Interview with Chris Walden
Chris Walden is a composer, arranger, conductor, and seven-time GRAMMY nominee. His credits include scoring more than 40 feature and TV films, crafting over 1,500 orchestral and big band arrangements for iconic performers like Aretha Franklin and Josh Groban, and collaborations with leading orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Walden has been the lead arranger for prestigious events like the Academy Awards and the Kennedy Center Honors and is the founder of the Pacific Jazz Orchestra.
Chris has been publishing his music with ArrangeMe since 2022.
ArrangeMe: How did you get started arranging and composing?
Chris Walden: Well, I'm originally from Hamburg, Germany and come from a musician's family. My mother is a singer. She specializes in early Baroque and Renaissance music and when I was three or four years old, I started playing recorder with that kind of music.
At age six or seven, I started to learn piano and then at 12, I started trumpet lessons and became interested in jazz. I started to play in our local high school big band, and I became interested in writing music because I always had ideas in my head that I wanted to put down to paper. I started at age 12 or 13, writing down my first ideas for compositions.
I really got more into arranging because the teacher that led our high school big band, he was at the time writing the arrangements himself, and they weren't really good. I was kind of cocky at the time and called him out on it and said, “your arrangements are not really good. We want to play better arrangements.” He said, “Well, if you think you can do it better, just be my guest. Here's a recording of a Count Basie tune. Why don't you try to do a takedown, a transcription, and bring it back next week?” Which I did. We played it through and he said that was pretty good. So here's another tune that you're going to do for next week.
So that kind of started me on arranging. Thanks to this teacher who used my cockiness against me and saw the potential that I apparently had in writing arrangements and encouraged me to write arrangements.
From then on, I wrote more big band arrangements for the school and I got to play on weekends when I had a gig at a Top 40 band. We played weddings and social events and stuff like this. After that, I got recruited to be one of the trumpet players in the German National Youth Big Band when I was about 19 years old. There I met, which would become then my main mentor at the time. His name was Peter Herbolzheimer, who was one of the biggest names in big band arranging in Germany at the time. He was a band leader and he kind of took me under his wing and let me arrange for his radio symphony projects and radio big band recording projects.
Then by the time I was 20 and 21, I got to Köln and got into the music school there, the conservatory of music in Köln, and started composing and arranging. At the time I was already making a living as an arranger, writing arrangements for radio orchestras and record projects.
From then on, I became more of an arranger and more and more became busy arranging and less playing trumpet.
So eventually I knew it was going to be my calling and not so much trumpet playing. So I focused on arranging and composing and did that all throughout my 20s until I was about 29 and then I came to Los Angeles.
AM: As you've progressed through your career, how have you approached gaining new opportunities? Have you searched and created new opportunities for yourself or did they come as a result of your networking?
CW: I think a combination of both. Especially in Germany back then, I didn't really have to hustle for work. I was just referred from one to the next, and once I'd successfully done a project with the Radio Symphony Orchestra, they referred me to another one.
It was the same in film. I more or less got into composing for film by accident. I was writing arrangements for a German recording artist who got asked to score a film, and even though he had done films before, he didn't really know how to go about it. He was not very technical about it. He would just write some themes, and he needed me as an orchestrator and co-composer to finish this film score.
The producers of the film saw how much I did versus how much this artist did, and they hired me for the next film instead of the other guy I was working with.
That kind of terminated my relationship with that that artist, but by then I was off writing music for films. From there, I would work with the director. The director would take me on to score his or her next film. So then I met the producer, and they hired me to work with another director, so it was kind of word of mouth.
Now, when I came to the United States in 1996, I was about 29 at the time. I didn't know anyone in Hollywood.
I knew one producer for television movies, and in the mid-90s, the major networks still had their movies of the week and I was referred to him by a friend in Germany, and he was gracious enough to let me visit him in his office. He gave me one of his movies that he already had finished, and he already had a composer for it. But he gave this movie to me and said, well, “why don't you score a couple of scenes in that movie?”
I took this movie home, and instead of just scoring a couple of scenes, I scored the whole movie, and that impressed him so much that he hired me for his next movie.
So in my first year in Hollywood, I scored two TV movies, and I thought, this is great. This is going to go on like this. But it didn't, because along came reality television, which killed the TV movie business, and since to that point, he was my only client, my only contact, I suddenly had no work for the next few years. Luckily, I still had work from Germany that kept us afloat here. But, I realized then the importance of networking and making yourself known.
What I did then is I started my own big band, not that I was expecting to make big money with my own big band, but it was a way for me to try out new music and to play publicly at some jazz clubs and get exposure.
