You’ve built an incredibly diverse career as a composer, arranger, producer, and sound designer. Can you share what first drew you into music, and how those early musical experiences shaped your creative identity?

I remember being very musical at a young age. My family had this weird old Italian tabletop organ (I now know it was a Bontempi). It had this loud electric hum when you turned it on, it had to warm up a little, and it sounded more like an electric accordion than an organ. I used to try and plunk out tunes on the keys, and I was fascinated by the buttons on the left side that played entire chords. It felt magical. My mom put me in piano lessons at 7 and I never looked back! I started playing clarinet in grade 6 because my older brother, Gordon, was a clarinet player and I looked up to him – still do! He was one of my biggest musical influences growing up. In grade 7, though, I found the saxophone, and I found jazz.

By the time I made it to high school at the now defunct Arts York program at Unionville High School, I did everything I could to learn more and play more music. If there was an extra curricular musical activity I was all up in it. I was in the concert band, jazz band, percussionist for the string orchestra, and I was in the pit orchestra for the school musical – even acting as student conductor in my final year of high school. I even played in a couple of rock bands outside of school with my friends. I started subbing into The Toronto All-Star Big Band, a youth ensemble based in Etobicoke that exclusively played transcriptions of big band hits from Benny Goodman to Count Basie. By the time I went to Humber College, I had years of practice, discipline, and gig experience under my belt. I learned a lot of leadership skills being a section leader and student conductor at a young age. It was there that I learned how to arrange for big-band. Shout out to Andy Ballantyne, my 2nd year sax teacher and the person who taught me how to arrange and how to find my voice as an arranger.

All the musical experiences of my youth are present in the work I still do today. I still draw a lot from what I learned in concert bands and section playing. I borrow a lot from Holst, Grainger, and also Sondheim, Ellington and Strayhorn. I also draw heavily from my favorite music from when I was growing up.

Your education spans both performance and technical training in music studies and sound recording. How have these formal training environments influenced the way you approach composing for screen versus creating your own musical projects?

Well, for one thing, when I’m writing for myself I don’t often write charts. My current solo project, laaain, basically lives in my head and in my DAW. I also create music under laaain out of “the love of the game,” so to speak, so there is no budget, and I need to be able to do everything myself. Occasionally, I’ll do a laaain show with the Bowed Arts String Quartet and I do have the string parts for them written out. That being said, my process for composing for screen changes depending on the nature of the project, the subject matter/time period, and of course the budget. Having the technical ability to record myself on multiple instruments is very useful when I don’t have a lot of room in the budget to hire session players. At the end of the day, I came up as a live musician so I’ll always prefer to do that whenever possible. 

What I learned about engineering and production at Recording Arts Canada is directly responsible for how I am able to manage my sessions as a composer, and to keep a lot of my own live playing in each score. It’s also helped me to be able to collaborate more efficiently with other recording and mixing engineers. Also, coming from a background of arranging for live performance, I’ve learned to keep parts playable, if not sight-readable, for quick turnaround sessions. I have yet to have enough time in a film contract to sneak multiple rehearsals into the hectic schedule of writing, recording, and mixing a score. Knowing how to properly convey everything I need from a musician in notation is essential to having a recording session run smoothly, and more importantly, have it stay a fun and creative process!

You’ve received major industry recognition – including a Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Music and a CASMA award. What did those acknowledgements mean to you creatively and personally?

First of all, winning the CASMA with Janal [Bechtold] was incredible! I had never won a professional award before, so it felt like I finally belonged amongst all of these heavy composers I am privileged to call my peers. Winning the CSA actually blew my mind a little bit. Black Community Mixtapes is an incredible series. Oya Media, helmed by directors Ngardy Conteh-George and Alison Duke, did an outstanding job telling the story of Black Canadians through multiple disciplines. It wasn’t a traditional documentary score – it was almost entirely beat making, but I did make a unique mixtape-like score for each episode and I was really proud of that achievement. I even managed to sneak some live horns in most of the episodes. After all the years being a jazz musician, music director, and pop arranger, I won an award for making hip-hop. I won a prestigious award for making music that sounded like me, my people, and where I came from. It’s such a great honor.

Your work ranges from docuseries like Dreams in Vantablack to animated shows like Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go! and Superwish. How do you navigate such different tonal landscapes, and do you find one type of project more challenging or rewarding than another?

I honestly find animation very challenging to work on, but the most rewarding when it works! Dreams in Vantablack was challenging for very different reasons than Thomas and Friends or Superwish. Working with poetry is tough. You want to support the poem, but you don’t want to influence the listener too much, or cloud the poet’s voice. It was my very first real show so I wanted to showcase what I could do as a composer, but I also really had to learn how to create specific moods and textures that worked with the different styles of animation in each episode.

With Thomas and Superwish, I wrote those songs without ever having seen any picture. I was given a brief, a part of the script, the lyrics, and some gentle music supervision. It was a really strange experience in comparison to everything else I’ve worked on, but I’ve learned that sometimes that’s how the cartoon gets made.

As someone who arranges for a wide range of artists and styles – from Madame Gandhi to Vivek Shraya’s Polaris-long-listed album – how do those collaborative experiences inform your own composing voice?

Recently, I had the opportunity to expand the small ensemble arrangements from Vivek Shraya’s “Part Time Woman” for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. It was cool to go back and visit pieces that I had arranged before transitioning into being a film composer. My voice as an arranger has evolved since then. Now knowing what I know, I was able to build upon and improve some of the voicings and thematic ideas I had before and really bring out the drama and character of each piece.

I try to bring a little bit of everything into each project (well, within reason). I learned a lot about blending pop and Indian music from working on “Part Time Woman”, and I learned a lot about rhythms and groove from working with Madame Gandhi. 

Your musician identity extends beyond composing for screen into your producer alias laaain and releasing your own music. How does working on your solo projects influence the way you think about scoring for film and television?

With laaain, I tried a different approach in that unlike the other projects I was in, I didn’t write anything down. When I write sax parts for a laaain song, or any horn arrangement I do now, I write them on the horn first — top line, and then the harmonies for each part. I feel like because I’m playing them and not overthinking it, I’m able to capture ideas that feel a lot more off the cuff, more natural. I’m also able to ensure that they’re playable live because I can play them. 

Now, when I am able to work on a score with live musicians, I record all the demos myself first (piano, winds, guitar, bass) so I know that even if the playing isn’t perfect, they feel more real than notation the part into Sibelius and having midi mockups of every part. I feel like I write better when I’m playing, if that makes sense.

You’ve worked internationally and performed in many different musical contexts. In what ways have those global performance experiences informed your approach to creating emotionally resonant scores?

Before I left Canada in 2014, I didn’t really know anything about other music scenes outside of Toronto. Living and working in Vietnam and Southeast Asia taught me so much about music as a global language. I learned about the rock scene in Vietnam, and the surprisingly huge reggae scene in Thailand and Cambodia. Each of these cultures have their own rich musical history, and are able to bring that to rock, pop, jazz, reggae and hip-hop. It’s helped me to approach each score by not only thinking about how I would write it with my musical experience, but also considering what musical time and space the characters live in. What happened in their country’s history that might contribute to the sound of that character and their world. 

I also learned how to communicate musically with people who don’t fully speak my language, nor I theirs. Playing lounge piano gigs in Hanoi taught me a lot about how Vietnamese people love a ballad. I didn’t appreciate them before, but I would have patrons request songs that I didn’t know and I’d come back the next week having learned one of my new favorite songs. 

Looking ahead, are there particular types of stories or genres you’re eager to explore with your music that you haven’t tackled yet? What excites you most about the future of your scoring career?

I’d really like to do more comedy, and I would love to work on a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic story. As a life long Star Trek fan, it’s my dream to score anything in the Trek universe.

I’m excited that right now, independent media in Canada is doing some really amazing things, and people are making ever more diverse and interesting films. I’ve worked on a few that will be coming out this year. And hopefully that means filmmakers in Canada will continue to push boundaries and gain recognition for the insane wealth of talent we have in this country.

Interview by Alex Petkovski

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