PEORIA MAGAZINE October 2023

A powerhouse in the music and film industries, Aaron Zigman recently visited with Peoria Magazine during his first trip to Peoria

“I would tell my parents I was going somewhere after school,” he said, still sheepish about it after all these years. “But really I was going somewhere else, to study with jazz musicians downtown.” The teen raptly watched their tech niques, occasionally getting a chance to sit in. Whereas his late-‘70s classmates at Point Loma High School followed The Clash and Elvis Costello as they climbed the rock charts, Zigman kept a keen eye on heroes such as Abraham Laboriel, a Mexican-American jazz bassist who would eventually play on more than 4,000 recordings and soundtracks. “I was fortunate enough to play with … the go-to guys on records and film,” Zigman said. By his late teens, he aimed to become a session musician in Los Angeles, a goal he began to realize while attending UCLA. At the same time, he wrote songs for Carly Simon and the TV show Fame . He hit it really big at age 23, when the pop band The Jets took his song Crush on You to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the spring of 1986. “That was a thrill,” he allowed with a slight grin. From there, Zigman began producing records, quickly becoming in demand in the studio for artists as diverse as Huey Lewis and Dionne Warwick. The studio taught him lessons in collab oration and teamwork, especially in learning to listen. “If somebody else has an idea, it’s always good to execute that idea,” he said. “You might learn something in the process.”

the exodus of Jews from Nazi Germany to China ahead of World War II, Zigman wrote all the pieces for a 100-plus-piece orchestra, which will perform with an 80-member choir starting this fall. For Zigman, who has studied the Holocaust since childhood, his oratorio — which is like an opera but with more focus on music and less on acting — marked a personal and professional zenith. “Music, to me, has been my life,” he said. “I feel like this piece … is the cul mination of my life’s work.” Yet he is not done. He believes the story behind Émigré is largely unknown and merits a wider audience. In that regard, he hopes it can make the jump to the silver screen. “That is one of the other reasons I did it, because I think it is a film,” Zig man said. “I think the two worlds can converge, opera and film.” After all, Hamilton enjoyed a suc cessful stage-to-screen transition, so why not Émigré ? And a few years from now, if you see ads for a film depicting a dark and obscure (yet vital) point of human history, think back about the preview here by Aaron Zigman, who gave an off-the-cuff sneak peek of a movie yet to be during his first visit to a calm place called Peoria.

Still, Zigman yearned for more than just mainstream success in the studio. In 1998, he told his manager he was leaving pop music for films. “I wanted to go to the long form,” he said. He had dabbled in film scores, con tributing work to movies including Mulan , License to Kill and What’s Love Got to Do With It? In 2002, he did his first full score, for John Q , which won a BMI Film Music Award and pushed him onto a new, and successful, career course. “I felt liberated when I became a film composer,” he said. “I think music in film is extremely important.” He readily allows that some movies, like Dog Day Afternoon , are great with out music. Still, scores can lift some movies, or sometimes even stand out on their own. “Some of the greatest scores … are of obscure films people don’t know about, for instance, The Legend of 1900 , he said. “I’ve watched that film 25, 30 times.” Yet Zigman still longed for more free dom and expanse. “When you’re writing for a film, you are supporting what’s going on,” he said. Zigman, who had been quietly work ing on chamber and orchestral works since the 1990s, completed the concer to Tango Manos in 2019, earning a nom ination for a Pulitzer Prize in music. Not long after finishing that work, he began Émigré , commissioned by Maestro Yu Long, the Shanghai Symphony Orches tra and the New York Philharmonic. For the ambitious oratorio, which follows

Phil Luciano is a senior writer/columnist for Peo ria Magazine and content contributor to public television station WTVP. He can be reached at phil. luciano@wtvp.org

OCTOBER 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE 111