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Composer Details
Chris Walden |
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Birthdate
October 10, 1966
Country of origin
Germany
Web site
www.chriswalden.com
Biography
Chris Walden was born on October 10th, 1966 in Hamburg, Germany, as the son of a Swiss soprano. Chris got in contact with music through the many musicians who came to his parent's house from very early on. At the age of 3 he started to play the recorder, and at age 5 he knew how to read music even before he learned the alphabet. Then at age 7 he learned to play the piano and the trumpet at age 13, which then became his main instrument.
In his high school years Chris discovered jazz and big band music while playing trumpet in local school bands. Very soon he started to write arrangements for those bands. After graduating from high school and 20 months of service, he was chosen out of many applicants to join the newly founded German National Youth Jazz Orchestra with which he toured for five years. The leader Peter Herbolzheimer additionally encouraged him to write arrangements for the band and soon he assisted Peter Herbolzheimer with arrangements for various radio and record productions.
During that time Chris moved to Cologne to study at the Music University of Cologne with two majors in trumpet and composition. Cologne at that time was the place to be for musicians. There he did lots of studio work, theater jobs and played in some of the jazz clubs in town. After a short while he was more busy as an arranger than as a trumpet player. By the time he got his master degrees at the age of 26, he had already written arrangements for almost every radio big band and radio orchestra in Germany.
While writing for quite a few famous German singers, Chris got asked by a singer/songwriter to orchestrate and arrange his music for a feature film. After doing three movies together, Chris got asked himself to compose music for a movie. That opened him the door to the German film and television industry. With music for film he found an ideal field of activity to combine his passion for composing in different styles with his knowledge as an arranger, and also to combine modern techniques of sound generation with traditional orchestra colors.
Although Chris was now a busy film composer at the age of 29 he felt the need to explore the musical possibilities of film scoring on a higher level. Due to the limitation of the all over production level of German films he decided to move to Hollywood. Arriving together with his then girlfriend in 1996 Chris scored two TV movies for ABC and CBS in his first year in Hollywood. He then wrote arrangements for Nancy Wilson and Christopher Cross while still working on German film projects from time to time.
Chris and his girlfriend married in 1996. Their son was born in 1997 and their daughter in 1999. Also in 1999 he founded his own big band based in Los Angeles with some of the finest studio players in town. Now Chris is scoring mostly TV and feature movies as well as he is arranging and producing for record companies. He arranges, orchestrates and conducts all his compositions himself in order to realize his ideas as precisely as possible.
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