Why Hans Zimmer is bringing his Oscar-winning film music to ...

Hans Zimmer - Interstellar - Main Theme (Piano Version) + Sheet Music

Hans Zimmers natural habitat is a dark, windowless room.

As one of Hollywoods most successful film composers with scores for dozens of movies stretching from Interstellar and The Dark Knight back to The Lion King and Driving Miss Daisy the 59-year-old Oscar winner spends untold hours in screening rooms and recording studios, including his own private space tucked into a larger complex on a quiet industrial street in Santa Monica.

Filled with polished woodwork and red velvet furniture, it has proved to be an inspiring spot for the man whose music combines lush orchestral arrangements with unconventional electronic textures.

But that didnt keep Zimmers friends from pushing him to try a change of scenery.

This whole thing started with Johnny Marr and Pharrell Williams sitting me down and going, Youve got to get out of here and look your audience in the eye, the composer said the other day, referring to the Smiths guitarist (whom Zimmer drafted to play on Inception) and the hip-hop producer turned pop star (with whom Zimmer worked on Hidden Figures).

And theyre right, he added. At some point you have to see if any of the stuff youve been doing while hiding behind a screen actually resonates with people.

Thats what Zimmer is doing this week by launching the North American leg of his first concert tour, scheduled to stop Friday night at the Microsoft Theater before moving on to a performance Sunday at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio. (The tour, which the German-born musician took through Europe last year, will return to Los Angeles on Aug. 11 for an encore at the Shrine Auditorium.)

At Coachella, where the bill is dominated by singers and rappers such as Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar, Zimmers instrumental music will no doubt be an oddity. But the composer insists the show hes put together is far from the buttoned-up occasion one might expect.

The reason I didnt do this for the longest time is that Ive always had a problem with the way we present orchestral music, he said, reclined on a sofa with a cup of coffee. Why would you spend an evening of your precious time with a man with his back to you and a bunch of people in suits reading the paper?

Instead, hes promising a more rock-informed experience, with Zimmer not as conductor but as frontman leading a group of more than 70 musicians through freewheeling renditions of some of his favorite themes.

One of those musicians is Marrs 25-year-old son, Nile, who also plays in the British indie trio Man Made and says the Zimmer outfit is basically the biggest band youve ever seen playing the most epic music youve ever heard.

The band approach isnt entirely new for Zimmer. Before he moved into composing for movies, he played briefly as a member of the Buggles, Trevor Horns late-70s new-wave group that scored a hit with Video Killed the Radio Star.

But after that the record company just wanted us to do the same thing again and again and again, he said. So you suddenly realize in rock and roll youre very easily typecast.

Film music, in contrast, offered limitless variation. I wrote Driving Miss Daisy and Black Rain in the same month, and they couldnt be any more different.

Zimmer, who plays keyboard, guitar and banjo in the show, intends to show off the stylistic breadth of his work on tour. But he wont show images from the movies themselves they seduce an audience into ignoring the players onstage, he says. Nor does he plan to deliver any kind of canned commentary.

Scripted, Im terrible, he said. Cant do it. Long time ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg asked me to take part in a presentation about animation at Lincoln Center. And his main press person, I overheard her say, Dont script Hans hes like a plank of wood.

The only way I can treat this is like Im having a dinner party with a few friends. Sometimes I ramble on and lose my way, and sometimes somebody in the band says, Come on, lets play some music.

Is his head sufficiently full of anecdotes that he can conjure stories at the mention of a title?

Go ahead, he said. Name one.

Rain Man.

My first movie in Hollywood, he shot back. Id come to Los Angeles not knowing anybody, not knowing my way around. So I wrote the whole score in Barry [Levinson]s office.

Another windowless room.

Its my fate.

In statements about the tour, Zimmers handlers have said h**l be joined onstage by special guests an especially tantalizing prospect at Coachella, with its densely packed roster. Yet the composer initially played down that idea at his studio, saying hed been completely and utterly consumed by an upcoming movie and hadnt arranged any specific cameos.

Then he kept talking.

Look, Kendrick and I are playing the same night, he said. I havent talked to him about it, but weve done things together. And I think there might be a chance I can persuade Pharrell to come and do something.

