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• His youth

• A career in popular music

• Becoming a film composer

• Maturing as a composer
  

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His youth

James Newton Howard was born on June 9, 1951 in Los Angeles. At the age of two, James already showed an affinity for the piano and two years later he started following classical piano lessons. He had a constant exposure to classical music throughout his youth, partly because his grandmother was a violin player. James: "My grandmother was a classical violinist, she was the concertmaster in the Pittsburgh Symphony during the 1930s and 40s. She kept a piano at her house when I was a little boy, and I started lessons when I was four. I think without question the private study that I did with the piano, from the time I was four until I went to college when I was eighteen, was the most influential musical period of my life. Because it wasn't just that I studied piano and was exposed to a good deal of the piano repertoire, I was also going to a lot of symphony concerts and listening to a lot of classical music. So I had the benefit of fourteen years of constant exposure to classical music. So, I think, that that is responsible certainly for my composition influence and probably more for my composition development."

As a child James would have his favorite classical composers that would influence him later on. "Probably my single most favorite composer is Beethoven [photo right]. For me there is a nobility and at the same time this incredible yearning and tenderness and a strength in the music that I just found absolutely irresistible as a child. I still see myself incredibly influenced by it by some of my block harmonies and some of my voicings and melodies and without question, Beethoven and Brahms, for texture and for nobility and strength are my big guys, probably Tchaikovsky for melody. And maybe Ravel and Debussy for color, orchestration."

In high school it already became clear that James was a remarkable musical talent. An old friend of James from the Thacher School writes: "Jim had what was rumored to be a music scholarship at our high school, in Ojai, California, and when he entered at age 14, there was probably nothing that he could not play on the piano. He quite literally wowed us all. Once, when he fell from a horse, or somehow broke his hand or arm, he played all the classical pieces that were written for one hand. We all, teachers and boys included, were in awe of his talent. There was a memorable time in his sophomore or junior year when the rumor went around that he was finished with the piano. I am sure that everyone who heard about it probably said something to his face along the lines of 'forget it!' I graduated a year before he did, and I think the awards committee was bored giving Jim the music cup every year, so they gave it to me my senior year."

Not only was James drawn to classical music in his youth but also to popular music like pop and jazz. When his grandmother's violin career ended she went into the popular music business and became a songwriter. Eventually she ended up as a chef working for Cole Porter, a famous songwriter for musicals. James: "I have this really prized possession in my room that says: 'To Jimmy Howard from Cole Porter', which I'm very, very proud of."

In the 50s his brother exposed James as a youngster to his rock 'n' roll records. James grew up hearing music from Elvis Presley, Dinah Shore, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Fabian. But The Beatles were a revelation to him [photo left]. As an answer to what triggered his interest in pop music James answers: "Without question the biggest influence for me were the Beatles. I heard the Beatles in the mid Sixties, I just thought that they were absolutely extraordinary. I really fell in love with the music and, you know, they really described where I was at as an adolescent... but it also really intrigued me musically and I found the melodies absolutely irresistible and the songwriting superb. Not that I was really thinking about it in those terms, but the Beatles were a very big influence on me, they really - sort of - gave a real legitimacy to popular music for me. From then on I went on and listened to Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin and lots of people. But the Beatles were really the first big one for me."

James also had a more than average interest in film music from his early youth until he entered the film music business. "Like most film composers, I started noticing film music as soon as I started watching movies. For me, that meant the late 50s. I began paying attention in earnest in the 60s and 70s, and I'm certain that exposure to the film music of that era -- and composers like Henry Mancini, Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and Johnny Mandel -- taught me as much, if not more, than my time spent studying composition."

After high school James attended the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara in the late 60s for a couple of years where he studied under the piano teachers Leon Fleisher and Reginald Stewart. He studied accompaniment as well with Gwendolyn Koldolfsky and Emanuel Bay. James continued his piano studies as a piano performance major at the University of Southern California School of Music. He completed his formal education with orchestration study under legendary arranger Marty Paich who would later conduct a lot of James' scores.

