Opening weekend at the Sedona International Film Festival this year will feature a one-of-a-kind event: A 100th birthday party for composer Henry Mancini.

Born April 16, 1924, in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Penn., where he played piccolo in a local band alongside his father, a flutist, Mancini went on to score some of the most famous and recognizable films of the 20th century, including “The Pink Panther” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” winning 20 Grammy Awards and four Academy Awards.

Gene Lees, editor of Down Beat magazine, credited Mancini with moving Hollywood music away from the European symphonic tradition previously dominant and toward a more homegrown, jazz-influenced style.

Although Mancini died in 1994, his daughter Monica and her husband and producer Gregg Field are keeping his legacy alive with a commemorative stage show for what would have been his 100th birthday, which they will bring to the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Sunday, Feb. 25.

“We have to sort of do a downsized version of what we mostly do,” Monica Mancini said. “This is in symphony concerts around the world, so we’re making it a very special performance for the festival. It’s going to be a different type of event, but it will be warm and fuzzy and it’ll be fun. We show various film clips, and then there are obviously songs from the films, it’ll be mostly his themes. I’ll be telling little anecdotes and information about how the songs were written and little bits and pieces of fun facts about the music. Gregg, my husband, who is producing the show, narrates a bit of it. It’s going to be very informal, but informative.”

“Where dad kind of stands out in that regard is that he wrote themes for his movies,” Mancini explained. “He didn’t intend for them to be a hit song. But because he had such a great gift of melody and structuring a song in such a way that is so evocative, he ended up having a lot of hits from movies.”

Mancini’s film and television themes included two No. 1 and six Top 10 hits on the Billboard adult contemporary chart between 1961 and 1971.

“The fun stuff was back before he became who he became,” his daughter said. “‘Creature from the Black Lagoon,’ ‘Ma and Pa Kettle Go to France’ or something, all those terrible Universal Studios B-movies that he used to score to get his feet wet. That kind of got him started in the big time. He made it to the big time by doing all that stuff … He opened the door for jazz in that world.”

Mancini and Field will be accompanied for the show by Randy Waldman, one of Henry Mancini’s studio pianists.

“Randy’s a hell of a piano player and he’s been with Barbra Streisand for well over 30 years, so we’re lucky to get him when Barbra’s not recording,” Mancini said. “Brilliant guy.”

Another Path

“I actually chose the path that my mother chose, which was being a studio singer here in Los Angeles,” Monica Mancini said. “I thought that seemed like a really fun career … When I started, my career was in the jingle world and in the studio world in the behind-the-scenes thing. It was a blast. I had fun. You’d show up to work, ‘work’ in quotes, of course, at the studio with all these other singers in your jeans, you didn’t care how you looked, you just showed up, hanging around with your friends and having a wonderful time earning a living.”

Although the two Mancinis did not perform together — Henry once told Monica, “I work alone, kid” — they would eventually collaborate in a different way.

“He was writing the music for ‘Victor, Victoria’ that was going to Broadway,” Mancini recalled. “He and Leslie Bricusse, his writing partner, would have to record demos of all the music that would be sung by all the actors on stage. And so I was specifically chosen to sing all the demos for Julie Andrews for all of her music, so we collaborated in a very particular way … But in terms of us actually performing together, that never happened.”

Later in her father’s life, as his health declined, composer and conductor Bill Conti took over his scheduled touring appearances.

“He decided that he would do part of his concert as a Mancini tribute,” Monica Mancini said. “He called me and asked me if I would be interested in going out on the road, doing some Mancini tributes, and I said ‘yes.’ My intent was not to be in the forefront and have a career like that. It didn’t interest me, but doing tribute concerts to my dad did interest me. So that’s kind of how I got started in my live performing career.”

Influence

“It was back in the late ’50s and early ’60s in the recording studio,” Mancini said of her father’s relationship with John Williams, who, at the time, was a session pianist who had not yet made a name for himself as a composer. “Dad would hire John to play — I think he even played on the original ‘Moon River,’ and whatever dad was recording at the time, he would hire John as his piano player.

“He’s a family friend, and I think that they adored each other, personally and professionally. John does credit dad, giving him a lot of those influences from way back.”

While composing, performing and recording, Henry Mancini also found time to write a book on orchestration, “Sounds and Scores,” which became a classic of music instruction.

“I run into people all the time, particularly young composers, and Hans Zimmer, for example, is one of them, who all read that,” Monica Mancini said. “It became their Bible. Barry Manilow, he’s a good friend, every now and then says, ‘Man, your dad helped me through all of those arrangements.’ He influenced a lot of people with that. So I’m pretty sure that it’s being used today.”

“We’re doing a documentary, so we’ve been looking at a lot of archival things that we went to UCLA,” Mancini continued. “The scores in particular that UCLA has is the original ‘Peter Gunn’ score, and also the original handwritten manuscript for ‘Sounds and Scores.’ You open the book and you see these beautiful handwritten staffs and you have to be very careful with the pages, as they’re all falling out. It was really wonderful to see.”

Legacy

“What we’re finding is that kids want a melody,” Mancini pointed out. “Dad’s music is trending on TikTok and other platforms. Young people have it as their background music … We’re putting his music out there to a generation of people who need to open up their ears and listen to some great stuff … We want to be sure that his legacy is brought into the fore for a whole new generation of listeners … as my mother would say, preaching the gospel of Mancini throughout the land.”

“The most exciting thing is that we have been in the studio for about a year and a half recording. We’ve taken six of Dad’s most iconic pieces of music and went in and re-recorded them … We last year went in with with John [Williams] and Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock and Arturo Sandoval and recreated ‘Peter Gunn.’ We’ve taken dad’s original arrangements; we just had different artists come in and play, and John recreated his famous riff on ‘Peter Gunn’ on the piano.

“By the end of February, we should have completed the last piece of the puzzle, which is ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ … We have Michael Buble singing ‘Moon River’ … So we’ve been very busy this last year and a half being in the studio and trying to herd cats and get this recording together so we can release it very close to dad’s birthday, which would be in April. It’s just taken Mancini to a really current, relevant, non-nostalgic level.”

“I’ve never been to Sedona and it’s been on my shortlist for the longest time,” Mancini added. “When we had this opportunity to do the show there, I thought, ‘Oh man, I’m killing two birds with one stone.’ We’re going to do a phenomenal show for people and also be able to see that part of the world. I’m excited to be there.”