Marion Evans (1926-2026)

Arranger Marion Evans died July 22, he was 100 years old. He lived two full careers in music separated by decades of near-total anonymity on Wall Street, a pause so complete that reference books rarely included him despite two Grammys and 65 Gold Records.

Raised in Goodwater, Alabama, he left an engineering track at Auburn to study music after his World War II service with the Seabees and the Marine Corps on Okinawa put him alongside sharp jazz players in military dance bands. A friend forwarded his charts to Tex Beneke, then leading the Glenn Miller ghost band, and Beneke hired him around 1950, a job that quickly expanded into arranging for Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie as the big-band era wound down.

The postwar studio and Broadway years cemented his reputation. He wrote charts for Perry Como, Judy Garland, and Tony Bennett, orchestrations for shows like Paint Your Wagon, and had a stint conducting The Tonight Show orchestra, for which he also wrote the closing theme. His 49th Street apartment doubled as an informal arranging school, where younger musicians such as J.J. Johnson studied Robert Farnon recordings and Percy Goetschius harmony texts under his guidance for free.

Then, around 1970, Evans read the room correctly on rock’s takeover of pop music and left the business cold, rebuilding a second career as a Wall Street consultant and later a software developer. He might have stayed a footnote if Tony Bennett hadn’t called him back in his 80s to arrange Duets II, which led to two more Grammy-nominated projects, Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, closing out his arranging career on his own terms.