David Foster, the producer, came to one of my big band shows and heard my music and asked me during the intermission if I also write for strings. I said, yes, I do write for strings as well, and he said, well, come to my studio tomorrow. I went to his studio and then he hired me to write some string arrangements for a singer named Rennie Olstad. But I didn't work regularly after that for David Foster. It took really some time to get on his call list to be called more regularly.
I just tried to be persistent and show my work with my big band and tell people about it.
And yeah, networking, I think, plays a part of it. But also, when I do work for a client, as with this film producer where I scored the whole movie instead of a couple of scenes, I discovered if you give the people more than they expect, then that leaves a good impression.
And there is actually a saying “there is no traffic on the extra mile”. I think that's a saying that I regard as very true for me, whenever I see there's a vacuum, I usually am someone who tends to fill it. If no one else is taking care of a problem, let's say, I usually jump in and do it and people recognize that, I think.
“I just tried to be persistent and show my work with my big band and tell people about it.”
AM: How did you start arranging for the Oscars ceremonies?
CW: I started as an arranger for the first time, just as a regular arranger for the Oscars, 12 years ago. Bill Ross was the music director and he hired me to be one of his arrangers writing music for the Oscars. I did that for a couple of years.
Then there was a different music director and I did not work on the Oscars for a few years.
Then a guy named Ricky Minor became the music director at the Oscars and I had worked with Ricky years before at American Idol and at the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. So I was one of Ricky's main arrangers and Ricky appointed me lead arranger for the Oscars in 2019.
So I did it under Ricky Minor for a few years. Then last Oscars, they brought in a new music director, but they kept me on.
AM: Can you talk about your work with the Oscars ceremonies and take us through your process leading up to the show?
CW: So for the Oscars, I've been the lead arranger now for six years, I think and not every year consecutively, because I'm being hired depending on who the producers are that year. Sometimes a new producer comes in, and the new producer chooses whoever did the show before, or they bring in their own music team.
So, I've been lucky that when there is a new producer, they bring me in anyway. But I don't know if I'll be doing the Oscars until late summer, early fall. That's when the Motion Picture Academy decides on what team will be producing. Then the producers, they take their team, and usually it's around the fall when it comes up who the music team is going to be.
If I know I'll be doing the Oscars in a particular year, then I usually start around Christmas and look at what movies will be likely to get a nomination in one category or another. There are usually a handful of movies that we know will get a nomination. For example, last year it was... It's pretty clear that The Brutalist would get nominated, that Wicked would get recognized, and that Emilia Perez would.
I start with those movies and, I try to watch them all, as many as I can, and I listen and I research soundtrack album releases and listen to the scores and see if there's, four or eight bars of a theme in that movie score that I can use as a winner play-on, because I have to write winner play-ons when the people come up on stage and accept their award.
The orchestra plays a piece of that particular movie score from that movie that is nominated and then will get an award, but nobody knows until they open the envelope to announce the winner what movie will win. Not even we know that, which means I have to prepare for each film.
There's winner play-on music for each of the five nominees per category, and there are 23 categories so that's already about 100 pieces of music. Obviously, a lot of movies have more than one nomination, and if a movie has more than five nominations, I write a couple of winner play-ons, and if a movie has about 10 nominations, then I try to come up with maybe three or even four different winner play-ons for that movie.
Chris and Academy Awards Music Director, Michael Bearden, at the 2025 Oscars ceremonies.
This also is challenging because nowadays scores are less and less melody-driven, and movie scores nowadays are more and more soundscape and sound design. Sometimes movies don't even have a score, and in those cases, I have to look if there is a certain song they license that plays a pivotal role in the movie, and then instead of using a piece of the score, I might use that song.
Then nominations usually come out five weeks before the show, that's when I know the rest of all the nominated films. I started researching all those. So it's a very short, but intense time. Those five weeks leading up to the Oscars, when I and my arranging team have to write that music. Besides the winner play-ons, we also have to write the presenter play-ons. This is when the presenters come out. And to present a category, we play a specific play-on for them as well. For example, if it’s Daniel Craig, then we play the James Bond theme or if it's Julie Andrews, then we play the Sound of Music.
We look for something, a music piece, that is identified with that certain presenter. And then we also write the music when we go to commercials, which we call the bumpers to commercials, so we write those short pieces as well and then obviously other performance numbers in the show.
Last year, we did this big James Bond medley, or we had the opening medley that evolved around Wicked, and so I write those arrangements as well and then there's the in-memoriam, so that needs to be written as well. Just a lot of music.
AM: How far ahead of time does the orchestra know the winner of the category, or do they know at all?
CW: The moment they open the envelope.
AM: How does that cue to start playing work? It’s such a short amount of time.
