On the Shelf
John Williams: A Composer’s Life
By Tim GreivingOxford College Press: 640 pages, $40If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help impartial bookstores.
Solely John Williams may have put me within the orbit of considered one of historical past’s most well-known basketball gamers. Kobe Bryant, like so many others, was an enormous fan of Williams’ music; he befriended and sought out the composer for profession recommendation and, when he made his post-athletic pivot to filmmaking, employed Williams to compose a brief rating.
And since I cowl movie music for a dwelling, I used to be in a position to interview Bryant — together with Williams and Disney animation legend Glen Keane — for The Occasions within the spring of 2017. I even received to satisfy Bryant in individual, backstage on the Hollywood Bowl, when he rehearsed his narration of “Dear Basketball” at an all-Williams live performance. It was an obscenely scorching day, and I waited exterior Bryant’s dressing room whereas they completed drying his sweat-soaked shirt with a hair dryer earlier than he got here out and cheerfully shook my hand.
I gave Bryant and “Dear Basketball” a good quantity of actual property in my new e book, “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” not due to his fame or athletic prowess, however as a result of I really feel that his quick movie impressed considered one of Williams’ most stunning works of the final decade, and in addition as a result of there was one thing poetic and transferring about the entire affair, and about saying goodbye to the factor you like probably the most — particularly because the movie turned a type of eulogy for Bryant after his premature loss of life in 2020.
[The below excerpt is from Tim Greiving’s “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” out Sept. 2. Greiving is a frequent contributor to The Times.]
Tim Greiving
(Laura Hinely)
Kobe Bryant, the 18-time NBA All-Star, was an sudden admirer of John’s music: as a boy, Bryant would tie a towel round his neck and run round to the theme of Superman; as a participant, he used the Imperial March to hype himself up earlier than video games; and as a father, he would rock his toddler daughters to sleep on his chest listening to Hedwig’s Theme. The six-foot-six athlete from Philly may hardly have been much less like John, however he acknowledged mastery when he heard it. “I asked myself a question,” Bryant stated: “What makes a John Williams piece timeless? How is he using each instrument? How is he using the space between them? How is he building momentum, and then how is he taking it away to build it again?” As a basketball participant, Bryant stated he was “essentially conducting a game,” “so I just wanted to talk to him about how he composed music and try to find something similar that I can then use to help my game as a leader and winning championships.”
Bryant first contacted John for counsel simply earlier than the 2008 NBA season. “The first thing I told Kobe was, I’d never seen a basketball game,” John confessed. “High school, college, professional, or television. And of course he laughed.” “But once I had told him my reason for reaching out to him,” Bryant stated, “he saw the connection immediately…If we look in our same industry and we just look at things from that funnel, then you wind up essentially recycling information. So sometimes you look outside of that discipline to have a new point of view, a new perspective on it. [John] was digging it.”
They continued to see one another through the years, with Bryant typically visiting John backstage after reveals on the Hollywood Bowl. When Bryant retired from basketball in 2016, he turned his consideration to leisure. He wrote a sentimental open letter, “Dear Basketball,” as a retirement announcement, and considered one of his first post-game tasks was turning that textual content into a brief movie. He needed it crafted by undisputed masters of their fields, so he commissioned Disney animation veteran Glen Keane— who designed and animated Ariel in The Little Mermaid, amongst different achievements— and he requested John to jot down the rating. The very first thing John stated to Bryant was, “I do classical pieces, and it’s all by hand,” virtually as a warning. Bryant answered: “The piece will be hand-animated by Glen Keane, who is you in the animation space. I want it to have the human touch. I don’t want it to be poppy, I don’t want it to be hip-hoppy. I want timeless, classical music.”
