I came to know the film score composer, Joseph Liebman in the early '90s. He lived in New York City and was a retired marketing executive from Revlon. He said that he became interested in composing while working as an executive at Macy's/Bamberger's in New Jersey in the late 1950's/early 1960s. He would go into the piano department and begin writing phrases here and there and his natural talent emerged. He was self taught, and he composed on normal staff paper, but in his own hieroglyph (which I could decipher as a very logical approach). Jazz musicians loved his scores and a full program of his music was performed at Carnegie Hall. He was also a co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Over the years, he compiled a large inventory of studio recordings with significant jazz musicians performing his works, among them Johnny Parker, George Duvivier and Lionel Hampton. Brock Peters and Edie Gorme recorded some of his pop tunes ("Bunny Love") and ballads ("What Happened"). His brother was a well know screenwriter who wrote the Edward G. Robinson film "Two Seconds." His nephew is the film director Richard Lester (Liebman) who directed the Beatles in "A Hard Days' Night" and "Help." Joe was very proud of his score to "Light Fantastic" and had an old copy of the out of print soundtrack album which he played for me several times. The liner notes to the album remark that he wrote "music that people think and feel." He also co-wrote a short subject score with Lionel Hamption called "Rooftops of New York," which was nominated for an Academy Award. I started to help Joe catalog his reel-to-reel backlog in the hopes of bringing out more of his work, but he moved to La Jolla with his wife Caroline in 1997 and the work was never completed. Joe and Caroline passed away soon thereafter, but as much in love until the very end as they were at the beginning.
