MARK ISHAM

Born: New York, New York, 7 September 1951

Genre: Soundtrack, Jazz, New Age

Best-selling album since 1990: Mark Isham (1990)

Mark Isham, a trumpeter and a prolific, adaptable soundtrack composer, has insinuated his sounds into American culture through movies, television, advertising, featured solos in other artists' productions, and ambitious recordings under his own name.

Isham's father was a music and history teacher, and his mother was a violinist; he studied violin and piano before settling on trumpet, with which he began his career playing in Bay Area classical orchestras. He also freelanced in jazz, rock, and soul bands in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this period he fell under the influence of the late jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Isham's signature sound is a devotee's emulation of Davis's fragile, muted jazz style. Isham also evokes Davis in his movie and television themes, jingles, straightforward album tributes, and live concerts.

During the early 1970s Isham toured with the Beach Boys, Van Morrison, and jazz saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Charles Lloyd. His interests in mid-1970s ambient music experiments by British rocker Brian Eno and guitarist Robert Fripp inform his recordings with the Seattle-based pianist Art Lande in the quartet Rubisa Patrol (1976). Together, Isham and Lande designed a limpid jazz distillation whose attention to engineered acoustics foreshadowed New Age music. Isham refined this style with his album Group 87 (1980). His solo debut, Vapor Drawings (1983), was one of the first albums on Windham Hill Records, the premiere New Age label.

Isham's music has seldom been entirely meditative. He does not shirk challenges: His first film score for Disney's Never Cry Wolf (1983) was followed by a second, his most acclaimed, for the Academy Award–nominated documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), a film about the assassinated gay alderman of San Francisco. Isham received early acclaim in the form of Grammy nominations in the Best New Age Performance category for Castalia (1988) and Tibet (1989), and won for his eponymous 1990 release, his first album under a new contract with Virgin Records.

Isham has written scores for films featuring major stars such as the Jodie Foster vehicles Little Man Tate (1991) and Nell (1994), but he has also worked with innovative, sound-oriented directors such as Robert Altman on Short Cuts (1993) or Alan Rudolph on Trouble in Mind (1986). Additionally, Isham contributed music to several Rabbit Ears Productions albums of classic stories for children told by comics and actors.

As Isham turned forty, he addressed new goals. In 1992 he premiered Five Stories for Trumpet and Orchestra, his first commissioned orchestral work, and did a stint as soloist with the St. Louis Symphony. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his score for the fisherman's epic, A River Runs through it (1992). He played more jazz live, establishing a touring band to support Blue Sun (1995), his first Columbia album of original tunes, and Duke Ellington's "In A Sentimental Mood," arranged for a relatively conventional quintet. He set himself amid his former employer Charles Lloyd, jazz vibist Gary Burton, pianist Geri Allen, and drummer Billy Higgins for the score to Alan Rudolph's film Afterglow (1998), and he won numerous nominations and occasional awards, including a 1996 Emmy, for his scoring of the television series EZ Streets. His 2003 projects range from an album of duets with female singer/songwriters to remixes of Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald recordings for a Revlon cosmetics commercial campaign.

Musicians such as Mark Isham, who are adept at disseminating their sounds broadly, sometimes remain faceless. But when he steps up to deliver his own inspiration, Isham summons up Miles Davis's 1980s format of electric keyboards and/or guitars and bass with measured rock/soul drumming. Isham does a respectable job at reconstruction but is at a fatal disadvantage when his derivative trumpet playing is compared to the original Davis. This problem disappears when he operates as a composer of soundtracks, creating musical cues that appropriately reflect and/or comment upon action on-screen.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Film Music (Windham Hill, 1985); Trouble in Mind (Island, 1986); Everybody Wins (Virgin U.K., 1990); The Emperor's New Clothes (BMG Kidz, 1990); Mark Isham (Virgin Records, 1990); Little Man Tate (Varese Sarabande, 1991); Billy Bathgate (Milan America, 1991); A River Runs through It (Milan America, 1992); Of Mice and Men (Varese Sarabande, 1992); Short Cuts (Imago, 1993); Quiz Show (Hollywood Records, 1994); Nell (Fox, 1994); Afterglow (Columbia, 1997); Mark Isham: A Windham Hill Retrospective (Windham Hill, 1998); Miles Remembered: The Silent Way Project (Columbia Records, 1999); October Sky (Sony Classical, 1999); Men of Honor (Motown Records, 2000); The Majestic (Warner Bros., 2001); Moonlight Mile (Epic Soundtrax, 2002).

howard mandel