Michael Kamen
Hello everyone! I hope you all are continuing to be well, healthy and safe. This week I am going to discuss a composer who meant and continues to mean a great deal to me; Michael Kamen.
Michael Kamen left us in 2003, leaving behind an amazing body of work, and I was fortunate enough to have worked with him for a long period of time. He studied the oboe at Juilliard with Robert Bloom, an incredible musician who was Leopold Stokowski’s English Horn player in the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Even though he was classically trained, Michael was very interested in all sorts of music, which is what drew me to him right away. He is very well known for a lot of different compositions, but he was so diverse that it was next to impossible to be acquainted with every different style in which he performed and composed.
My personal knowledge of him was as a film composer. The first time I personally worked with Michael was with the Lethal Weapon film (1987), and I was hired back to continue with the entire Lethal Weapon franchise, as well as other great films such as The Last Boy Scout (1991) and Frequency (2000).
However, Michael was also part of a very interesting scene in the early 1970s with a group called the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble. That’s where he began to flex his non-oboe chops in different ways that resulted in him getting to work with a great number of popular artists over the years. He was very good friends with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, and he did all the orchestral arrangements for Pink Floyd’s The Wall, not to mention his work with other musicians such as the group Queen and Eric Clapton. One of his final projects in the rock world was a live performance with Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony in 1999, where he orchestrated the music and even conducted. That was a truly unique musical experience, and if you want to experience the magic yourself you can find recordings of it on Youtube.
His variety of interests in music was just one facet of this remarkable human being. I remember attending a fundraising event that was organized by the composer Alan Silvestri. It included Silvestri, David Newman, Danny Elfman, Michael Kamen, and more renowned composers. The theme of the evening was focusing on film composers and their relationships with the directors that they worked with. We equate directors with composers; John Williams with Steven Spielberg, David Newman with Danny DeVito, Danny Elfman with Tim Burton, Alan Silvestri with Robert Zemeckis, etc. Michael Kamen was part of the program for the evening as well, and the directors he worked with got up and spoke about their times together.
Kamen’s best known and most beloved score was for the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).
I remember this famous story the director of Robin Hood, Kevin Reynolds told during that fundraising event. Michael always had an affinity for British lore of that period, like Robin Hood and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, etc. I guess he loved that stuff as a kid because the director got up and told a fantastic story about approaching Kamen for the film. When Reynolds asked him if he would he be interested in writing this score for Robin Hood, Michael’s response was “I already have.”
Michael had been creating these melodies in his mind since he was a child. If you listen to that score, you are going to hear a personal commitment to the major themes and the entire structure of the composition of that movie; more so than your average film. There always is an element of personal commitment by an artist any time they put their art into gear. We as musicians put our hearts and souls into every performance that we give. There is a level of personal pride in everything that we do. But in the case of Michael and Robin Hood, it was like he was channeling his childhood fantasy in a way. That score was very personal to him, and it was obvious! I felt very lucky to be part of the recording sessions for this movie.
When you hear a film score it always sounds like it was recorded under normal circumstances, like everyone is wide awake and on their “A game.” But what audiences and listeners don’t know, is that for the musicians you never knew when you had an evening session with Michael Kamen (which typically started at 7 or 8pm) if you were going home before 2am! You just never knew because the creative element would happen, or technical problems like in any session, but these in particular were special. Some of the big chase scenes (in which the composer specifically requested we record on descant horns) we recorded after midnight! That may not seem like a big deal, but if you are a recording musician you have to start usually at 9 or 10 in the morning, and if you are on the Hollywood short list you are working day and night. You don’t get weekends; you just work whenever the work comes in. This happened to be during the really busy period when we were getting ready for summer blockbusters. We were working literally from 10am until after 12am for 5-6, or even 7 days a week. At a certain point everyone was so exhausted that on a ten-minute break we would try to sleep take naps just to make it through. So, some of those big chase sequences were recorded after a 14-hour day. Yet it was worth it. The music was so inspiring that no matter how tired we were we wanted to get it right. There are certain composers that just inspire you by who they are as a person; Michael was one of those people.
We lost him to a heart attack. Later in his life he had contracted multiple sclerosis. The last time I saw him was at a Henry Mancini Institute concert at UCLA around 2002. He always just had a look on his face like he was so happy to see you, and he was a very gentle, caring soul, and to see him with a cane just to keep himself steady was heartbreaking. He was such a remarkable composer.
I don’t think it was the last film I did with him, but one of the most meaningful scores I ever did with him was called Frequency which stars Dennis Quaid. It’s an interesting story about a father who is a firefighter, and his son is a cop. The father has ham radio unit, but he dies in a fire when his son was little. Years later, the son discovers the dusty ham radio, and the father connects with his son via the ham radio (some weird electrical storm). Anyways, the music Michael wrote for this thing was almost reminiscent of Mahler, and there are some truly incredibly beautiful moments. I remember one big long sequence which unfortunately got chopped up, but it was just like a slow movement in one of Mahler’s symphonies that are so emotional, like the Adagio of the Fifth. It brought everyone to tears. We never got to hear the entire thing in the movie, which was a shame. But that sequence told me a lot about the emotional depth about how Michael related to music and to life. I feel very fortunate to have known him and have worked with him, and to be reassured by him that it’s ok to have your own voice, and it’s ok to do what you feel is good art. To not ever be dissuaded from your path, to choose not to be part of the crowd. That’s where you are going to find your most inspirational moments as an artist. That’s what Michael Kamen was to me.