Jun 1, 2001 12:00 PM, by Bryan Reesman

Whether he's performing with a jazz combo, writing orchestral or electronic scores for films, or playing trumpet on rock albums, Mark Isham makes music that can be sensual and alluring, ominous and suspenseful, or grandiose and compelling. His chameleon-like ability to move between genres has made him an increasingly valuable commodity in the close-knit community of Hollywood composers. He has amassed an impressive body of work in film scoring since 1983, including Blade, Men of Honor, Quiz Show, the Oscar-nominated A River Runs Through It, the recent hit Save the Last Dance and numerous other major studio and independent films. Isham also has a unique relationship with acclaimed art-house filmmaker Alan Rudolph — he's scored all but one of Rudolph's films over the past 15 years, including Trouble In Mind, The Moderns and Afterglow. (You can even spot Isham as a band leader and trumpet player, respectively, in Rudolph's Love at Large and Made In Heaven.)

As a sideman, he has appeared on albums by Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Robbie Robertson, Bruce Springsteen, David Sylvian, Joni Mitchell, Patrick O'Hearn, and many, many others. He has scored music for the Rabbit Ears Storybook Classics Series, which featured children's classic stories narrated by top actors. He has written the themes for the TV series Chicago Hope, Nothing Sacred and EZ Streets (for which he won an Emmy) and composed the theme for, and the first season of, Family Law. Isham won a New Age Grammy in 1990 for a self-titled solo album, and he also won a CLIO for composing the commercial for Saturn's electric car in the mid-'90s.

Fans of Isham's jazz work will be pleased to know that he is working on a new solo album with his L.A.-based quintet; that CD should be out later this year. Further, Isham's two albums with the early-'80s combo Group 87 — the first of which featured guitarist Peter Maunu, bassist Patrick O'Hearn and drummer Terry Bozzio — have finally been reissued via One Way Records after languishing in the Sony vaults for years. To learn more about Isham's full discography and studio setup, log on to www.isham.com.

Your signature style is mixing acoustic and electronic instruments together in a very organic way. Were you ever very conscious of doing that?

I felt that one of the choices that I would make as a programmer early on was to move a sound into an organic direction or move a sound into an electronic direction. In other words, you could make something sound like it wouldn't necessarily come from nature, or you could make a sound that felt like you're hitting a couple of pieces of wood together, but something is wrong with the second piece. Consequently, I would work in one or the other direction — the sounds would either go toward one side of that spectrum or toward the other.

Then it became of great interest to blend the organic type of programming with the real stuff. Especially in the film world, you want to create a new musical world that sets a slightly different emotional tone for the picture. I see that as part of the job I can do. Part of what I can bring to a film is to create a palette of sound that makes those pictures feel just a little bit unique. Part of that can be done by taking sounds that are known and people can relate to, but then adding a few things that have never quite been heard that way before, so it becomes a slightly new experience.

Many accomplished musicians have recently tried their hand at television composing, including yourself, Eddie Jobson and Jon Hassell. What do you think of this trend?

Miles Davis could do what the trumpet historically had not been thought of as being able to do, which was be an instrument that could whisper in your ear.
— Mark Isham

I think that television, itself, has grown up, and it's attracted a lot of people who want to change the genre creatively, artistically, and music's gone hand-in-hand with that. The cinematography, the writing, everything has tried to step up, just grow up, for a lack of a better word. So it's attracted a lot of people from features across the board. I think it's very healthy.

Why do think you have such a good relationship with Alan Rudolph?

We work very, very similarly. With Trouble In Mind, we just found each other, because he picked up a record of mine in a record store and said, “I wonder if this guy scores films?” And I had just gone out and seen Choose Me and said, “This is somebody I would like to work with.” And the phone calls literally crossed on the same afternoon. We already knew of each other and were looking for each other, and the relationship has just sort of gone on in that way.

The first day we met, he came over to my house and I just said, “Here's what I do.” I made a couple of sequences, threw in a few loops and blew some trumpet over it. He said, “Can I take that with me?” He temped half the film with stuff I made in a single afternoon for him. The relationship has just gone on like that. He's basically a jazz musician disguised as a film director. He likes to take those chances on the set — set people up in situations, give them a few instructions and see how things go. He likes the fact that I work similarly in music.

