Jeff is the younger brother of film composer Mychael Danna. Amazingly, they world in the same field without any signs of sibling rivalry, and sometimes even collaborate on projects. As a team of two, they scored the film “Green Dragon” (2002), beautifully blending together their distinct musical styles. They have also collaborated on two non-film-related CDs released on the Hearts of Space label, A Celtic Tale (1996) and A Celtic Romance (1998). Jeff Danna’s great musical strengths are his abilities to sculpt striking melodies and construct vibrant, colorful orchestrations. For “Uncorked” (1998), Jeff wrote a lovely stream of melodies that flow from the harp, strings, guitar, flutes, and hurdy-gurdy in such a way that they beautifully heighten the film’s emotional character. His praiseworthy score for “The Gospel of John” (2003) uses the same approach to express the intimate side of a much more epic story. For this movie, Jeff chose not to write an epic score a la Miklós Rózsa. Instead, he took us on an introspective journey into the events found in “The Gospel of John”. In 2004, turning 180 degrees from his biblical style, Jeff composed a dark, textural score for “Resident Evil: Apocalypse”. This is a synth-heavy score with orchestral cues that are far from angelic (or melodic), but like all of Jeff Danna’s work, it is very well done. You stared your musical career as a performer. What type of music did you play? I was into the songwriting, the pop music world. I started out as a guitar player, and my interest first lay in band arrangements, and then in songwriting. That was where music started for me really. You worked with your brother Mychael on two non-score projects titled “A Celtic Tale” and “A Celtic Romance”. How did these ideas blossom? I had recently moved to L.A. and was working on other projects when Mychael and I discovered that we had the same time off that summer. We had done some movies together back when we both were starting out in Toronto. As we talked about those experiences and how much fun they were, I mentioned that, since we had some time, we should do something else together again. At the time, I was working on a project that used a lot of Chinese instruments, while he was doing a project that used Indian instruments, so we talked about mixing Western music with these other cultures and combining orchestras with native instruments and voices. We both loved this style of music, but we hadn’t really heard it done the way we thought it could be done, with that kind of orchestral element added to it. For the first one, we said, “Let’s just do whatever it is that we do with the Celtic music and see how that turns out.” When that first album did as well as it did, we were then asked to do another, and we agreed. We changed it up a little bit by adding Gregorian chants and early music elements as the story called for them. Where did the words come from? The words come from some fragments from eight- and ninth-century poems we found. We had our lyricist, John Stuart Dick, clean up the translations for us. We wanted something that was historically accurate. Collaborating seems like it would be terribly difficult. How did you blend your work? Usually one guy starts a tune. He’ll start the seed of the idea and he’ll bring it in some kind of form to the table, and then we’ll both start hacking away at it. You undoubtedly have different approaches to music, different sounds, so how did you combine your efforts to create a united finished product? Well, there is commonality. You might be able to listen to both Celtic albums and tell who had the bigger role in certain pieces, but I am not sure. You are right in that we do have our own sounds, but there is a foundation of common interest that seems to connect our music. Your music is heavily acoustic. Talk about your relationship with the orchestra versus the synthesizer. I tend not to like synthesizers that often. But I have worked on projects where I needed a cutting-edge sort of electronic sound that could not be done acoustically. If I can achieve this sound with an unusual acoustic instrument, I would rather do it that way. I feel it ages better, among other things. How did your film music career begin? I was a guitar player, but I hurt both my hands with a couple different injuries, and it was starting to look like I wasn’t going to be able to be a player for a living. I was told that I would never play music again. At that point, I started to wonder what I was going to do, outside of jumping off a building, which definitely was something I was considering. Eventually, I just fell into films. As a player, I had played on some soundtracks and saw how it worked. So I thought I would give it a shot myself. How were you injured? I basically got serious carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis in both my arms. Those injuries can get to the point where you can’t really do anything. I had taken piano lessons while I was young. Then I discovered the guitar and put the piano aside for a little while and taught myself to play guitar incorrectly, apparently. I could play fine, but I was doing things that were not good for my hands, and after about twelve years that caught up with me. Does this affect you now? When scoring a film, you’re not required to play guitar eight hours a day, seven days a week. When I first started scoring and I was doing TV series, I didn’t really play guitar at all for four years. And that really let everything settle down and heal. Those injuries took a long time to heal, so I was away from guitar for quite a while as I started my film career. It is better enough now that, in fact, I’m playing today, all day, on this sci-fi film that has some very industrial Nine Inch Nails sort of things going on, lots of guitar. There are still aches and pains, but it’s not like it was. I’m just careful with it and I can get through it fine. Your instrumentation makes your music uniquely yours. It has a bit of raw sound and abstract ideas that blend in such beautiful creative work. What is your fascination with sound and where does this come from? Well, I guess I always like something a little left of center, even in orchestral music. In straight-up orchestral music I try to find a way to come at the orchestra a little differently. One way is