The name of Jack Nitzsche, who died on August 25th aged 63, first came to the attention of the sort of pop fans who scrutinise the small print on record labels when, in the early 1960s, he helped build Phil Spector's "wall of sound", as featured on hits by the Crystals, the Ronettes and Ike and Tina Turner.
His subsequent work as an arranger, composer and pianist took him into significant collaborations with the Rolling Stones, Sonny and Cher, Neil Young and many others, and eventually into film scoring, where he produced the soundtracks for Performance, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Exorcist, An Officer and a Gentleman, and 9 1/2 Weeks.
Born in Chicago but raised on a farm outside Newaygo, Michigan, Jack Nitzsche moved to Los Angeles in 1955, aged 18, with the ambition of becoming a jazz saxophonist. But the burgeoning Hollywood pop scene soon attracted his attention, and Sonny Bono, then an A&R man for the Specialty label, gave him his first job, as a music copyist. He soon exceeded his initial brief by writing a novelty hit, Bongo Bongo Bongo.
He met Phil Spector in 1961 while working in the Hollywood office of Lee Hazlewood, the producer of Duane Eddy's twangy guitar hits (and later Nancy Sinatra's musical partner). The following summer, Spector, still barely 20 years old, invited him to create the orchestration for a Gene Pitney song called He's a Rebel, to be recorded by the Crystals. With the session singer Darlene Love taking the place of the Crystals' own lead singer, Barbara Alston, the session provided the template for Spector's much imitated sound.
Not particularly keen to share the credit for his creations, Spector was dismissive of the contribution of his arrangers. "I know how to arrange," he once said, "but it's much easier to have someone to write it out than to have to sit down and do it yourself." Yet the orchestrations were the key to what Spector called his "little symphonies for the kids", and Jack Nitzsche's skill was important to the success of songs such as the Crystals' Da Doo Ron Ron and Then He Kissed Me, and the Ronettes's Be My Baby, Baby I Love You and Walking in the Rain.
Spector was willing to concede Jack Nitzsche's competence. "He was really good and co-operative and I always used him," he said. But when Spector signed up the Righteous Brothers in 1964 and prepared to record a song called You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', he was busy with another project, and the job of creating the arrangement for the 1960s greatest example of orchestral pop went instead to Gene Page.
"I guess Jack felt really unimportant when he saw that we could do it without him, that it could be any arranger", Spector said. "It was his own fault, because he was gone."
He was back, however, in time to participate in River Deep, Mountain High, featuring the voice of Tina Turner, which gave Spector a big hit in Britain, but failed dismally in the US.
Jack Nitzsche had already moved on. Under his own name, a charming if ephemeral instrumental titled The Lonely Surfer became a hit. He hung out with the Rolling Stones, and played piano on a number of their hits, including 19th Nervous Break- down and Paint It Black. With Sonny Bono, he wrote Needles and Pins, a worldwide hit for the Searchers.
In 1966, he arranged Bob Lind's Elusive Butterfly and Buffalo Springfield's Expecting To Fly, the latter inaugurating a long collaboration with Neil Young which included studio work on the Canadian's first solo album and, as a pianist, on tour with Young's band, Crazy Horse. And in 1970, for Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg, he created the music for Performance, featuring Mick Jagger, Ry Cooder and Randy Newman, after which his expertise with soundtracks was much in demand, culminating in the daring and successful teaming of John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis for The Hot Spot, Dennis Hopper's noir thriller, in 1991.
Jack Nitzsche was first married to a session singer, Gracia Ann May, but it was with his second wife, the folk singer Buffy Sainte Marie, and the jobbing lyricist Will Jennings that he co-authored Up Where We Belong, the theme song to Taylor Hackford's An Officer and a Gentleman, a worldwide hit for Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, and the winner of an Academy Award for best song in 1982.
His life was not a smooth one. He developed an enthusiastic drug habit, for which he periodically received treatment, and his other relationships included one with the actress Carrie Snodgress, which ended when she had him arrested and charged with rape, although the charge was dropped when he agreed to plead guilty to threatening behaviour.
He left behind little of what might be called his own music. Apart from The Lonely Surfer, and the soundtracks, there is only a neglected orchestral album from 1973, titled St Giles Cripplegate.
But his work in all idioms was invariably marked by imagination and intelligence, and at a time when pop music was a hot rod moving up through the gears, he was one of those who kept its axles greased.
Bernard Alfred (Jack) Nitzsche: born 1937; died, August 2000