Henry Mancini wrote music that both served its movies and encapsulated its times. Jazzy, funky, and always packing a punch, Mancini’s sound was utterly of its day. As a youth, the composer entered The Juilliard School in New York playing Beethoven; during World War II, his US Army service included participating in the liberation of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Later, he worked with the re-formed Glenn Miller Orchestra, studied with Ernst Krenek and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and then joined Universal Pictures’ music department in 1952. Mancini’s main theme to The Pink Panther, the 1963 film starring Peter Sellers as hapless French detective Inspector Jacques Clouseau, is full of that gorgeously feline mixture of mystery and loping gait.