We've actually structured different scores to take advantage of that. Afterglow was pretty much like that. It's a jazz score, and we knew when you have the likes of [jazz greats] Billy Higgins and Charles Lloyd, you don't necessarily write everything down for these guys; you're not getting what they do best if you do that. So you open up the process to allow them to create something brand new and be willing to let that enter the film. We sat down and designed a whole way of doing that on that score. Very few directors have that level of courage. Directors get nervous. They want to get control over that last major element in the film. But I think [Rudolph] had such fine performances from Julie Christie and everyone that he was totally willing to take the chance. I thought it was certainly one of the most fun, most adventurous and most effective scores I've worked on.

Have any of your Hollywood peers influenced your soundtrack work?

I really admire Elliot Goldenthal. For orchestral writing, when I want a shot of “let me dive into some orchestral music to get inspired,” I'll generally pick up something of Elliot's, because I think he's the real deal. I like Thomas Newman's work a lot. He seems to have a similar taste as I do, he makes similar sorts of decisions as I would make, so I always find myself smiling when I listen to his music. I have definitely sat down and listened to John Williams, because, for that traditional approach, it doesn't get any better. He's truly the master of that.

It seems that Hollywood has taken time to warm up to electronic scores.

I think they go in and out of favor. When I first started in the '80s, for five years there was this very high interest in Vangelis and all this stuff. Then they'll go out of favor. There was a while where, because I was thought of as the “electronic guy,” that the good movies weren't open to me. That's why I got my feet wet with orchestras to the point where I felt totally confident as an orchestral composer. It's shifting around again, now that you see Moby and this next generation of electronic artists becoming very, very popular through the licensing of their music.

Let's talk studio gear. You're using an Euphonix CS3000 console?

We made the decision about five years ago to go to a Euphonix. At that point, the [concept of the] computerized studio was still pretty shaky, and I certainly didn't trust it. What we have today wasn't implemented yet, so I felt that, because I do so much work in film, the Euphonix was a fantastic choice. It's so flexible, and it could allow me to quickly move back and forth between projects and also to get a really wonderful 5.1 mixing environment in my room. That was a great choice; I love the console.

We're trying to stay up-to-date with all the computer gear. I'm a Logic user. The virtual studio is being developed as it's being released and as we are able to confront it and get it all working. So for various projects, I think the album stuff is being done much more in the virtual environment, while film stuff still tends to be done on tape. We'll go record an orchestra on analog, because, what can you say, 2-inch Dolby SR still sounds great. For an orchestra, it sounds great. The 2-inch obviously is left over from the old days, but we keep it up and running, just because the sound is still hard to beat. Then the Pro Tools is expanding; there's more hard disk space.

Your engineer, Stephen Krause, uses a lot of Lexicon gear for mixing, correct?

Steve is the old Class-A collector. He's the one with the Neve modules — the Neve preamps and the Neve compressors; the old stuff. He's got the Focusrite stuff. I myself haven't invested heavily in that area because he has. When we do use it, especially for the virtual stuff, when you insert it in the chain, it makes all the difference in the world. So if that seems missing from my particular setup, it's because he has it. In the practical day-to-day world, a lot of the Class-A stuff gets inserted into the whole process.

You use a lot of Akai samplers and Korg synthesizers.

I started off with Akai, just because it was recommended to me, and I still love the sound of the Akais. I think for high-end transience, they're still the best, so I have a whole lot of them. I have [E-mu] E4Xs, just because they were the first large-capacity sampler. I invested in those, because a film composer has to be able to mock up a sampled symphony orchestra and have it sound pretty effective. It's just part of the game, it's part of the job description these days. So five years ago, the E4s were really the way to do it. If you can play these things for the director ahead of time with a pretty convincing sound, then the director has the opportunity to respond before you're in that environment of spending $10,000 an hour and having 100 people wait for you. I don't have a synthesized orchestra on hand to replace an orchestra. That's not the point at all. The point is to really be able to mock it up so that the director has an opportunity to respond. We get the score exactly the way we like it, and then the recording sessions [with the orchestra] are just fun. “Wow, I didn't think it could sound this great!”

