JEFF RUSSO
Jeff Russo never intended to be a leading film and television composer although that is certainly what he has become. After making his mark on the ground-breaking series Fargo he has now become synonymous with Star Trek, composing the scores to two of the latest and most successful incarnations of the brand: Discovery and Picard. However, it was the lure of rock ‘n’ roll that first drew Russo into music making and he originally found fortune as guitarist in the 90s alternative rock band Tonic with lead singer Emerson Hart. The band was successful enough to release several albums and tour extensively, but while on a break from the band, Russo hooked up with Wendy Melvoin from the duo Wendy & Lisa and ended up writing some cues for some of the television series that they were scoring. He was consequently bitten by the film-composing bug.
“Wendy asked me if I wanted to try my hand at writing a cue for them,” Russo recalls. “They gave me all their stuff, like their samples, and I tried writing a cue and they really liked it. I ended up writing a bunch of music for them as an additional writer for about a year on Crossing Jordan and The Bionic Woman.”
That was the start of Russo’s new career in media composition and although it would take him a couple of years to get a firm foothold in this new industry, he has now become one of the most in-demand composers in film and TV. So high is his profile that Berlin-based library developers Orchestral Tools even helped develop a special library for him to use in his enterprises. Modus is now commercially available but was initially designed to offer Russo articulations and control over an orchestra that were and .
