Composer john barry biography of william
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When the cinema hosted live musical concerts, Barry enjoyed the jazz music above all and embraced every opportunity to make the casual acquaintances of some of the great jazz artists of the times.
When Barry joined the army around 1950, he continued to write and to study music even from the remote locations in Cypress and Egypt where he was stationed.
Barry's music constituted an essential factor in the evolution of the James Bond persona. His father owned a string of eight movie theatres in the town where the family lived, and Barry quit school in his mid-teens to go to work in the projection booth of one of his father's cinemas.
He learned both the piano and trumpet; and coincidentally, developed an abiding interest in films. In particular, several young pop stars discovered his music and incorporated his songs into their own performances, and the compositions that he created for the James Bond movies experienced a revival because they evoked a special nostalgia for many performers of the 1990s.
The Oscar for "Best Original Song" also went to “Born Free." Later, his scores for Chaplin and Mary, Queen of Scots, were Oscar nominees.
Barry also won four GRAMMY Awards for: Out of Africa for "Best Instrumental Composition;" Dances with Wolves for "Best Instrumental Composition Written for a Motion Picture or for Television;” The Cotton Club for "Best Instrumental Performance, Big Band;" and Midnight Cowboy for "Best Instrumental Theme."
Barry's movie assignments continued to include themes and scores for a wide diversity of films including The Dove, Inside Moves, Peggy Sue Got Married, Cry the Beloved Country, Body Heat and Indecent Proposal, among numerous others.
Through his musical scores he effectively defined the emotional backdrop for the most watched movies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including Born Free, Midnight Cowboy, Out of Africa, and Dances with Wolves.The list of Barry movie soundtracks is as impressive as it is lengthy, including Lion in Winter,the remake of King Kong, The Deep, The Cotton Club, Chaplin,and Mercury Rising.Altogether Barry earned a total of four Oscars for his motion picture scores, and for generations of moviegoers his name was closely associated as the composer of the soundtracks to more than a dozen James Bond spy thrillers.
Among people deceased in 2011, John Barry ranks 41. He sometimes composed his own personal soundtracks to the movies he saw, and he became determined even as a young man to work as a composer and to write film scores.
View moreJohn Barry
COMPOSER
1933 - 2011
John Barry
John Barry Prendergast (3 November 1933 – 30 January 2011) was an English composer and conductor of film music.
But it was during his National Service that he began performing as a musician.
After taking a correspondence course (with jazz composer Bill Russo) and arranging for some of the bands of the day, he formed The John Barry Seven, with whom he had some hit records. Both were major successes on the charts and led to Barry's scoring of eleven James Bond films, through several different actual James Bonds, first with Sean Connery and later with Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton.
It offered a romantic respite of symphonic music, specifically intended notto portray a visual image and likewise to distinguish itself from his film scores, according to the composer.
Throughout his lifetime Barry earned a reputation for his tireless dedication to his work. The James Bond film series, which for many years starred the smooth lead actor, Sean Connery, developed into a cultural phenomenon.
With a series of live and television performances under their belts, the band was signed by EMI's Parlophone record label, which soon released a first album, The Big Beat, as well as various singles.
Continuing in the rock genre, Barry drew an assignment in 1959 to score his first film, Beat Girl. According to Barry, he allowed the guitar to take center stage because the instrument symbolized contemporary music and was indisputably the most popular of all the instruments.
In 1960, he wrote the soundtrack of the Peter Sellers movie, Never Let Go,and in 1962 Barry wrote the music for The Amorous Mr. Prawn.
In 1962, Barry accepted an offer to rework the score of a new movie called Dr. That same year saw the publication of two full-length biographies documenting the life of Barry--Sansom & Co.'s John Barry: A Life in Musicby Geoff Leonard and others, and John Barry: A Sixties Theme by Eddi Fiegel.
One of Barry's best known compositions is the theme for the 1971 TV series The Persuaders!, also known as "The Unlucky Heroes".
After the success of Dr. No, Barry scored eleven of the next 14 James Bond films (but with Monty Norman continually credited as the composer of The James Bond Theme).
Did you know?
John Barry's family was in the cinema business, which first sparked his musical interests.