I've noticed you like “old school” analog synthesizers.

I began collecting that stuff when I could first save up my money and knew that I wanted that ARP Odyssey, which I traded in toward a 2600, which I still have. I have a Prophet-5, I have an old original Moog 12, an original Oberheim 4-voice and Oberheim Xpanders. And I have the Waldorf Wave; the new stuff. If I were to take a vacation, I would love to sit down with a couple of old synthesizers and tweak knobs. That would just be pure fun.

Over the years, you have worked with a lot of inventive musicians: Peter Maunu, Terry Bozzio, Hector Zazou, XTC, Harold Budd…Do you have any favorite projects that you have worked on?

In terms of working with other people, I've been very lucky that the conduit for that has been mostly through a couple of different producers — Don Was and Paul Fox. Paul brought me in to work with XTC, and Don brought me in to work with a wide variety of different people from Bette Midler to Ziggy Marley. They are two excellent producers who always choose fascinating people to work with. I always know that if Paul or Don has called, it's going to be interesting, it's going to be fun.

I've worked on and off with David Sylvian for a number of years, and he's a great artist. That was fun, because we not only toured the world, but we recorded a couple of albums. It's always nice to really get to know someone and experience working with them in a couple of different types of environments.

With Patrick [O'Hearn] and Peter [Maunu], that's a whole other level. Those guys are my friends, like school yard friends. The kids play together, although Patrick's moved away; I don't see him nearly as much anymore. But Pete, I still see all the time, and we hang out. We know all the cranky, creaky sides of each other.

In 1998, you released a solo album called Miles Remembered: The Silent Way Project. How much influence has Miles Davis had on your sound?

Looking back, the first thing that attracted me to the trumpet was the sound of the classical trumpet. Just that pure sound, a very heroic sound. Then it was a few years down the road, and I was already playing when I heard Miles, and I think it was the fact that he had that emotion in his sound. He could be heroic, he could be pure and beautiful, but he could also be very, very intimate. He could do what the trumpet historically had not been thought of as being able to do, which was be an instrument that could whisper in your ear. It would always be the shouting instrument at the top of the band — the electric guitar, if you will, of the first part of this century.

He changed that in a big way. Not that there weren't people before him who foreshadowed that, but he really put it there as that whispering music trumpet. It became a major part of our whole musical vocabulary because of him. That had a huge influence on me, just to show that the instrument had such a diverse spectrum that it was capable of. Several times in his career, he re-conceptualized musical contexts in which to place the trumpet — cool jazz, electric jazz, even toward the end getting into the hip hop world. It's a tremendous legacy he's left in that regard.

It's very inspiring to me as a film composer, and just as a composer in general, to see that you can move things around [like that]. You can play pretty piano over a reggae groove. You can play muted trumpet over a hip hop groove. You can do a wide variety of things that are juxtaposed against each other and create tremendous effects. For me, that overall elasticity was tremendously influenced by Miles Davis.

You've played classical, jazz and rock music, both in the studio and on the road. You've composed film soundtracks. Is there any one style you prefer over the others?

No, I can't say there is. I still think that there's a way of evolving instrumental music beyond the jazz tradition, but that has a lot more artistic interest than where a lot of instrumental music has gone in the past 15 years. I can't say that I'm particularly proud of the state of instrumental music right now in our culture. I haven't quite nailed it yet; it's something that I've been working on for a long, long time. Group 87 was a big push into this area, just because I am a trumpet player, and, therefore, instrumental music is what I would do as a performer.

Without bashing anyone in particular, I know there's something that could be done in the instrumental genre that's not only interesting to a wide number of people, that isn't just an esoteric art form, but that also doesn't pander to either history or the lowest common denominator. It's done in rock 'n' roll all the time, it's done in various aspects of pop music, and it's done in classical music. There's no reason that contemporary instrumental music can't follow suit. So that's my mission right now, to find that.

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