CW: Up until a few years ago, the orchestra did play all the winner play-ons live and how we did it is, since it's only 8 or 16 bars, the copyist would lay out the music on two or three pages.
So for each film, it's only like two lines or two staffs. And they have numbers one through five. and then when they open the envelope, they could see all five cues on two or three pages at once. So they wouldn't have to look for the music. So for that category, it's then these two or three pages and put them on. When they open the envelope, the conductor would quickly count them in and then they would play it.
This was up until a few years ago, but now this process has been streamlined, and now we pre-record all of those, and then they get played in the audio truck by someone who plays them on Ableton.
But the same for this. He doesn't know either, so he has the guy who plays them in the truck, has them also numbered, and when he hears the winner, then he presses play. We configured them in a way that in this Ableton system, he can jump to the last part of the fermata at any given point, so when he sees the winner then approaching the stage and getting close to the microphone, he jumps to the fermata, so it sounds like the orchestra would have organically played it that way.
But the rest of the music, we still play live in the show. That's the only part we don't play live in the show anymore, but all the other music, the orchestra still plays live.
AM: So I want to pivot now to your work with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra. How did that come about?
CW: So I've been writing music for other people, let's put it that way, for 35 or more years and have been gladly doing so and it’s fulfilled me greatly. But I always had an urge also to fulfill my own musical vision, and I did it in a sense with my own big band.
I founded that more than 20 years ago, but that was more like a passion project on the side and my creative outlet, but was not a main focus. My main focus was writing music for television and recording artists. I've always been also writing, I've always been writing music for the concert hall for pops orchestras.
For years, I've been writing music for the Boston Pops and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and I would occasionally guest conduct other orchestras like the National Symphony or the Greensboro Symphony or other orchestras in pop settings, what they call “Pops,” which is basically a symphony orchestra playing pop and jazz music.
But I always found that the pops orchestras in the U.S. lack a certain identity. Pops orchestras in the the U.S. are sort of like the stepchild of the orchestra world, and I've been a guest conductor a few times with the Metropole Orchestra in Holland, which is not a symphony orchestra, it's a big band and strings, and I thought something like this doesn't exist in the U.S., and I think there would be a place for it.
So two years ago I started a non-profit organization that carries the Pacific Jazz Orchestra and put together a board of directors and went from there and approached artists and raised some money, since it's a non-profit, and put on a concert season.
The Pacific Jazz Orchestra has lately become an important focus of my work, and it looks like it's at some point going to become my main focus, and I'm not sad about this at all, because I feel very passionate about this and I think this is the most meaningful thing musically I did in my life so far.
I see this also bigger than myself. I mean, I'm the one conducting it and writing most of the arrangements for it. But, at some point, I also see myself standing back for a little bit and letting other people conduct it and handing it over at some point to the next generation, so it'll be a little bit of my legacy, so to speak. And yeah, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished already in our first two seasons with it.
We did great projects with all kinds of artists, not only jazz artists, but my goal is to cross over between jazz and other genres. We just did some concerts with Ivan Lins from Brazil, the singer-songwriter and other guests like Lee Ritten, Jane Monheit, and Dave Kruzan.
AM: What has been your experience with ArrangeMe? And then why do you self-publish over the traditional route?
CW: Well, publishing through the traditional route is, for someone like me, not easy. Because if you approach a publisher with a piece like…say, I don't know, like a “Night and Day” by Cole Porter, and you have your own version. If you go to a traditional publisher who holds the publishing rights for it, they might often say, we already have three or four versions of “Night and Day,” we don't need yours. So it's really hard to get your own versions published of standards. And with ArrangeMe, arrangers like me would have the opportunity to sell my version of “Night and Day” by Cole Porter and people would find it as well, and people would be interested in my version of “Night and Day.” So I think that's a big advantage of ArrangeMe.
ArrangeMe democratizes the whole process of releasing and selling arrangements. It's a great idea, and I found a home for many of my pieces that I've put on ArrangeMe that I didn’t necessarily write specifically for releasing on ArrangeMe, arrangements that I've written for artists, where the artist is okay with me distributing it to ArrangeMe, so I've been taking great advantage of it.
All these charts that I've written for other people or for other ensembles, get a second life on ArrangeMe.
AM: Is there anything that you're working on right now that you want to highlight going into the next few months?
CW: Well, we have a great concert coming up with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra on May 29 with Anat Cohen and Tierney Sutton. So I'll be writing music for that. Then I just finished an arrangement for a Christmas record for national recording artist Natalie Grant, other than that, I'm looking forward to what comes my way!
To find out more about Chris and his music, visit www.chriswalden.com and be sure to follow him on YouTube and Instagram. You can find his charts on Sheet Music Direct, and Sheet Music Plus
