SIDE A
1. Theme from “Hatari!â€
2. Baby Elephant Walk
3. Just for Tonight
4. Your Father’s Feathers
5. Night Side
6. Big Band Bwana
SIDE B
1. The Sounds of Hatari
2. The Soft Touch
3. Crocodile, Go Home!
If the recognition of one’s peers is the true measure of success, then few men are as successful as composer, arranger, and conductor Henry Mancini. In a career that spanned 40 years, writing for film and television, Mancini won four Oscars and twenty Grammys, the all-time record for a pop artist. Plus he received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.
Mancini’s best known works include the jazz-idiom theme to The Pink Panther film series (“The Pink Panther Theme”), his “Moon River” to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the theme to the Peter Gunn television series. The “Peter Gunn Theme” won the first Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Mancini also had a long collaboration on film scores with the film director Blake Edwards.
Henry Mancini produced the score for the Howard Hawks-directed, John Wayne-starring safari comedy Hatari! which included the well-known “Baby Elephant Walk”. This is at first a fun blend of jazz and Afro-exotica, jungle drums mixed with a classic bop combo. Elsewhere, however, the soundtrack opts for some pleasant, but very Western jazz, only stopping for the African instrument-sampler “The Sounds of Hatari,” which features some nice treated piano.
The American Film Institute nominated the score from Hatari! as one of the greatest film scores of all time.
180 gram audiophile vinyl
PVC protective sleeve
Music composed by Henry Mancini (The Pink Panther, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Peter Gunn, Charade)
First pressing of 500 individually numbered copies on yellow vinyl
Official website: http://www.henrymancini.com/