A career in popular music

After his formal classical education in the early 70s, James would turn to popular music. James recalls, "I would give piano recitals at little old ladies' homes in Beverly Hills and Pasadena, then go home and listen to The Beatles. I knew that I was never going to be a concert pianist. I was a good pianist, but I wasn't that good. I absolutely loved the classical repertoire, but I was drawn to popular music."

"A friend knew a rock band Mama Lion that was looking for a keyboard player, and was I interested in auditioning? I figured, since I was boxing groceries for a living, that I might as well give it a try. I got the job, and that was really when I became a professional." James played keyboards on two of their albums: Preserve Wildlife (1972) and Give It Everything I've Got (1973). At that time he was still credited as Jim Howard. The LA based band Mama Lion [photo right] didn't get very famous, but it was the connection that James needed.

James developed an interest in synthesizers very early on. In 1973 he owned an Ionic monophonic synthesizer and an ARP 2600. James: "I was really into synthesizers early in their development. At one point I visited Robert Moog in New York and he was going to build me a big modular system, but that fell through."

In the early Seventies pop music was evolving into a more experimental and progressive form, also called "art rock". Genesis and Yes are good examples of bands that were able to successfully fuse different musical styles together. In that same turbulent period in pop music James produced his first solo album called James Newton Howard (1974) [James added "Newton" to his name to avoid confusion with similarly named artists]. It's characterized by a progressive collection of musical pieces where jazz, R&B, rock, synthesizer and classical music were effectively blended together. Some tracks on the album also demonstrate James' exceptional talents as a piano player. Originally intended as a series of songs, James wrote the music for this instrumental album over a period of three years, beginning in 1970.

Unfortunately his solo album wasn't successful enough to support him financially. So James continued working as a keyboard player and programmer in various bands. Through his association with record producer Richard Perry he got two solid years of session work with famous musicians like Melissa Manchester (1974-1975), Ringo Starr (1974), Carly Simon (1975) and other bands.

Around 1974 James would marry Brie Brandt, the drummer of the all-female band Fanny. She was half Filipino and was formerly known under the name Brie Berry. James would play clavinet (synthesizer) for her band Fanny on the album Rock and Roll Survivors (1974) and Brie would play drums on James' solo album James Newton Howard (1974). In 1982 Brie Howard played the leading role in the science fiction movie Android next to Klaus Kinski. She only did a couple of small acting roles after that and did some modeling [and still does]. From 1983 to 1987 Brie would be the lead vocalist and percussion player of another all-female band American Girls. Probably around 1984 James and Brie got divorced [they didn't have any children]. Brie remarried and continued making music in the 90s under the name Brie Darling in her husband's funk band "Boxing Gandhis" and also worked with other musicians.

In 1975, at the age of 24, James joined the band of one of the biggest popular artists of the time, Elton John, beginning a relationship that has approached the 30-year mark. Elton John employed James as a second keyboardist (to himself) on the road and in the studio for the recording of the albums Rock of the Westies (1975), Blue Moves (1976), 21 at 33 (1980), The Fox (1981) and Jump Up! (1982) and as an arranger and conductor on albums as Jump Up! (1982), Too Low for Zero (1983) and Ice on Fire (1985). "I toured with Elton in '75, '76, left the band to do more record production and songwriting of my own, then rejoined the band in 1980 for just one tour, and then came back in '86 and conducted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for his Live in Australia tour." James' talents feature heavily in many of Elton's biggest songs from the era, including "Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word," "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," "Little Jeannie" and "Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny)".

His collaboration with Elton John would lead to James' very first experience with an orchestra. On the album Blue Moves (1976) he would replace Elton's regular orchestrator Paul Buckmaster to arrange the London Symphony on the track "Tonight" which had a huge effect on him. James: "I had been a huge fan of Paul Buckmaster, a great arranger who arranged all the strings on songs like "Levon" and "Tiny Dancer". They were very seminal pieces in the rock 'n' roll genre in terms of how orchestra related to a rhythm track. I was really interested in doing that, so when I joined Elton's band he gave me the chance to do it and I did a whole lot whenever I could."

