News from the darkest corners...

Joe Harnell, a Grammy Award-winning pianist, arranger and conductor, died Thursday of heart failure at Sherman Oaks Hospital in Sherman Oaks. He was 80.

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Harnell began studying piano when he was 6 and started his professional career as a jazz pianist at 14. He graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in music.

He enlisted in the Army Air Forces during World War II, touring with the Glenn Miller Air Force band. After his discharge at the end of the war, he studied composition with Aaron Copland and worked as a music director or accompanist for a number of leading singers. Harnell worked with Peggy Lee in concerts and on several of her albums in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He also worked with Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Pearl Bailey and Frank Sinatra.

From 1967 to 1973, Harnell served as music director for Mike Douglas on his afternoon television talk and variety show. Harnell moved to California and found work scoring for films and television shows, including “Santa Barbara,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Bionic Woman,” “Alien Nation” and “V.” He received three Emmy nominations for best dramatic score.

He recorded numerous albums under his own name, including “Bossa Nova Now” for Columbia and “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Hud and Other Movie Themes” for Kapp.

Ray Davis, a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic, a flamboyant 1970s funk band whose music is considered a precursor to modern rap and hip-hop, died Tuesday from respiratory complications at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. He was 65.

Davis provided bass vocals on songs such as “Give Up The Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucka),” “One Nation Under A Groove” and “Flashlight.” The latter two songs reached No. 1 on the R&B charts.

Under leader George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic fused R&B, jazz, gospel and rock styles combined with garish costumes and elaborate stage displays to form one of the most original bands of the 1970s.

“It started out as a doo-wop group,” Clinton said in a 2003 interview at a Rhythm & Blues Foundation ceremony honoring the band. “Once we decided to change from that, we went as far as we could … from diapers to any kind of costume that anyone might have on.”

Born March 29, 1940, in Sumter, S.C., Davis was a member of the original Parliaments, a vocal group formed in the 1950s by Clinton while a junior high school student in Plainfield, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Web site. Other members of the group included Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins and Grady Thomas.

The group scored a top-20 pop hit in 1967 with the single “(I Wanna) Testify.” In the early 1970s, Clinton changed the vocal group’s name from plural to singular and also created Funkadelic, a funk band with a sound more influenced by the electric guitar. The two overlapping groups and other affiliated acts became known as “P-Funk.”

Parliament-Funkadelic was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 in a class that included the Jackson 5, Bee Gees, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Young Rascals and Buffalo Springfield.

Davis, who lived in Franklin Park, remained active musically in recent years, according to his son, Derrick, filling in on bass vocals with the Temptations after the death of Melvin Franklin in the mid-1990s and touring since 1998 with original P-Funk members Haskins and Thomas.