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BUY BARRY BIO BOOK THE great film music of Oscar-winning composer John Barry has long been admired by Derby banker Gareth Bramley. "The first Barry record I purchased was the Persuaders TV theme single which I bought from Selectadisc in Nottingham in the mid-1970s – and from that moment I was a fan," says Gareth. John Barry, best known for his music for the James Bond films, has also composed classic scores for movies such as Dances With Wolves and Out of Africa. Full Story
Fred Astaire, writes Joseph Epstein, the veteran critic and essayist, "was the very model ... of the democratic dandy, itself an innovative figure." He adds that G. Bruce Boyer called Astaire in his movie roles "the democratic ideal: a classless aristocrat." If T.S. Eliot calling the mature Henry James "a European of no known country" isn't the same thing, it's close enough. - WEB - IMAGES - SHOP Fred Astaire
John Barry turns 75. The composer of "Somewhere In Time", "Out of Africa," "Dances With Wolves," "Born Free," "Midnight Cowboy" and "The Lion in Winter" -- as well as such iconic James Bond themes as "Goldfinger," "You Only Live Twice" and "Diamonds Are Forever" -- is believed to be the sole Brit to have won as many as five Academy Awards.
Johnny Green was born October 10, 1908, in New York. He entered Harvard at age 15, and while there, played piano and saxophone and led the Gold Coast Orchestra. Guy Lombardo heard the band and hired Green to write arrangements for his own band. This he did during summer vacations while eventually earning a master’s degree in English literature, and it was while working for Lombardo that he wrote his first hit song, “Coquette”. At his father’s insistence, Green got a job as a stockbroker, but soon left Wall Street to pursue a full time music career. In the early 30's, he worked as an accompanist for Ethel Merman, Gertrude Lawrence and James Melton, and also worked as a pianist for Leo Reisman. He was pianist and assistant conductor for Buddy Rogers, spent much of 1933 in London writing for musical productions at the London Hippodrome and for the BBC, then had his own band back in the U.S. (1933-41). With this band, he frequently appeared on radio, on his own show as well as the shows of Ruth Etting (1934), Ethel Merman (1935), Jack Benny (1935-36), Fred Astaire (1936-37) and the Philip Morris Show (1939-40). Beginning in 1942, he settled into the Hollywood studios, and was musical director for MGM from 1949 into the 60's. He won an Oscar in 1968 for his work on the movie Oliver!. As chairman of the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Art and Sciences, he conducted the orchestra for 17 Oscar telecasts. He also guest conducted several symphony orchestras. Among the songs he wrote are “Body and Soul”, “Out of Nowhere”, “I Cover the Waterfront”, “Weep No More My Baby”, “You’re Mine You” and “I Wanna Be Loved”. He died in 1989.
Ed Harris Takes On The Bad Guys, Directing -- And Singing -- With New Film Soundtrack Available Here Historically Westerns have produced some of the most memorable music in cinema history. Composer Jeff Beal's take on the genre is featured on the Lakeshore Records soundtrack for APPALOOSA, available via Amazon Digital. In addition to Beal's score, the album will feature the track, "You'll Never Leave My Heart" sung by the film's director and co-star Ed Harris. Composer Jeff Beal first worked with director Ed Harris on Harris' feature film directorial debut, Pollock. A three-time Emmy Award® winner for the main title of Monk, the original dramatic score of TNT's telefilm Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, and most recently for The Company, Beal has also been Emmy-nominated five other times, including three nods for the HBO series Rome and one for Carnivale. Beal composed the score for the upcoming film Salomaybe?, directed by Al Pacino. His other film composing credits include the documentary The Pixar Story, Ping Pong Playa, Spirit of the Marathon, and The Passion of Ayn Rand. Steven Schneider (regular contributor to the NY Times) wrote of "...the richness of Beal's musical thinking - the ways in which he conceives of his solos as fully-developed mini compositions, while his compositions often capture the liveliness and unpredictability of the best improvisation."
Soundtrack Features Original Music by Academy Award® Winner Rachel Portman AVAILABLE HERE Lakeshore Records releases the soundtrack for THE DUCHESS. The soundtrack contains original music composed by Rachel Portman (Emma, The Cider House Rules). Academy Award® nominees Keira Knightley (Atonement) and Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, Schindler's List) head the international cast, which also includes Dominic Cooper (The History Boys), and Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool). The film is based on Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana Cavendish, the scandalous Duchess of Devonshire. In 1996 Rachel Portman became the first female composer to win an Academy Award® for her score to the film Emma. The British composer studied at the University of Oxford. She earned the British Film Institute's Young Composer of the Year Award in 1989 for the mini-series "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit". After several years composing for TV movies and BBC series she scored her first Hollywood feature film with 1992s Used People. Since then she has composed music for a variety of films including The Joy Luck Club, Benny & Joon, Emma, The Cider House Rules, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Chocolat, and more recently Infamous, The Lake House, Mona Lisa Smile, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. THE DUCHESS is based on the story of an extraordinary woman who rose to fame by staying true to her passions in a world of protocol, gossip and social rules - and paid the price. Long before the concept existed, the Duchess of Devonshire (Knightey) was the original 'it girl'. Like her direct ancestor Princess Diana, she was ravishing, glamorous, and adored by an entire country. Determined to be a player in the wider affairs of the world, she proved that she could out-gamble, out-drink, and outwit most of the aristocratic men who surrounded her. But even as her own power and popularity grew, she was haunted by the fact that the only man in England she seemingly could not seduce was her very own husband, the Duke (Fiennes). And when she tried to find her own way to be true to her heart and loyal to her duty, the resulting controversies and convoluted liaisons pushed her to the brink of risking banishment by her husband, family and all of London society.