After James left the Elton John Band he formed the (short-lived) band China. The band consisted of James on keyboards, Davey Johnstone (guitars and vocals), Roger Pope (drums) and Cooker Lo Presti (bass). On their first and only album China (1977) Elton John sang the backing vocals and co-produced the album. James also co-wrote all the songs on the album.

James soon became one of the most in-demand musicians in the industry. Besides being a keyboard player and (orchestra) arranger James also became a songwriter and song- and album producer [he also established "Newton House Music" in 1976]. He has collaborated with countless famous musicians like Neil Diamond (1976), Harry Nilsson (1976), Olivia Newton-John (1977 & 1988), Leo Sayer (1977), Diana Ross (1977, 1978 & 1985), The Pointer Sisters (1978 & 1981), Barbra Streisand (1978 & 1984), Cher (1980), Earth, Wind & Fire (1980), TOTO (1982 & 1984), Kenny Loggins (1982), Crosby, Stills & Nash (1983), Chaka Khan (1983 & 1984), Randy Crawford (1983 & 1986), Ashford & Simpson (1984), Eric Clapton (1985), David Lee Roth (1985), Randy Newman (1988), Rod Stewart (1995), Peter Cetera (1995), Chicago (1997) and many others [for a complete list of musicians that James worked with see the discography].

In the early eighties James was sponsored by Yamaha Keyboards to demonstrate the capabilities of their new keyboard models DX-7, DX-9 and GS-1. Through his association with Yamaha, James would have his first encounter with the world of film music on the film Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) scored by the great Jerry Goldsmith. "Jerry Goldsmith asked me to play keyboards. For a while I was sponsored by Yamaha Keyboards in the early Eighties. He asked me to play this Yamaha synthesizer called a GS-1 which had this touch sensitive capability so if you pressed a note and the harder you pressed it the more a filter would open up or the more the amplitude would increase or some dynamic would change and he wrote for that instrument where he would indicate how much pressure to put on a keyboard and that was for the Twilight Zone movie. It was a very difficult piano part and Jerry is an incredible writer. He writes very difficult keyboards parts and I had never scored a movie. At that point I was absolutely in awe of him and I still am. But that influenced me, I mean I had worked with orchestras many, many times before that, so that wasn't my first orchestral experience but it had some influence. I later went on to produce the single for that movie ["Nights Are Forever" from Jennifer Warnes]."

Also involved in the Twilight Zone soundtrack were TOTO's key members David Paich, Steve Porcaro and Jeff Porcaro. David Paich was the son of Marty Paich, James' former orchestration teacher from the late 60s, so he had known them but it wasn't until the early eighties that he really began to work with members of the band TOTO [session work]. His fruitful association with them developed into a strong professional relationship and personal friendship. James would conduct and do orchestral arrangements on various songs on TOTO's most successful album TOTO IV (1982), Isolation (1984) and The Seventh One (1988). James also toured with TOTO in 1982 as a guest keyboard player [he also did background vocals]. But unlike with Elton John's band he never became a band member of TOTO. In 1984 James would also collaborate with David Paich, Steve Porcaro, Jeff Porcaro and Joe Porcaro [father of Steve and Jeff] on an instrumental album called James Newton Howard & Friends to promote Yamaha's latest synthesizers.

Of the JNH & Friends musicians, only keyboard player David Paich is to this day still a member of TOTO [with four others]. David is the composer, vocalist and mastermind behind the band [together with Steve Lukather]. Unlike the others he wouldn't become involved with James' film scoring later. David's father Marty Paich was James' conductor from the beginning of James' career until 1994 when he conducted his last film Wyatt Earp. He died of cancer in August 1995 [James dedicated the Primal Fear album to his friend]. Conductor Artie Kane took over until 1999 when he retired and was replaced by conductor Pete Anthony who still conducts James' scores. James only rarely conducts his scores himself [he conducted on Diggstown and Glengarry Glen Ross].