to inject the orchestra with different kinds of instruments that aren’t usually found in orchestral settings. That creates a tension that I find lends itself to interesting sounds and interesting music. But I try above and beyond anything else to write good melodies and themes – to have solid melodic content. I think that you can get quite unusual and abstract sonically if you have a good melodic base to hold it together. “Uncorked” is a score with an Irish flavor. But it doesn’t sound like a traditional folk score. You added a mysterious presence with the hurdy-gurdy and other instruments. When you write a score like this, what do you set out to accomplish? Remember, when we’re film composers, a lot of factors play into the music. The director of that film came to me because he had heard one of the Celtic works. So that was one of the things he immediately started talking about. In that film, Nigel Hawthorn played a character who was rather eccentric and made references to St. Augustine and some other ancient presences and such. So it was a good excuse for me to drag out the hurdy-gurdy. But, again, a lot of it just goes back to me trying to find something unusual or some slightly different way to come at things if that’s possible. All of your music has flowing themes and melodies. This aspect of music seems to come so naturally to you. Is this true? I would say that it comes easier to me than other aspects of composition. And, like I said earlier, it’s also something that I think is very important. It’s something I hold in high regard. I spent a long time – days sometimes – tweaking melodies, trying to make them as flowing and effective as possible. Which composers have inspired you most? I tend to think more in terms of films when we’re talking about film composition. But, of any one composer, Bernard Herrmann stands out for me. I really love his sound. He’s not necessarily the most melodic composer in terms of your standard straight-up melody, but he does a very interesting thing, and I love it. And then I think of individual film scores that I love, such as Elmer Bernstein’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which has a lovely melody, and Alfred Newman’s “The Razor’s Edge”, Rózsa’s “Double Indemnity”… I could go on and on. Were you aware of film music as you were growing up? Yeah, because music was such a big part of my family and my upbringing. I was always aware of music in any context, because I grew up in a house with so much music in it. I remember going when I was very young to see Gilbert and Sullivan musicals that my parents were singing in. I remember going to movies and noticing music. It never occurred to me for a long time that film music might be how I make a contribution, but certainly it was something that I always took note of. Let’s talk about “Green Dragon”. How did you and Mychael come to collaborate on this film score? It just sort of happened. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I was available and he was available and we said, “Yeah, we’ll give it a shot.” This score strove for an authentic Vietnamese sound. How much research went into the sounds and instrumentations? It’s probably the most research I’d ever done for anything up until “The Gospel of John”. We spent a good month driving back and forth from L.A. to Orange County, where there’s a large Vietnamese music community. We had a translator who was a Vietnamese musician, and he filled us in on a lot of things. It’s a fascinating culture. I don’t think we quite got as much of the musical culture into that score as we might have, given the beauty of that sound. “The Kid Stays in the Picture” utilizes a complex group of sounds. By the time I got through the middle of the CD, I was so impressed by the many levels to which you took this music. Tell me what I’m hearing and how difficult was it to combine all these flavors for one story. The challenge in it was also the thing that was really fun about it – spanning about five decades musically. It is something you would never do in a conventional film score. You would rarely write tarantellas, waltzes, gangster music, and carnival music in one score. I was really attracted to the film because there was room for all those different sounds to sit next to each other amongst the source music – Cat Stevens, Steely Dan, and the other things that the filmmakers were using to tell the tale of Evan’s life. I really enjoyed that project. There was some sweating, as it had a very short turnaround, but it was really a rewarding film to be part of. “The Gospel of John” – I believe that you were meant for this movie right from the beginning. Your emotional and heartfelt music seems truly inspired. What was this project like for you? That’s an interesting take on it. I think you’re probably right. I remember that one of the producers had heard my score to “O” and had liked it. And that was the beginning of our conversation. They liked the fact that I had done some things with Renaissance instruments and the orchestra. Their concept for “Gospel of John” was that it would have the ancient music of the biblical era and the geography of the place mixed with large-scale modern-orchestra sound. Then, when I saw the film and saw how they were handling the subject, I thought that the score shouldn’t really be “Ben-Hur” or something like that. It should have some of the scope of the vintage Bible flicks, but it should also have the real period instruments injected into it. A music supervisor who had already done research on this project for a year tracked down a lot of the players. Then it was just a matter of my absorbing the book of information that he gave me and going to London to meet with the players and talk about their instruments and their craft. I came back to Los Angeles to write it. Will you continue to write for films or do you have aspirations in other areas? I like film. I have been asked to do a couple of concert things, but film is a really good place for me to work right now, and I am comfortable doing it. I still have other things I do on the side: I still play a little guitar on sessions and that kind of thing. I do some album work. But I think that film music is in some ways the classical music of this generation. I’m happy to be here, making whatever contribution I can.