Bill Holman, Grammy-winning jazz composer and arranger, 96

Bill Holman, a Grammy Award-winning jazz arranger and composer who helped shape the big-band music of Stan Kenton and Doc Severinsen’s “Tonight Show” orchestra and wrote orchestrations for singers such as Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett and Natalie Cole, died May 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96.

He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments, said his stepdaughter, Kathryn King.

Mr. Holman served in the Navy during World War II and studied engineering before launching his music career in his 20s. A skilled tenor saxophonist who played on dozens of recordings, he made his greatest mark as an arranger and composer of tunes for jazz big bands.

He first gained notice in the early 1950s after joining Kenton’s band, a group renowned for its soaring brass and lofty ambition blending the grandeur of classical music with the sizzle of jazz. Mr. Holman’s bouncy, rhythmically nimble style didn’t always fit with Kenton’s approach, but he soon became one of the bandleader’s top arrangers, producing orchestrations, or “charts,” that helped define the bold Kenton sound.

“Holman cut his teeth with Stan Kenton,” Seattle Times jazz writer Paul de Barros wrote in 2005, “and, since then, has epitomized a type of brainy, buoyant music that features harmonic wit, soft contours, lines moving in contrary motion and unusually beautiful textures.”

With Kenton, Mr. Holman showed a knack for taking familiar standards, such as “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Stella by Starlight” and “What’s New?” and reworking them with daring new rhythms, harmonic complexity and intertwining melodies that made them sound modern and fresh.

He composed the tense, neo-baroque “Invention for Guitar and Trumpet,” which became one of Kenton’s most recognized numbers and was featured in the 1955 film “Blackboard Jungle,” with Sidney Poitier and Glenn Ford.

Kenton’s acclaimed 1955 album “Contemporary Concepts” included six tunes arranged by Mr. Holman.

“All that music came straight from the heart,” Mr. Holman said in a 2008 interview with music writer Marc Myers for his website JazzWax.com. “As you get older, you get wiser and along the way you lose your innocence. When you’re young, you don’t have the smarts to get cute.”

Mr. Holman released three big band albums as a leader in the 1950s and 1960s and contributed works to other groups, including a Grammy-nominated 1967 arrangement of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” for drummer Buddy Rich.

Mr. Holman wrote six of the arrangements for “Unforgettable,” Cole’s top-selling album, which won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1992.

Working with his own group, Mr. Holman received a Grammy in 1996 for best instrumental composition for his tune “A View From the Side,” and another in 1998 for his arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser.”