Jack Eskew
Jackson W. "Jack" Eskew (1940-2016) was a musical arranger/orchestrator based in Los Angeles, California. He studied music at the University of Southern California before beginning his career by touring the United States with various bands.
In the 1960s, he led the band at Disneyland that appeared nightly in the famous subterranean rising stage, playing trumpet and piano. He subsequently became music director at Disneyland. During the 1960s and '70s, he musically supervised such television shows as the classic The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, The Sonny and Cher Show, and The Mack Davis Show.
From the early 1980s, Eskew worked with Academy Award winning film composer Bill Conti (best known for his scores of the Rocky series and The Right Stuff) and subsequently orchestrated The Karate Kid series, Baby Boom, Betrayed, A Prayer for the Dying, Broadcast News, The Addams Family, Rookie of the Year, Huckleberry Finn, The Big Blue, the Pierce Brosnan remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, Spy Hard, 8 Seconds, and Rocky Balboa, among others. Eskew, again working with Conti, also worked as an orchestrator for numerous telecasts of the annual Academy Awards.
Eskew was nominated three times for an Emmy Award, winning in 1994 for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Direction, The 64th Annual Academy Awards.