Don Sebesky, arranger who broadened jazz’s audience

Don Sebesky, who in a wideranging musical career played with leading big bands, was a behind-the-scenes force at CTI Records and other jazz labels, won Grammy Awards for his own compositions and arrangements, and orchestrated some 20 Broadway shows, died April 29 at a nursing home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 85.

The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Elizabeth Jonas said.

Mr. Sebesky’s musical interests ranged far and wide. He created arrangements not only for jazz musicians but also for a diverse range of pop vocalists, including Nancy Wilson, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart, and Barry Manilow. To jazz aficionados, though, he was best known — and sometimes criticized — for the work he did as a sort of house arranger for Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI, a jazz label that was a major force in the 1970s.

From the beginning, Taylor and CTI were on a mission to broaden the audience for jazz by exploring intersections with pop, rock, and R&B, and by making music that was more accessible to mainstream audiences than some of jazz’s more esoteric strains. It was an approach that displeased some purists, but it sold records, and Mr. Sebesky’s arranging skills were pivotal to that success.

Mr. Sebesky arranged saxophonist Paul Desmond’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), an album of interpretations of Simon & Garfunkel songs. He arranged guitarist George Benson’s “White Rabbit” (1972), an album anchored by Benson’s rendition of the title track, the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane hit. Pairing Benson with that song was an idea Mr. Sebesky had proposed to Taylor, but with a twist.

“I suggested we do ‘White Rabbit’ in a Spanish mode,” Mr. Sebesky told Marc Myers for the website JazzWax in 2010. “He agreed. George Benson doesn’t read music. He just heard the song and automatically fell into the groove.”

Those were just two of the countless records on which Mr. Sebesky worked for CTI from the late 1960s (when it was a subsidiary of A&M) through the 1970s. He also made his own albums as a bandleader, for CTI and other labels. These, too, often merged jazz and rock.

His debut album, “The Distant Galaxy” (1968), included versions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna.” “Don

Sebesky and the Jazz-Rock Syndrome,” released the same year, included his version of the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” as well as other covers.

In 1984, Mr. Sebesky made his nightclub debut as a bandleader, bringing a 12-piece band to Fat Tuesday’s in New York’s Manhattan borough to play selections from “Full Cycle,” an album he had just released on the Crescendo label that featured his arrangements of Miles Davis’ “All Blues,” John Lewis’ “Django” and other jazz standards.

“At Fat Tuesday’s, a low-ceilinged, narrow room in which the 12 musicians must be strung out in a line, instrumental separation and clarity are a far cry from the possibilities of a recording studio,” John S. Wilson wrote in a review in The New York Times. “But what may be lost in this respect is made up for in the vitality and involvement projected by the musicians and the visual razzle-dazzle of the variety of instruments brought into play.”

The next year, reviewing a return engagement at the same club, Wilson wrote, “This is a band full of fresh ideas and fresh sounds that set it apart.”

By then, Mr. Sebesky had begun working on Broadway as well. His first credit was for some of the orchestrations for “Peg,” a 1983 autobiographical one-woman show starring singer Peggy Lee.

That show was short-lived, but many of his other Broadway shows did better. The 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” ran for more than two years and won him a Tony Award for best orchestrations. “An American in Paris” in 2015 also had a long run, and he shared a second Tony, with Christopher Austin and Bill Elliott, for the orchestrations of that show.

Donald Alexander Sebesky was born Dec. 10, 1937, in Perth Amboy, N.J. His father, Alexander, was a laborer in a steel cable factory, and his mother, Eleanor (Ehnot) Sebesky, was a homemaker.

Mr. Sebesky’s first marriage, to Janet Sebesky, ended in divorce. He married Janina Serden in 1986. In addition to Jonas, his daughter from his second marriage, he leaves his wife; another daughter from his second marriage, Olivia Sebesky; two sons from his first marriage, Ken and Kevin; a brother, Gerald; and nine grandchildren. Two daughters from his first marriage, Cymbaline Rossman and Alison Bealey, died before Mr. Sebesky. Before moving to the nursing home in Maplewood, he lived for about 30 years in Mendham, N.J.