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Ralph Jose P. Burns was born on June 29, 1922 in Newton, Massachusetts and began playing the piano as a child. Attending the New England Conservatory of Music, he learned the most about jazz by transcribing the works of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. While a student, he lived in the home of Frances Wayne, who was an established big band singer and her brother Nick Jerret was a bandleader who began working with him. He found himself in the company of performers as Nat King Cole and Art Tatum.

Moving to New York in the early 1940s, he met Charlie Barnet and the two men began working together. In 1944, he joined the Woody Herman band with members Neal Hefti, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Chubby Jackson and Dave Tough. Together, the group developed Herman’s sound. For 15 years, Burns wrote or arranged many of the band’s major hits including Bijou, Northwest Passage, Apple Honey, and on the longer work Lady McGowan’s Dream and the three-part Summer Sequence.

Herman band member Stan Getz was featured as a tenor saxophone soloist on Early Autumn, a hit for the band and the launching platform for Getz’s solo career. Burns also worked in a small band with soloists including Bill Harris and Charlie Ventura. The success of the Herman band provided Ralph the ability to record under his own name. He collaborated with Billy Strayhorn, Lee Konitz and Ben Webster to create both jazz and classical recordings.

Writing compositions for Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis led to his later work with Aretha Franklin and Natalie Cole. He was responsible for the arrangement and introduction of a string orchestra on two of Ray Charles’s biggest hits, Come Rain or Come Shine and Georgia on My Mind. In the 1990s, Burns arranged music for Mel Tormé, John Pizzarelli, Michael Feinstein and Tony Bennett.

During the 1960s he quit touring as a band pianist and began arranging and orchestrating for Broadway shows including Chicago, Funny Girl, No, No, Nanette, and Sweet Charity. His first film score was for Woody Allen’s Bananas. He worked with Bob Fosse and won an Academy Award for Cabaret, and went on to compose the film scores for Lenny, New York, New York  and All That Jazz, the latter garnered an Academy Award. Besides winning Oscars, Burns won an Emmy,  a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. From 1996 until his death, he restored many orchestrations for New York City Center’s Encores! series.

Carefully hiding his homosexuality throughout his life, pianist, composer and arranger Ralph Burns, who was posthumously inducted into the New England Jazz Hall of Fame in 2004, passed away on November 21, 2001 from complications of a stroke and pneumonia in Los Angeles, California.

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