Big-band leader had unlikely hit in 1982

Larry Elgart was a saxophonist who formed a popular big band with his older brother, Les; co-wrote the theme song to “American Bandstand”; and had his biggest hit album in 1982, a disco-pulsing medley of 1940s standards called “Hooked on Swing.”

Mr. Elgart died Tuesday at a hospice center in Sarasota, Fla. He was 95.

A precociously talented musician, he was traveling with bands at age 15 to support his family during the Great Depression. He played alto sax in orchestras led by Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Red Norvo and Charlie Spivak, some of the biggestnames of the day, and was an adventurous-minded player who also helped compose ballet scores and musical tone poems.

He first teamed with his brother in 1947 to start a band with dynamic arrangers, such as Nelson Riddle and Ralph Flanagan, but it proved a commercial failure. Mr. Elgart and Charles Albertine, a saxophonistcomposer with avant-garde sensibilities, formed a new orchestra in 1952 and installed trumpeter Les Elgart as the nominal frontman.

It was the last breath of the jazz and swing era, and rock ’n’ roll soon emerged as the dominant commercial force. But the brothers managed to keep the Les Elgart Orchestra, later renamed the Les and Larry Elgart Orchestra, humming along lucratively for the next 15 years by playing campus proms, country club dates and cruise ship ballrooms.

They were traveling to promote the radio success of one of their first albums, “Sophisticated Swing” (1953), when they landed in Philadelphia and met Bob Horn, who hosted a local TV dance show called “Bandstand.”

“My brother said to him, ‘If we record a theme for you, would you use it?,’” Larry Elgart told the Longboat Observer in Florida. “Our next recording date, we recorded [“Bandstand Boogie,” written with Mr. Albertine] and took it to Bob Horn, and he said, ‘Absolutely. That’s it.’ If you hear Barry Manilow at times, he’ll say he wrote ‘Bandstand Boogie.’ It’s not true. He just wrote the lyrics” decades later.

The song, cut in 1954, remained the anthem for what became “American Bandstand,” which soon had a youthful new host, Dick Clark, and Mr. Elgart enjoyed royalties from the song for the next six decades.

The Elgart band’s repertoire shifted away from its earlier experiments in jazz into a polite lineup of bigband favorites, cha-chas and bossa nova standards.

“They produced music that was intended to be inoffensive, and neither demanding nor intrusive,” observed Rob Bamberger, host of WAMU’s “Hot Jazz Saturday Night.”

“In LPs built around new and resuscitated popular trends, such as ‘ The Twist Goes to College,’ or ‘ Big Band Hootennany,’ the Elgarts pasteurized it for a bigband format, making such music palatable to people who really couldn’t abide the twist, or would rather have had a dislocated shoulder shoved into place than be found at a hootenanny.”

After the brothers separated in the 1960s, Larry Elgart continued a prolific recording career, including his hit “Hooked on Swing” in 1982.