Dance

Kurt Bestor Emmy-award-winning composer has written music as diverse as underscores for movies, television shows, classical orchestras, video games, and pop arrangements. This diversity is found in his over 20 CD recordings. A common thread is a very emotional quot;visualquot; style. It's as if every song is a quot;filmscore looking for a film.quot; Just close your eyes and let Bestor take you somewhere special. Bio For more than a two decades, Kurt Bestor's film scores, television themes, compositions and carols have provided an indelible soundtrack from American life. Indeed, much of Bestor's own life has been dedicated to creating musical parallels to visual images. Perhaps best known for his innovative interpretation of seasonal carols found in his popular 5-CD boxed set quot;The Complete Kurt Bestor Christmas,quot; the Utah based composer and performer launched his career writing music for television and movies. His credits include more than 40 film scores and more than 40 themes for national TV programs and commercials. It is Bestor's music that has introduced NFL Monday Night Football, and National Geographic; he scored TBS's Wild! Life Adventures and the IMAX film 'The Great American West.' He also was given the Outstanding Film Score Award at the New York Film and Television Festival for his music for PBS's 'A More Perfect Union.' Bestor was awarded an Emmy® for his collaboration with Sam Cardon on the original music for ABC's coverage of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Bestor benefited from his families musical inclinations. His grandfather played trumpet in many popular mid-western big bands and a great uncle played trombone in Jack Benny's band. When he took up piano as a child, Bestor was encouraged by his mother to improvise with his imagination. 'I'd get restless practicing and my mom would sit down at the piano with me and say 'Play something that sounds like a sunrise.'' Thus was born his fascination with the relationship between music and visual imagery. As Bestor took up trumpet in his early teens, he set his sights on composing for film. 'I knew that's what I wanted to do when I saw 'Jaws' during high school. I have made a goal to score films ever since.' While enrolled in college, Bestor began writing music for student films, gradually moving onto documentaries and eventually into the feature film score arena. In 1987, he was one of only six recipients of a fellowship at the Sundance Film Institutes Film Composer Lab. There, he studied with master film composers Dave Grusin, Alan Silvestri and David Raksin. Even while Bestor's scoring career flourished, leading to such projects as music for the National Geographic documentary on the sinking of the Andrea Doria, a second large screen film 'Sedona,' the feature film 'The Ghosts of Dicken's Past,' and the Warner Brothers film 'Scarecrow,' he expanded his career to include original recordings and increasingly popular concerts. In 1988, he recorded his first best-selling Christmas album. 'At the some time, everybody I talked to said it was a bad idea,' he recalls. 'There was only one other album out of contemporary instrumental Christmas music, by Mannheim Steamroller, and I was told that the three-month period from October though Christmas was too short to market a new record.' But after staging a sold-out, 2,500 seat concert to support the album, Bestor found himself at the helm of a holiday tradition, inspiring further recordings and annual concerts across the country.

Dance