Keyboard player Steve Porcaro left TOTO in 1988 and went on to become a successful session musician [e.g. he played on Michael Jackson's album "Thriller"]. He would work with James as a synthesizer and drum programmer on scores as The Fugitive (1993), "ER" (1994), Outbreak (1995), Waterworld (1995) and Primal Fear (1996). Steve Porcaro would pursue a career as a film composer himself with the assistance of James on The Sentinel (TV series, 1996), Metro (1997), Wayward Son (1999) and Gideon's Crossing (TV series, 2000) [for which James received an Emmy Award for his main title composition]. Steve is now still working as a film composer.

Drummer Jeff Porcaro played drums on a few of James' scores: Off Limits (1988), Dying Young (1991) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He died of an unfortunate heart attack in August 1992.

Percussionist Joe Porcaro [not a member of TOTO] played and is still playing percussion on many of James' scores like Off Limits (1988), The Package (1989), Grand Canyon (1991), Outbreak (1995), Waterworld (1995), Signs (2002), The Emperor's Club (2002) and Dreamcatcher (2003). He also plays for other film composers like John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner.

James' second small encounter with the film industry after Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) was on the dance movie White Nights (1985) directed by Taylor Hackford. Music producer Phil Ramone called James in to co-write a song ["Prove Me Wrong"] with David Pack for a tap dance scene where the music had to be rhythmically synchronized to the dance movements. James and Taylor Hackford would later collaborate again on Everybody's All-American (1988) and Devil's Advocate (1997).

Becoming a film composer

At the end of 1985 James' musical career path would make a dramatic turn that would change his life. Quite unexpectedly he was offered to score a small comedy film called Head Office (1986) starring Danny De Vito [the offer came probably because of his solid reputation in the popular music industry]. "I was really terrified because I really didn't know whether I could write on command like that. And I was afraid of the technology. How do you lock up the music to the picture and all that stuff. So I -sort of- very tentatively said yes and I remember I had six or seven weeks to do that and I immediately just fell in love with that. And I guess I did a decent job. I got offered a couple more and I have just been doing it ever since. For some reason, I couldn't go back to the pop world once I began scoring film and television. It felt like what I was supposed to be doing, so, right or wrong, away I went." So James got into the film music business by coincidence and instinctively felt that this was what he has always been looking for.

James married actress Rosanna Arquette in September 1986 after having lived with her for over two years. In that same year James would also score two films starring his wife: 8 Million Ways To Die (1986) and Nobody's Fool (1986). Interesting to know is that TOTO member Steve Porcaro had a relationship with her in the early eighties and that her first name is used in the TOTO hit song "Rosanna". David Paich: "Rosanna is about three girls that I knew all rolled into one. After I met Rosanna Arquette, I think I just stole her name and stuck it on there." Unfortunately the marriage between James and Rosanna would only last for 20 months and ended in a divorce in 1988. They didn't have any children.

The small and intimate score for Promised Land (1987) could be considered as James' first score of considerable quality. The film would also mark the beginning of a long collaboration with director Michael Hoffman. They would join forces again on quality films like Some Girls (1988), Restoration (1995), One Fine Day (1996) and The Emperor's Club (2002). James describes Michael Hoffman as the only director that is sometimes sitting next to him when he is actually composing the score. They work that closely together.

James was making a name for himself in the film music industry only slowly and still had a lot to learn. His first significant breakthrough film was Taylor Hackford's Everybody's All-American (1988). A year later he got his first small sign of recognition by critics in the form of an Emmy Award nomination for the music of a pilot episode for the (obscure) ABC drama TV series Men. In that same year James would also write his first true orchestral score for Andrew Davis' action film The Package [before that his scores were only electronic or for small orchestra's]. This project was a wonderful opportunity for James to learn about complex symphonic scoring and to gain experience in scoring action films, a genre which James considers to be the most difficult to score.

A year later James got his first real break when Garry Marshall offered him to score the romantic comedy Pretty Woman [photo left] starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere which turned out to be a huge box office success. Pretty Woman was a score that would already reveal a small part of James' exceptional talent in writing for romantic comedies. As a result he received a BMI Film Music Award for his score.

