Mark Isham Biography
7 September 1951, New York City, New York, USA. Born into a musical family that encouraged him to learn the piano, violin, and trumpet at an early age, Mark Isham began studying the jazz trumpet while at high school and then explored electronic music while in his early 20s. For a time he pursued parallel careers as a classical, jazz and rock musician, performing, for instance, with the San Francisco Opera, the Beach Boys and Pharoah Sanders, but by the early 70s, he concentrated his efforts on jazz. As co-leader of pianist Art Lande's Rubisa Patrol, he recorded two albums on ECM Records in the late 70s, continuing his partnership with Lande through to the late 80s. Together with guitarist Peter Mannu, synthesizer player Patrick O'Hearn and drummer Terry Bozzio, he set up the Group 87 ensemble in 1979, releasing a self-titled debut album in 1980 and A Career In Dada Processing four years later. At the same time, Isham continued his links with rock music, recording and touring as part of Van Morrison's band, where his trumpet and flügelhorn set off the saxophone of Pee Wee Ellis to good effect.
During the 80s, Isham developed his compositional skills, using a synthesis of brass, electronics, and his own plaintive trumpet to produce a very visual, narrative form of music. He recalls that "my mother once told me that, as a kid, even before I really played music, I tried to tell stories with music. So, whether it's in the vocabulary of heavy metal or Stravinsky, the thread has to do with images." Isham has taken that thread into film music, scoring the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times Of Harvey Milk, the movie Mrs. Soffel (both recorded on Film Music), and writing music to accompany children's fairytales. His other feature credits include Trouble In Mind, The Moderns, Everybody Wins, Reversal Of Fortune, Little Man Tate, Billy Bathgate, A Midnight Clear, Sketch Artist, Cool World, A River Runs Through It, The Public Eye, Of Mice And Men, Nowhere To Run, Fire In The Sky, Made In America, Romeo Is Bleeding, Short Cuts, The Getaway, The Browning Version, Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle, Quiz Show, Timecop, Nell, The Net, Kiss The Girls, Blade, Galapagos: The Enchanted Voyage, Rules Of Engagement, Men Of Honor, and Gotti, and The Majestic. His television scores include Chicago Hope and EZ Streets, the latter receiving an Emmy. Throughout his career, Isham has remained a prolific session man, whose work encompasses recordings with artists as varied as saxophonist Dave Liebman, guitarist David Torn, singer-songwriters Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega, Tanita Tikaram and Marianne Faithfull, and the Rolling Stones. His own recordings have encompassed acoustic and electric jazz, electronica, orchestral scores, children's music, and new age. In the latter category, Isham received a 1990 Grammy for Best New Age Performer for that year's self-titled album. Isham is blessed with an instantly memorable trumpet sound, one that is burnished, resonant, in places lush but which can, at times, be bleakly powerful, relying on minimalist fragments to achieve its subdued effect.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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