PEORIA MAGAZINE October 2023

ONE MORE THING

Composer and Conductor Aaron Zigman leads an orchestra through a practice session. (Photo provided by Aaron Zigman)

A MUSICAL WUNDERKIND LANDS IN PEORIA You may not know Aaron Zigman but you know his work, and now he knows Peoria and he’s impressed

BY PHIL LUCIANO

A chance encounter makes me wonder: At any given time, how many folks like Aaron Zigman might be unassumingly roaming around Peoria? You might not know his name or face. But you know his work. Music? The 60-year-old Zigman has written or produced more than 50 albums, working with the lofty likes of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Car ly Simon. Phil Collins, John Legend, Christina Aguilera and Quincy Jones. Movies? He has scored more than 70 Hollywood films, including The Note book , Sex & the City , The Proposal , John Q , Akeelah and the Bee and The Shack . Not a bad résumé, eh? But there’s more. Zigman, a classically trained pianist since age 6, just finished a sprawling oratorio about the under-told story of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany

for Shanghai. The intense effort took him four years. Four years . Think about that the next time you complain about the latest job dumped on you at work. And there he was, just the other day, wandering around Peoria for the first time. A California lifer, he’d popped into the River City to visit a pal. “I love Peoria,” he said in some of his first words to me. “It just feels calm. There’s a calming energy.” I met Zigman through a friend of a friend, just after his first ride along Grandview Drive. With an enthused smile, he gushed, “Nice energy. Nice vibe.” You could say the same about Zig man, whose low-key demeanor bellies intense musical passion. You don’t — at least, I don’t — run into Zigman-caliber creative minds every day. So, I chatted with him for a while, curious as to how one rises to the top of the fickle enter tainment world, and on his own terms.

As it turns out, if not for a sorrowful twist during childhood, he might have bypassed recording studios and orchestral halls in favor of tennis courts. As a kid in San Diego, Zigman, whose mom is a pianist and harpist, started writing musical compositions by age 9. But he had another great childhood love in tennis. In fact, as his teens ap proached, he was good enough that collegiate tennis seemed a certainty, with a professional career a possibility. But at age 13, his beloved tennis coach died. To fill that sudden void, he threw himself entirely into music. “That was very traumatic for me,” he said somberly. “So, music started to be dominant. Literally at age 14, I made the decision that music was going to be my life. I don’t think my parents knew it at the time.” In fact, there were other things they didn’t know.

110 OCTOBER 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE