Chris Rael is an eclectic American musician, singer, composer, and songwriter.
He is the founder and leader of Indo-pop band Church of Betty, based in New York City. He has composed, recorded, and produced more than 25 CDs, collaborating with artists from around the world. He is the founder of indie label Fang Records, and has produced hundreds of live events in downtown New York City.
Rael was a pioneer in the progressive music movement at the original Knitting Factory in New York in the 1980s. Throughout the 1990s, he studied Hindustani classical singing and sitar in Varanasi, India, forging a world-orchestral-pop style. The Village Voice has noted that “Chris Rael has consistently blended rock and Indian music better than any Western guitar guy, ever.” [1] He produced Najma Akhtar's 1996 album, Forbidden Kiss. [2]
His genres, besides Indo-pop, include progressive, chamber, and film/theater music. He composed and produced three Bollywood-parody songs for the 2003 film Cosmopolitan . In 2005, he received the Outstanding Soundtrack Award, out of a field of 230 film composers, at the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Los Angeles, for the Lower East Side Biography Project's Queer Realities and Cultural Amnesia. [3] He wrote and composed Araby, a musical based on James Joyce’s Dubliners , which has been performed at Dixon Place in New York City. [4]
Rael has been featured in The New York Times [5] and Billboard [6] and on NPR. [7]
He has performed around the world, including venues in the UK, Europe, Australia, India, Mexico, and across the U.S. He also traveled the world with his then wife, performance artist Penny Arcade, performing their two-person show Rebellion Cabaret.
Anne Jennifer Dudley is an English composer, keyboardist, conductor and pop musician. She was the first BBC Concert Orchestra's Composer in Association in 2001. She has worked in the classical and pop genres, as a film composer, and was one of the core members of the synth-pop band Art of Noise. In 1998, Dudley won an Oscar for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score for The Full Monty. In addition to over twenty other film scores, in 2012 she served as music producer for the film version of Les Misérables, also acting as arranger and composing some new additional music.
Clinton Darryl Mansell is an English musician, singer, and composer. He served as the lead vocalist of alt-rock band Pop Will Eat Itself. After the band's dissolution, Mansell moved to the United States and embarked on a career as a film score composer.
Howard Leslie Shore is a Canadian composer, conductor and orchestrator noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. He won three Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings, with one being for the song "Into the West", an award he shared with Eurythmics lead vocalist Annie Lennox and writer/producer Fran Walsh, who wrote the lyrics. He is a consistent collaborator with director David Cronenberg, having scored all but one of his films since 1979, and collaborated with Martin Scorsese on six of his films.
Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was an American composer and arranger best known for his film music, notably the scores for his acclaimed collaborations with director David Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986), the Twin Peaks television series, The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001).
Michael Arnold Kamen was an American composer, orchestral arranger, orchestral conductor, songwriter, record producer and musician.
Michael Daniel Penn is an American musician, singer and composer. His 1989 single "No Myth" was a top 20 hit in the US and successful in several other countries.
Diana Jean Krall is a Canadian jazz pianist and singer known for her contralto vocals. She has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, including over six million in the US. On December 11, 2009, Billboard magazine named her the second greatest jazz artist of the decade (2000–2009), establishing her as one of the best-selling artists of her time.
Duncan Sheik is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Sheik is known for his 1996 debut single "Barely Breathing", which earned him a Grammy Award nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. He has composed music for motion pictures and Broadway musicals, winning the 2007 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations for his work on the musical Spring Awakening.
Christopher Stephen Botti is an American trumpeter and composer.
Jon Brion is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, and composer. He performed with the Excerpts, the Bats, 'Til Tuesday and the Grays before becoming an established producer and film score composer.
Adam Lyons Schlesinger was an American musician, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He was a founding member of the bands Fountains of Wayne, Ivy, and Tinted Windows, and was a key songwriting contributor and producer for Brooklyn-based synth-pop duo Fever High. He also wrote songs for television and film, for which he won three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and the ASCAP Pop Music Award, and was nominated for Academy, Tony, and Golden Globe Awards. He died unexpectedly due to complications of COVID-19 at the age of 52.
Walter Anthony Murphy Jr. is an American composer, keyboardist, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known for the instrumental "A Fifth of Beethoven", a disco adaptation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony which topped the charts in 1976 and was featured on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977. Further classical-disco fusions followed, such as "Flight '76", "Toccata and Funk in 'D' Minor" "Bolero", and "Mostly Mozart", but were not as successful.
Łukasz Sebastian Gottwald, known professionally as Dr. Luke, Tyson Trax, and Made in China, is an American songwriter and record producer. His professional music career began in the late-night television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live as its house band's lead guitarist in 1996 and producing remixes for artists such as Bon Jovi and Gravediggaz. He came into music prominence in 2004 for producing Kelly Clarkson's single "Since U Been Gone" with Swedish record producer Max Martin.
Luciana Souza is a Brazilian jazz singer and composer who also works in classical and chamber music. Her song "Muita Bobeira" was featured as a music sample on Windows Vista.
Jason Staehler Hill is an American film score composer, record producer, songwriter, mixer, inventor and multi-instrumentalist. He is known for inventing his own musical instruments and for playing cello, guitar, pianos, bass, drums and synthesizers.
Richard Allen Harvey is an English composer and musician. Originally of the mediaevalist progressive rock group Gryphon, he is best known now for his film and television soundtracks. He is also known for his guitar concerto Concerto Antico, which was composed for the guitarist John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Cosmopolitan is a 2003 American independent film starring Roshan Seth and Carol Kane, and directed by Nisha Ganatra. The film, based on an acclaimed short story by Akhil Sharma and written by screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan, is a cross-cultural romance between a confused and lonely middle-aged Indian, who has lived in America for 20 years, and his exasperating, free-spirited blonde neighbour.
Keefus Ciancia is an American film and television composer, music producer, and musician. He has won an Ivor Novello Award, BAFTA, and a BMI Film & TV Award. He has composed and produced music for True Detective, Killing Eve, London Spy, The Fall, and Spider-Man 2.
John Philip Shenale is a Canadian composer, arranger, musician and producer based in Los Angeles.
David Michael Barrett is an American screenwriter and film producer in Los Angeles, California.