1. Here at Bionic Buzz, we are all about people’s passions. Where did your passion for music come from? Was it a certain album you heard or a live performance that you saw that inspired you to make a career in the music industry. Or was it just natural for you as a child?
Zach: I started playing guitar when I was 12, which was really my first introduction to music making. I was entering a classic rock phase and only wanted to learn how to play Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath so that got me intro rock n’ roll. At the same time, I was falling in love with film scores after watching Once Upon a Time in the West and Pirates of the Caribbean. I put it together pretty quickly that I wanted to be a film composer, and l was fortunate to have a family and support system who constantly encouraged me to pursue my passion.
Leo: My parents listened to a ton of music in our household (my dad is debatably the world’s biggest Dead Head), so I think it just became a natural outlet for creativity. I grew up playing saxophone, clarinet, and flute, and performing in a lot of musical theater. Playing in jazz ensemble especially, I started to have more fun appreciating how arrangements were put together than actually playing them. This ran parallel to a love of movies, especially stories that involve extravagant world-building, from a very early age, and so putting the two passion together into a single job felt natural.
2. Let’s talk about your music journey. You found your passion for music than what? Were you in bands in high school & college? If so what type of music? How did you get composer / music department gigs in Hollywood for such films such as Ant-Man & Edge of Tomorrow before Cobra Kai?
Zach: I was in a few bands between high school and college which I think were pretty pivotal to my compositional style. One was a video-game inspired metal band called Dracula Mountain and my college band was a math-rock group called The Earth is a Man. I also had an electronic music project called D/A/D which is heavily inspired by ’80s synth pop and electro. It’s a pretty easy line to draw from my former projects to the sound of the Cobra Kai score!
After I graduated college, I moved back to LA and got an internship at Chris Beck’s studio, which is where I met Leo. Chris is one of the busiest composers in town and his projects ranged from the Marvel movies to indie romantic comedies. It was a great place to cut your teeth and work on your composing chops. Every day you were required to switch gears and work on some new musical muscle.
Leo: A lot of my first compositions were weird long-form instrumental jazz pieces with too many changing time signatures because I listened to an insane amount of Pat Metheny back in the day. But I actually really love writing for orchestra the most. Like Zach said, we both worked for Chris Beck, which was a great environment for two people with such diverse musical backgrounds.
I was also a Battle of the Bands champion in high school, and we mostly played Dave Matthews covers. Preparing for this show is probably my first rock band performance since then.
3. Let’s talk about your upcoming gig at the world famous Whisky a Go-Go on June 12th. Enter the Dojo: The Music of Cobra Kai Live! (click here for tickets) You will be performing the music from hit TV series. Are you also going to be doing any covers like Airborne ‘Back in the Game’ or Kari Kimmel ‘Cruel Summer’? Will there be video screens featuring footage from the series? Do you want people to come dressed as cosplay from Cobra Kai or maybe their favorite 80’s Hair Metal band?
Zach: We’re keeping our set list and details pretty close to the chest but I will say it’s an ambitious project for us. We had to extend our original score cues, which were on average like, a minute and a half, to lengths that felt more like a real song. We don’t want this show to feel like a composer concert, we want it to feel like you’re with Johnny and the rest of the Cobra’s on a hot night on the Sunset strip in 1984. We would LOVE to see cos playing! 🙂
Leo: Expanding these pieces for live performance has been some of the most joyfully creative and rewarding time we’ve had recently, and we are incredibly excited to share it with fans of the show. As for other covers, you’ll just have to come to the Whisky and see what tricks we pull out. The more people in costume the better– it will help us get into character as shred-tastic rock gods.