personally objectionable. With his orchestra, he had a US Top 30 entry with Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy main theme to 1956’s The Man With The Golden Arm (starring Frank Sinatra) but after serving as musical director for the nationally televised Hit Parade, he became recording manager for Coral Records, a Decca Records subsidiary. Among his clients were Jackie Wilson, Bobby Darin and Buddy Holly, for whom Jacobs cut corners by duplicating the Darin arrangement of ‘Early In The Morning’. By contrast, ‘the most unplanned thing I have ever written’ was the pizzicato string section that embroidered Holly’s posthumous smash, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’, taped in the New York’s Pythian Temple studio. During the 60s, Jacobs functioned in a more administrative capacity in the music industry, working for New York’s Springboard Records prior to his retirement in the late 70s.