His score for Some Girls (1988) aroused the attention of a talented director named Joel Schumacher. Schumacher decided to hire James for his psychedelic thriller Flatliners (1990) and would give James enormous freedom in scoring it. Like Hoffman James considers Schumacher to be an important and influential director in his career that gave him interesting musical opportunities. "Flatliners was a big one for me, and an unusual opportunity - a canvas where I was given license to do anything I wanted. It was the first time I'd worked with a choir, the first time I'd worked with a large orchestra, the first time I'd blended a lot of synth and percussive elements with orchestra and choir." They would collaborate again on Dying Young (1991), the TV series 2000 Malibu Road (1992) and Falling Down (1993). Unfortunately their collaboration ended on Schumacher's film The Client (1994). James: "Our relationship got a little strained when I was about to do The Client, and Larry [Kasdan] offered me Wyatt Earp. It was an opportunity to do an epic western score, and I asked Joel to let me out of my commitment. He graciously did, but his feelings were still hurt. But we straightened it out, and are back to being great friends."

An important and big year that would put James on the map was 1991, where would score an enormous amount of high quality scores for the films: The Prince of Tides, My Girl, Grand Canyon, Dying Young, King Ralph, Guilty by Suspicion and The Man in the Moon. His romantic score for The Prince of Tides was rewarded with his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score and he would also receive his first Grammy Award nomination for the main theme of Dying Young. During The Prince of Tides he would have a short love affair with actress Barbra Streisand who also directed the film. This project was also remarkable because Streisand, being a musician herself, had a lot of input in the music and demanded an extraordinary amount of rewriting [James came up with four alternate main themes].

But James' greatest achievement in that year was his intimate score for The Man in the Moon [photo right] directed by Robert Mulligan. Some insiders [including me] still consider this forgotten score to be James' most moving work to date. The film, set in the 50s in a small Louisiana country town, tells the touching story about a young teenage girl that falls in love with a much older boy with fatal consequences. James' dramatic, lyrical score captures the nostalgic mood of the film perfectly with a magnificent mix of Americana mandolin guitar music, violins and beautiful soaring string arrangements. James would play the piano himself on this score [like on more on his early scores] showing his exceptional abilities in playing this instrument. To this day it's still James' favorite score.

Against his will James was quickly pigeonholed as a romantic composer. At that time his scores were quite heavily piano-oriented and string-dominated. Looking back James now declares that he didn't use the full potential of the orchestra yet. "It was a lack of experience. I relied heavily on the piano. When I first started out I was a pianist so I would write orchestra parts that I could play on the piano. If it sounds good on piano it's probably going to sound good on strings. I was writing very string heavy for about the first 30 movies I did. It's something that Marty Paich my first orchestration teacher, used to tell me; he said that strings are the backbone of the orchestra and he was absolutely right. Horns, brass was kind of the last frontier for me."

Maturing as a composer

Frank Marshall's Alive (1993) [photo below] was a film where James would show that he was maturing as a symphonic composer. James: "Alive has to be one of my favorite scores. It was very much a breakthrough score for me, one of my first times I felt like I had really succeeded in writing an orchestral score that worked well. With the counterpoint, I was striving to write an orchestral score that was more complex than my usual piano-oriented scores." Alive was also his first big film where James started to make very detailed electronic mock-ups to be used instead of a traditional temp score [i.e. of previously recorded music by various other composers]. From that moment on a lot of his films would be successfully previewed with his own temp scores that he created specifically for those films. Although making these demos is very labour intensive, it avoids the long-winding process of making detailed sketches with pencil and paper [computers can automatically generate MIDI sketches]. It would also avoid that filmmakers will become too attached to a traditional temp score. Following Alive was a brooding and intelligent score for Falling Down (1993). With these scores he hoped to break out of being typecast as a romantic composer and was showing Hollywood that he was capable of much more. With an exceptionally dynamic and melodic score for Ivan Reitman's Dave (1993) James proved that he was also very gifted in writing music for the difficult to score comedy genre.