Someway, these three disparate artists—with twenty years between every of them—hit it off. Keane was an avid fan of Misplaced in Area rising up within the Sixties, and when he advised John how a lot he cherished the music, John was utterly embarrassed. “But it’s wonderful, John!” Keane stated. “It held the promise of wonder and excitement and fun and quirky and scary and dangerous, and it was all in this one score. And John— the roots of your entire career are in that score.” Keane requested if he may play a few of the outdated music. John stated, “No, please don’t!” “No, I really gotta play it for you,” Keane insisted. “So I did.” The unlikely trio sat round a desk in Keane’s workplace “and we just talked,” stated Bryant. “John talked about how [the letter] made him feel, Glen how it makes him feel, and we all centered on the same thing, which is why I wrote it in the first place: the beauty of finding what it is that you love to do, and then finding the beauty of knowing that you will not be able to do that forever. Once they saw the nature of the piece, there was really nothing else to discuss.”
(Oxford College Press )
Keane illustrated the five-minute movie with graphite on paper, depicting the arc of Bryant’s letter— from younger Kobe tossing rolled-up tube socks, to NBA glory, to retiring at 37. John was equally impressed by Bryant’s childlike enthusiasm and Keane’s artisanal course of. “The drawings have great fluidity and, in the best sense of the word, great simplicity,” John stated. “They really are gorgeous, not only to look at, but rhythmically they’re fabulous.” Keane at all times animated whereas listening to music, and for this story it was picks from Empire of the Solar. John used that rating as a reference level, however initially he wrote one thing that was too massive, “and he went back and he rewrote it for something that was more understated,” stated Keane, “in a similar way that Kobe’s delivery, his narration, is very personal, uninflected, not trying to sell anything. More like revealing. Kobe’s got a very quiet voice, and that also had a big impact in how we animated.”
John took a brief break from The Final Jedi and spent two weeks in March 2017 to jot down and document this quick piece—a present for Bryant. When the towering baller arrived on the Sony scoring stage, John stated: “I hope that you like what I’ve written.” Bryant simply checked out John and stated, “I feel pretty confident that it’s going to be just fine.” When Bryant heard John’s piece for the very first time, emanating from a symphony orchestra, “Oh my God,” he stated. “I almost lost my mind. As soon as his hands went up and then the music started, I almost yelled out loud— but I had to remember that the red light was on and we’re recording… It was the most unreal experience I could ever have.” Bryant regarded over “and just put his head on my shoulder,” stated Keane, “like, ‘I can’t believe it.’ It was so beautiful. Then when it was done, John turned to us and said, ‘I promise it’s going to get better.’”
It was one of many easiest, but most impressed items John wrote throughout this decade: a short journey taken by a humble, hummable tune that bottled a younger boy’s guileless desires and aspiration for greatness and glory. His hymnal theme begins as a mild woodwind duet, which is handed to strings after which accelerates into hovering triumph to accompany Bryant’s heyday. Then it grows small once more, a lonely keyboard wandering a damaged chord as Bryant’s voiceover admits that his physique can solely play for therefore lengthy. John’s knack for noble flying music closes the loop, with heraldic horns and rolling timpani connecting Bryant’s story to his music for American heroism— concluding with a bittersweet reprise of the theme on piano and an uplifting coda because the credit roll. Just like the letter itself, the rating is a component valentine, half elegy—and John put his coronary heart into it. He premiered it on the Hollywood Bowl in September, and Bryant shocked the viewers by becoming a member of John onstage to relate. The quick movie received an Oscar in March 2018—after which very shortly afterward, it turned a poignant eulogy for Bryant when he died, age 41, in a helicopter crash on a foggy Sunday morning in Calabasas that additionally killed his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. John’s wistful, symphonic poem instantly took on a brand new shade. “It is elegiac, but it isn’t weepy,” John stated of the movie when he first scored it, by no means imagining the sudden tragic destiny of his younger good friend.
It strikes its personal method of saluting the person and the sport and the accomplishments with numerous modesty, I feel. It’s very touching, and in the long run that could be its highest achievement, that it’s in a position to reward this man the way in which it does, with out numerous false vainness or hubris that would simply have spilled into it. That’s my tackle it in any case.