Maybe Ill phone somebody.

mikael.wood@latimes.com

Twitter: @mikaelwood

Source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-hans-zimmer-coachella-20170413-story.html

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Hans Zimmer Delivers a Thrilling Evening of Movie Music Magic Ahead of His Coachella Debut

Best of Hans Zimmer - All time greatest soundtracks!

It took 30 years for me to get out of a dark, windowless room, and look where I am, joked Hans Zimmer, gesturing out to the dark, windowless, boxy Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles Friday night (April 14).

But this was a very different scene for the Oscar-winning composer than the usual solitude that accompanies writing music to such movies as The Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Driving Miss Daisy, Interstellar and dozens more. This night, he was in a dark, windowless room with more than 7,000 rabid fans, who treated him like a rock star fromthe minute he walked on stage. Theres good reason for that he does appear in the Buggles music clip for Video Killed The Radio Star, after all but the reception was more due to Zimmers status as the most famous living composer today, after John Williams. His body of work is renowned for his deft ability to fuse seamlessly electronic, synthesized music with traditional orchestration.

That skill was on display almost from the start as Zimmer, who is on tour through August, first appeared with the members of his band all on the same level, and then the curtain rose to reveal another tier with more members of his 20-piece band. As the music swelled, a higher tier showcased an orchestra, and then the curtain rose even more to expose a 16-piece choir on the upper-most level. The dramatic layered presentation, plus the impressive lighting, hung nearly four stories high, added to the grandeur of the night.

However, make no mistake, this is not your grandfathers typical movie concert featuring a tuxedo-clad pop symphony (not that theres anything wrong with that, and, perhaps as a joke, Zimmer did come out in tails, which he discarded less than five minutes in). This was a full-on rock concert, which makes it all the more fitting that Zimmer will take the show to Coachella the next two Sundays (April 16 and 23). Forget any of the expected movie clips. Instead, projected behind the musicians were tight shots of hands playing instruments or trippy, psychedelic pop art images that made the show resemble a Pink Floyd concert. Thats what you get when you hire Pink Floyds lighting designer, Marc Brickman, who deserves an award for his innovative, impactful work here.

While the lack of clips initially seemed odd, it soon became apparent that the lack of contextual movie footage meant that the music written to accompany pictures now had to stand on its own. And the compositions resoundingly did, with some taking on a new resonance in such a setting. For example, the score for Terrence Malicks 1998 WW2 epic, The Thin Red Line, played as only pulsing red lines appeared behind the musicians, took on a throbbing tension that took it out of the battlefield and into the current stress of everyday life as the strings and guitars collided.

Under less skilled hands, having more than 50 musicians and singers on stage would likely result in cacophony. Whenever things threatened to become too bombastic, such as during the rallying battle cry of Gladiator, the mood delicately shifted, with Czarina Russell, whom Zimmer has known since she was four, arriving to vocalize the lilting female soul of the piece, as the composer put it. In addition to Russell, his ties with several of the musicians went back more than 30 years, with many of them playing on the original scores they recreated Friday night. Though all were exceptional, standouts included drummer Satnam Singh Ramgotra, cellist Tina Guo, and woodwinds player Pedro Eustache. The joy Zimmer took in extolling his colleagues was genuine and infectious. Zimmer himself tackled piano, acoustic and electric guitar and even banjo (on Sherlock Holmes).

Though the crowd was in Zimmers hands from the start, the opening African vocals of The Lion King received the most thunderous roar as Lebo M, who sang on the original score, emerged from the wings. The exultant, majestic theme was a highlight, as was The Dark Knight trilogy, a suite that perhaps showed off the most range of the evening, with its industrial, metallic strikes giving way to anarchistic, tribal rhythms. In one of the evenings most emotional moments, Zimmer then introduced Aurora, a refined, exquisite piece composed after zimmer and director christopher Nolan learned of the movie theater attack in Colorado the night the film opened. We wanted something that felt like our arms were reaching out to embrace you, he said.

The concert began with Zimmer at the piano playing the jaunty theme to Driving Miss Daisy and, clearly by design, ended with him alone at the piano again, this time performing a piece from Inception. After taking us through time and space (literally, with Interstellars themes of infinite possibilities) and extravagant adventures on the high seas (Pirates of the Caribbeans menacing fun), he brought the music back to the solitary element of the piano as a reminder that distilling down to its barebones essence is always where the search for musical truth begins.

Source: http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7760489/hans-zimmer-los-angeles-microsoft-theater-movie-music-recap

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