After hiring James for The Package back in 1989, director Andrew Davis would turn to him again for the Harrison Ford action chase film The Fugitive (1993) [photo below]. His score for this successful film would result in his second Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score and would finally place him in the "comfort zone" of his career. "I was terrified doing The Fugitive. And I was anxious to do an action movie. First, to get me out of the rut [typecasting] and, second, because every composer in Hollywood knows that an action film is the challenge - it's difficult to do it well. I underscore those words ten times - 'to do it well' is no mean feat. It's difficult to hide behind an action film. You can't, really. Your limitations are much more obviously displayed in an action idiom than in a romantic comedy. There are very few composers in my opinion who do big action, orchestral scores very well." Although a lot of people were impressed by his score James doesn't think it's one of his best works: "The Fugitive score was effective in driving the picture, but I have a lot of reservations about it. I had eight weeks to do over 90 minutes of music. I don't think it's one of my greatest scores. But a lot of people say it's my best work. Whatever the case I certainly did the job."

Although he had scored a lot of music of very high quality before The Fugitive, it's strange that James feels a kind of shame towards it and said in a 1994 interview: "I hope I've left piano-sounding scores like Dying Young behind. It's hard for me to listen to my old music. I went to a concert where they played the end titles from Dave and The Prince of Tides, and I just wanted to crawl under my chair! My orchestrations sounded primitive and uncomfortable. Film composing has been an evolutionary process for me, and I think I've just gotten started. While I've endeavored not to repeat myself. I have, by definition, done a lot of scores that sound like James Newton Howard. I'm trying to escape that by taking chances."

On April 25, 1992 James would marry his latest wife Sofie. In 1994 James and Sofie would have a son named Jackson, followed three years later by their second son Hayden. James seems to be very fond of dogs, and adopted a golden labrador named Otis (after Mr. Redding) soon after his marriage. In October 2004 James and Sofie divorced after 12 years of marriage. James currently resides in LA.

After having worked successfully with the much respected writer/director Lawrence Kasdan for the first time on Grand Canyon (1991) they decided to team up again on the epic western Wyatt Earp (1994) starring Kevin Costner [photos below]. James would rise above the occasion and delivered a phenomenal majestic score that was without a doubt his most impressive work until then [it's also a favorite of James himself]. Kasdan gave James the chance to work on it for a long period of six months [writing a score of over two hours of music] and it became a very learn full process. "I learned a lot about the orchestra, I learned a lot about my own process, because I spent so much time on some of the cues that I learned what happens when I rework something over and over again until I get it right. I learned about shaping a two-hour score." [Kasdan even made James rewrite The Wagon Chase cue 87 times!]

The relationship between Howard and Kasdan is very tight. After Grand Canyon and Wyatt Earp, James would score every film Kasdan directed: French Kiss (1995), Mumford (1999) and Dreamcatcher (2003). They first met when James visited the set of Kasdan's western Silverado (1985) when he came to visit his former wife Rosanna Arquette. About his collaboration with Kasdan, James declared: "It's probably the best collaboration I've ever had with a director. I spent more time talking with Larry than any other filmmaker I've worked with. Larry is, I think, one of the finest filmmakers this country has ever produced. And I think that he makes pictures that are really character-driven pictures, that are really about people that have a large dimension as characters, that they are fully developed characters. There is a great deal of subtlety exchange and interplay between them and consequently the score needs to be very careful. Because it's very easy to be over the top."

Wolfgang Petersen's action film Outbreak (1995) was an important and challenging project for James because he got the opportunity to experiment a lot on that score. Petersen chose James because he was quite impressed by James' work for The Fugitive. Peterson was very specific about what he wanted. "I had five weeks to write it, a lot of it was action, which was very complicated again and very demanding. I tried things from an orchestration point of view that I hadn't tried before that had to do with texture and atmosphere and not thematic material."

