Craig Safan
| Craig Safan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 17, 1948 Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Genres | Film score |
| Occupation(s) | Film composer |
Craig Safan (born December 17, 1948 in Los Angeles, California) is a an American composer for film and television, whose biggest scores include The Last Starfighter, Mr. Wrong, Stand and Deliver, Fade to Black, Major Payne, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, and music to the TV series Cheers, for which he won numerous ASCAP awards. His style consisted of often improvising as a form of composition that allowed him to quickly express himself.
Craig Safan was born in Los Angeles, son of an L.A. native Eugene Safan, who owned a downtown jewelry store. Safan’s father was a B17 bomber pilot during World War II who met his mother, Betty Torchin, in Laredo, Texas while stationed there at the Army Air Force Base. She was a piano virtuoso who had studied at the Cleveland Conservatory.
Safan began picking out tunes when he was 5 or 6 years old. Growing tired of classical music, Safan’s mother hired a teacher for him named Helene Mirich Spear who taught "popular" piano, who had young Craig improvising in his first lesson. Besides being a jazz pianist, she also played classical violin, so as well as the improvisation, she worked on technique by having him play Scott Joplin and Zez Confrey pieces.
"While in middle school I was going to an LA club called Shelly's Mann Hole and hearing all the great jazz pianists... Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Hampton Hawes, and more," Safan recalled. Afterwards, Mirich would transcribe Monk's solos for him to play. "I was a very straight kid from a nice Jewish family whose idols were mostly junkies but I didn't really understand that at the time."
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