Les Baxter (March 14, 1922 – January 15, 1996) was an American musician and composer.

Baxter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory before moving to Los Angeles for further studies at Pepperdine College. Abandoning a concert career as a pianist, he turned to popular music as a singer. At the age of 23 he joined Mel Tormé’s Mel-Tones, singing on Artie Shaw records such as “What Is This Thing Called Love?”. Baxter then turned to arranging and conducting for Capitol Records in 1950, working with early Nat King Cole material. He went on to join a conservative folk group, The Balladeers, and worked in the film industry of the ’60s and ’70s, conducting scores for horror movies and teenage musicals. When soundtrack work fell off in the 1980s, he scored music for theme parks and became known in the 1990s as a progenitor of the “exotica” movement. In his 1996 appreciation for Wired magazine, writer David Toop remembered Baxter thus: Baxter offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home hi-fi comforts in the white suburbs. (WIKIPEDIA)