American arranger, producer, songwriter, and Academy Award-winning film score composer.

Born: 22 April 1937 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Died: 25 August 2000 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (aged 63).

He first came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector and went on to work with the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, among others. He also worked extensively in film scores, notably for films such as Performance, The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1983, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for co-writing Up Where We Belong with his then-wife Buffy Sainte-Marie

The Nitzsche-phone

Nitzsche was a keyboard player on many mid-1960s albums by The Rolling Stones. On several, he was also credited as the player of the Nitzsche-phone. In an obituary on Gadfly Online, former Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham explained the credit:

I made that up for the credits on those Stones albums—it was just a regular piano (or maybe an organ) mic’d differently. It was all part of this package that was created around the Stones. People believed it existed. The idea was meant to be: My god, they’ve had to invent new instruments to capture this new sound they hear in their brains. And they were inventing fresh sounds with old toys—therefore, it deserved to be highlighted—it was the read-up of creation, of imagination—getting credit for a job well done.