Franklin called him a few weeks later and asked him about his career plans - offering her publicist to be his first manager, who then landed Bowers his first film-scoring gig, for a documentary about the late actress Elaine Stritch. Aretha Franklin, whose dramatized story he would score 10 years later, was in the audience and was so impressed with Bowers that she sought him out after his performance. In 2011, still in graduate school, he took first prize in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Piano Competition, which landed him a record deal with Concord Jazz. He earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in jazz studies at Juilliard. By the time he left for college, Bowers had accumulated somewhere between $25,000 to $40,000 in competition prize money - which he used to support himself in New York.
He got a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music but decided to go to Juilliard instead, where there was a better ratio of teachers to fewer students. Phil looks at the unexpected places film music is goingĪn unconventional event last weekend focused on the cinematic worlds that composers Hildur Guðnadóttir, Kris Bowers and Nicholas Britell have created through sound.īy the time he got his driver’s license, Bowers was playing gigs with his teachers in Glendale or sitting in with the best up-and-coming jazz players - like Ambrose Akinmusire and Walter Smith III - at the Mint on Pico Boulevard. Bowers says his dad would often point to Gould and say things like, “Well, Victor got three solos, you only got two,” as a way to make Kris more competitive.Ĭommentary: The L.A. Second place came with a monetary prize, but top honors went to his childhood friend, Victor Gould.
We’re now standing in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Kris once took second place in the finals for the Spotlight Awards - the Music Center’s showcase for L.A. That plan included enrolling him in competitions from a young age. I did want them to excel.”Įric and Kimberle, now about to celebrate their 40th anniversary, were a united front in their rigorous plan for Kris. But the expectation to do well was not there - the expectation to show up was there. Says Eric: “My parents were hard-working people, and they were glad I went to school. “He’s like, ‘If you want to be average, this is what you’re aspiring to.’” “ literally drove me downtown to skid row and was like, ‘Get out of the car,’” Bowers says. Once he came home with a C on a test, while at the prestigious Los Angeles County High School for the Arts on the Eastside, and argued with his father that it was fine because a C isn’t failure, it’s average. Kris Bowers says his parents were exacting, and expected intense discipline in music studies and a high bar at school. “It was a vision that started back then.” “That just became a thing with us,” Eric says. Eric Bowers remembers emphasizing a particular song he’d fallen in love with - “Leaves on the Seine” by David Lanz - and telling his wife: “One day this child is going to play this song for us in person.” His mother - Kimberle, a retired HR executive at DirecTV - played music while Kris was in utero.
(He also bought the house in Pasadena and found out he was going to be a father.) Ever critical of himself, he mostly sees what could have gone better at that concert - but “I feel like any time people are emotionally moved,” he says, “then it was successful on some level.” Phil in November, including the premiere of a new horn concerto performed by the Phil’s Andrew Bain. Billie Hol iday,” the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect” and “King Richard.” He and his grandfather, Horace, were also the subjects of the documentary “A Concerto is a Conversation.”īowers’ big year culminated in a concert of his music performed by the L.A.
His neoclassical music was heard in 82 million homes as people streamed “Bridgerton,” one of the most watched series on Netflix to date, and he scored three major films about larger-than-life Black American figures: “The United States vs.
The 32-year-old composer had an explosive year in 2021. It is Kimberle Bowers, not Kimberly Bowers. 9, 2022 An earlier version of this story misspelled Kris Bowers’ mother’s name.