The new style he had developed on Outbreak would be continued on his biggest project ever until then, Kevin Costner's Waterworld (1995) [photo right]. Waterworld could be described as James biggest and boldest score to date characterized by rousing heroic and majestic themes accompanied by aggressive and distinctive 5/8 and 7/8 rhythms. Waterworld was originally directed by Kevin Reynolds and was to be scored by Mark Isham. But during the last weeks of shooting Kevin Reynolds left the project and Kevin Costner took over as director. Costner, still impressed by James' score for Wyatt Earp, quickly took James onboard. James stood under a tremendous pressure. "Believe me when you have six weeks to write two hours of music, you don't have any time to consider if you are making a mistake. At some point during that movie, I thought, 'I am making grievous errors on the most expensive high-profile movie ever made. I am going crashing down in flames. It is going to be a complete disaster.' And then, the next day you look at it and you know you're really helping the movie... The overriding response has been really positive." Two years later he would collaborate with Costner once more on The Postman which resulted again in a beautiful sweeping score.

The mid 90s resulted in a lot of nominations for various awards. James took up his songwriting again on Junior (1994) and co-wrote the song "Look What Love Has Done" for which he got an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song. He also co-wrote the song "For The First Time" for One Fine Day (1996) that resulted in an Academy Award nomination, a Golden Globe nomination and a Grammy Award nomination for Best Original Song. James received his third Academy Award nomination for Best Original Comedy Score for P.J. Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding (1997).

James was also involved in the initial phase of the popular TV series ER for which he scored the pilot episode and the main theme. His main theme was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1995. James explains his involvement: "The show just seemed like it would be one of the good ones. I told the producers that I'd write the theme and the first show if they'd give the show over to my friend Marty Davich. They said okay. So, I wrote the theme and did the pilot. Then I gave the show over to Marty, who has been having a great time doing it ever since."

Early 1997 James opened his own studio [named JNH Studios] located in an office building in Santa Monica, California [photo below]. James spends a lot of his time in the large control room behind an Euphonix console between synthesizers and samplers, composing, recording and mixing music with his engineer Jim Hill. He works with Vision software [for a more detailed overview of what kind of equipment James uses see this article].

James has assisted various other composers in starting up their careers. Among others his friend and former TOTO member Steve Porcaro (see earlier). He also helped composer John Frizzell by writing thematic material for The Rich Man's Wife (1996) and Dante's Peak (1997). Dante's Peak was a movie that James was asked to score but wasn't able to due to other commitments and therefore he handed it over to Frizzell. "I was going to do the movie, then the movie changed dates, and of course I had another commitment and I couldn't do it. I'd written, not just the theme, but four or five cues." James also helped out John Debney on Liar Liar (1997), again a film he was asked to score but couldn't because of other commitments. "Debney is somebody who I think is really underrated a lot of the time, I think the guy's enormously gifted, so I talked to the director, Tom Shadyac, and said, 'why don't I write the thematic stuff, which is what I think you really want me to do anyway, and give the score to Debney?'."

For Taylor Hackford's psychological horror thriller Devil's Advocate (1997) [photo below] James wrote a grand and brilliant apocalyptic score consisting of a very intelligent mix of electronic music, large orchestra and choir. James chose for a more textural than melodic approach with subtle and effective use of atmospheric electronic music. "In a strange way, it required some of the largest music I've ever written, because the issues were the biggest issues - good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell. It was on a scale I hadn't written before." His profound masterpiece score for Devil's Advocate would change the direction of his career in such a way that he went on to score a large amount of atmospheric thrillers with much success. His typecasting as a romantic composer was gone forever.

In the late 90s James was still evolving and slowly changing his old style. James: "As I look back on my older work, themes come back too often for my taste. It's not even about using the main theme too much. It's about recitative-like music being too thematic in nature - too melodic and melody-driven, which is a form that has become kind of boring to me, I think that I'm only lately getting away from that or becoming able to write freely. I think that it's really all about counterpoint - more counterpoint and less melody. Just dig into the texture of the music rather than the melody or the theme. To do that I write more to paper, which helps internalize the idea of texture." After A Perfect Murder (1998) James also started using synthesizer sounds in a more subtle way so that they are less distinguishable from the orchestra.