Scarecrow Press will release the autobiography of six-time Academy Award® nominated composer Lalo Schifrin this summer. Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, edited by Richard Palmer, is a journey from Schifrin's formative years in Argentina to the classical and jazz atmospheres in Paris in the 1950s; from his jazz career with Dizzy Gillespie to his development as a film composer. Organized in eight parts, the book reflects on Schifrin's cosmopolitan experience providing impressions and vignettes of the extraordinary people with whom he worked. His music bridges three styles-jazz, classical, and film/TV-his autobiography offers insights on all three genres, as well as politics, literature, and travel. It includes over 30 photos, appendixes listing Schifrin's works, a discography, and an audio CD featuring some of Schifrin's greatest compositions. As a young man in his native Argentina, Lalo Schifrin received classical training in music and studied law. He came from a musical family, and his father was the concertmaster of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colon. After his studies at the Paris Conservatory, Schifrin returned to Argentina and formed his own big concert band. Dizzy Gillespie heard Schifrin perform and asked him to become his pianist, arranger, and composer. In 1958, Schifrin moved to the United States and began his remarkable career. Since then Schifrin's career has taken him in many directions. As a jazz musician he performed and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and George Benson. His classical activities include Zubin Mehta, The Three Tenors, Rostropovich, Barenboim, and others. His longtime involvement in both the jazz and symphonic worlds came together in 1993 as pianist and conductor for his on-going series of "Jazz Meets the Symphony" recordings, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and jazz stars like Ray Brown, Grady Tate, Jon Faddis, Paquito D'Rivera and James Morrison. Schifrin has written over 100 film and television scores including Mission Impossible, Mannix, Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid, Amityville Horror, four of the Dirty Harry films, and more recently Abominable and the Rush Hour trilogy. To date, Lalo Schifrin has won four Grammys® (twenty-one nominations) , one Cable ACE Award, and six Academy Award® nominations....Available Here
Alan Jay Lerner, American songwriter, lyricist. (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986)
Following graduation, Lerner wrote scripts for radio, including Your Hit Parade, until he was introduced to a down-on-his-heels Austrian composer Frederick Loewe, who needed a lyricist, in 1942. They scored My Fair Lady, Camelot, Brigadoon, Gigi, others.
Oscar winning composer Ray Heindorf (August 25, 1908 - February 2, 1980)...was born in Haverstraw, New York, he grew up on the town of Mechanicville and played piano in local movie houses, and was educated at the Troy Conservatory of Music. From the late 20’s to the early 70’s, he was a composer-arranger-conductor- musical director for numerous movies, having worked on more than 150 of them throughout his career. He was nominated for 18 Oscars, and won three for scoring: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),This Is the Army (1943) and The Music Man (1962). Other movies he worked on included The Cabin in the Cotton (1932), Captain Blood (1935), Blues in the Night (1941), Kings Row (1942), Young Man with a Horn (1950), A Street Car Named Desire (1951), The Jazz Singer (1952), A Star Is Born(1954), Finian’s Rainbow (1968) and 1776 (1972). While much of the music he composed was for film background scores, he wrote “Pete Kelly’s Blues”, “I’m in a Jam”, and “Melancholy Rhapsody”, among others. He died in 1980.
CARMEN DRAGON conductor, arranger –received an Oscar for best score (w/Morris Stoloff) for “Cover Girl” (1944) – musical director for films “Lovely To Look At” and “The Kid From Brooklyn” -rec. w/Hollywood Bowl Symphony for Capitol. Conducted radio orchestra for many Hollywood based network shows in the 1940's. Carmen Dragon was born on July 28, 1914 and died March 28, 1984. Dragon was born in Antioch, California. He was very active in pops music conducting and composed scores for several films, including At Gunpoint (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Night into Tomorrow (1951), and Kiss Tomorrow Good-bye (1950). He conducted the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, and they performed on the "Standard Oil Hour," broadcast on NBC for elementary schools in the late 1940s through the 1950s. The show was sponsored by Standard Oil Company of California, but other than the name there were no commercials. The program featured a high quality introduction to classical music for young people growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s. Dragon made a series of popular light classical albums for Capitol Records during the 1950s with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Some of these recordings have been reissued by EMI on CD. Carmen Dragon is the father of harpist Carmen Dragon and Daryl Dragon of the 1970s pop music duo The Captain & Tennille.
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