Ralph Burns, 79; Jazz Pianist, Noted Arranger

Ralph Burns, a onetime jazz musician who fashioned a diverse career as an arranger, winning two Academy Awards, a Tony Award and an Emmy while helping expand the range of several popular artists, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 79.

Burns died at St. Vincent’s Hospital of complications from a recent stroke as well as pneumonia, according to a spokesman for his business manager.

After making a name for himself as a pianist and orchestrator for Woody Herman’s band, Burns played a key role in some of Broadway’s most memorable shows. He worked on “Chicago,” “Funny Girl” and “No, No, Nanette.” Over the years, if there was a Bob Fosse production, Burns’ name was usually connected with it. With Fosse he did “Sweet Charity,” “Dancin’ ” and the film “Cabaret.”

His award-winning career spanned decades, as did his awards. He won a Tony in 1999 for “Fosse” a couple of decades after he picked up his Academy Awards for adapting the scores of “Cabaret” and “All That Jazz.” Some critics say his orchestrations for the Kit Kat Klub band in “Cabaret” helped make that one of the prime movie musicals of the last quarter-century. He later added a shared Emmy to his collection of statuettes for “Baryshnikov on Broadway.”

And he collaborated with a who’s who of leading figures of American song. He worked with Richard Rodgers on “No Strings,” Rodgers’ first score after Oscar Hammerstein II died, and with Jule Styne on “Funny Girl.” In the recording studio, he worked with Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis.

“Everything I did with Fosse I loved,” he later told Michael Phillips--now The Times’ theater critic--when Phillips was writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune. “That was my ideal situation. But I also loved ‘Funny Girl,’ working with Jule Styne and with Barbra Streisand.”

Born in Newton, Mass., Burns learned piano at an early age and by 12 he was playing in dance bands in and around Boston. He attended the New England Conservatory of Music briefly, but spent most of his teenage years working in a local jazz orchestra.

He later said he learned orchestration by analyzing the recordings of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, transcribing their legendary compositions note by note to see how they worked.

Burns moved to New York City as a young man, playing in the clubs on 52nd Street. By the early 1940s, Burns was playing piano and writing orchestrations for Charlie Barnet’s big band.

Then he joined Herman’s band, also as a writer and piano player. He worked with Herman over the next 15 years and wrote many of the band’s big hits including “Bijou,” “Apple Honey” and the three-part “Summer Sequence.” “Early Autumn,” one of his later and more notable compositions, came from an assignment to write a fourth movement for “Summer Sequence.” Years later, Johnny Mercer wrote lyrics for the tune, and it became a favorite of singers.

Herman later told Leonard Feather, the jazz critic, that Burns had much to do with the success of his band.

”. . . I suppose the most important change for us was having Ralph Burns as arranger and pianist. He was as much responsible for our sound as anyone at that time,” Herman said.

But after several years of touring, Burns left the band to continue his writing and to take work as a freelance orchestrator. He worked with Bennett, Mathis, Charles and, later, Aretha Franklin and Natalie Cole.

It was Burns who introduced Charles to the instrumentation that combined a big band and strings and gave him two of the biggest hits of his long career: “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Georgia on My Mind.”

He began orchestrating and arranging for the Broadway musical theater in the mid-1950s and kept at it all his life. Last year, he orchestrated “Thoroughly Modern Millie” at the La Jolla Playhouse.

He told Phillips that his big-band training always helped him in the theater.

“When it came to arranging a Broadway score’s big, jazzy numbers--the dance numbers--I was already used to writing for an orchestra in that way. Most of the orchestrators who worked in the theater at the time would hand over that stuff to somebody else. It was not their world, you know. They were legit; they were schooled in the strings and woodwinds. With me, they’d say ‘Get hot,’ and I could get hot.”

His first film credit was “Cabaret” in 1972, which was followed by such familiar movies as “Lenny,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Annie,” “My Favorite Year,” “The Muppets Take Manhattan” and “New York, New York.”

In the 1990s, Burns returned to his roots, arranging jazz albums for Mel Torme and John Pizzarelli.

It was probably fitting that Burns would return to the music he started with.

“I still listen to jazz. My roots are still there, and I feel I can go listen to Woody’s band to steal ideas when I’m writing for a film,” Burns told The Times some years ago. “ ‘Simple Is Better’ was always [Herman’s] motto, and good taste; I think he’s taught an awful lot of arrangers how to develop that way.”

Memorial services are pending.