A very important film in James' career would be The Sixth Sense (1999) [photo below]. Important because it would become a huge box-office success that would secure his position in the film music industry even more. But even more important because it started a collaboration with the highly talented writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan recalls how James was assigned to the film: "He came on very late in the game. I wasn't familiar with James as a person, I hadn't met him yet. I was working with a couple of other people who we were thinking about using and it became late in the game when choosing the composer. Frank Marshall, who had worked with James before [on Alive and "From The Earth to the Moon"], said, 'What do you think about James?' I said 'Wow, that's cool,' so I started listening to his music and I thought this could be very interesting. He came and saw the movie and responded so strongly to the film, that we decided to go with James, and it's been one of the great collaborations."

After his successful, haunting score for The Sixth Sense he would collaborate again with Shyamalan on the thriller Unbreakable (2000). But this time James was involved in the film very early on in a unique way. James recalls, "One of the most important aspects of this score is that Night asked me to start composing music before he started shooting. I went to Philadelphia and sat with him in his office while he storyboarded the entire movie for me, which is something I've never done before. Based on that experience, I then went home and wrote about twenty minutes of music just based on that storyboard and our conversations. So the key thematic piece [main title] was actually written before I ever saw any kind of movie put together." Shyamalan explains this working process: "That was an important aspect to me and I want to continue that. It's kind of like a copy of a copy of a copy, I don't want his inspiration to be diluted at all. I don't want him to be inspired by the movie, I want him to be inspired by what I was inspired by, the original feeling and story." The result was an unique delicate atmospheric score that sounded different than anything James had ever tried before.

The respect and trust between Howard and Shyamalan is enormous and they would team up very successfully again on the hit thriller Signs (2002) [for which James received a Grammy Award nomination for the main title] and their latest thriller The Village (2004) that resulted in an Academy Award nomination for James. Both are very eager to pursue a long-lasting director-composer relationship that will be as successful as Spielberg and Williams, or Zemeckis and Silvestri.

The turn of the century was an exceptional period for James where he was showing that he had grown and matured into one of the most successful and versatile film composers in the business. In a period of two very productive years he produced a baffling string of critically acclaimed scores like The Sixth Sense (1999), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Dinosaur (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Vertical Limit (2000) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001).

His serene, almost artistic score for Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) [photo left] is most impressive in relation to the [equally impressive] film. Out of context of the film the restrained, textural nature of the score makes a difficult listen, but his atmospheric, dramatic score reaches unheard of perfection with regard to how well it is integrated with the film. It seamlessly follows the mood of film and lifts it to higher grounds. James: "Snow was a particular love of mine, a pet project of mine. I was a huge fan of Scott Hicks' movie Shine and the wonderful book. As far as I was concerned, it was a monumentally interesting project. I always dedicated myself as hard as I could, but with this one I felt it was a more satisfying and complete expression than many of my other scores. With Snow Falling on Cedars I worked so hard writing things out. I spent weeks working on the string counterpoint. Consequently it's some of the least James Newton Howard sounding music I've ever done. That's a good thing! If I wasn't living in a Hollywood world I'd do more of that." His score for Snow Falling on Cedars was nominated for a Golden Satellite Award.

Dinosaur [photo below] was also a special project for James, being one of the biggest projects of his career so far, he worked on it for five months over a period of a year. This ground breaking CGI live-action film, absent of the traditional use of songs, presented a difficult but interesting challenge for James to heighten the emotional content of computer generated characters. In order to achieve that he had to score 80 minutes of the total running time of 82 minutes. His epic and heartfelt music for Dinosaur was very well received by critics and garnered nominations for a Grammy Award [for the track "The Egg Travels"] and a Saturn Award. In 2001 Disney hired James on their next animation film Atlantis: The Lost Empire and again he succeeded brilliantly in delivering a phenomenal and magical score. With his third Disney animation assignment Treasure Planet (2002) James seemed to have become a favorite choice for Disney Pictures.

As a sign of recognition for his entire film music career, James received The Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000 from ASCAP. In September 2004 James was elected as a Director in ASCAP's Board of Directors. It has been a long road for James but he has finally reached the top of his craft... and he is still growing.

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