Kenneth Ascher
American musician
Kenneth Lee Ascher (born October 26, 1944, in Washington, D.C.) is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger who is active in jazz, rock, classical, and musical theater genres — in live venues, recording studios, and cinema production. With Paul Williams, he wrote the song "Rainbow Connection" for The Muppet Movie. Both Williams and Ascher received Oscar nominations for the 1979 Academy Awards for Best Original Song ("Rainbow Connection") and Best Original Score (The Muppet Movie Soundtrack). The song was also nominated for the Golden Globes for "Best Original Song" that same year. Ascher and Williams also wrote "You and Me Against the World", a top-10 hit for Helen Reddy in 1974.
His work
In 1966, Ascher joined the Woody Herman Orchestra as arranger and pianist. Herman hired Ascher — on the advice of Frank Foster — to replace the departing Nat Pierce. Ascher has been a member of ASCAP since 1968.
He played piano on "Baby Now That I've Found You" recorded by Dan Schafer on Tortoise International Records, an RCA Records subsidiary released in 1977.
Ascher's work through the years has included keyboard parts and string arrangements on John Lennon's albums Mind Games, Walls and Bridges and Rock 'n' Roll and Yoko Ono's A Story, music for several songs from Barbra Streisand's remake of A Star Is Born (where he also served as music coordinator), and arrangements for portions of Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell (produced by Todd Rundgren).
“Kenneth Ascher” enters the record as american musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kenneth, Ascher and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Kenneth Ascher” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Kenneth, Ascher and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q989574. VIAF identifies the subject as 29721680. The Library of Congress control number is n91117214. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1979, 1974 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kenneth Ascher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.