Robert Drasnin

by Richie UnterbergerDrasnin has a host of television compositions under his belt, including work for Lost in Space, Playhouse 90, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible, and The Twilight Zone. From 1977 until the early '90s, he was the Director of Music for CBS Entertainment. Before all of that, he played alto, clarinet, and flute in the jazz bands of such leaders as Tommy Dorsey and Red Norvo. His status as an artiste, however, rests upon an album that he might have considered as a trifle at the time. Voodoo, issued around the late '50s on the tiny Tops label, closely approximated the exotica sound of Martin Denny -- under, apparently, instructions from the Tops A&R chief himself. Drasnin devised a satisfying approximation of Denny's tropical-Latin-lounge jazz hybrid, in somewhat of a more low-key fashion than Denny himself. Indeed, Drasnin later arranged Denny's Latin Village album. The rare Voodoo LP was reissued on CD in 1996.