The jazz highbrow
This remarkably original composer is an American by birth and was an engineer by profession before he took to music. He won fame overnight with his first composition, ' The Toy Trumpet'. Later he starred in a film with Shirley Temple, played this number, and accompanied Shirley.
He specialises in the oddest of titles, and once played his composition, ' The Penguin ', to an audience of penguins at the New York Zoo. They went to sleep. He has been responsible for many ingenious arrangements of classical pieces. Perhaps he is best known for ' In an Eighteenth-Century Drawing-Room', which is his own adaptation of the first few bars of a Mozart sonata.