Joel Forrester

Joel Forrester (born May 2, 1946) is an American jazz composer and pianist. He composed the theme song to NPR's Fresh Air.

Forrester was reared in Pittsburgh. He has played jazz piano professionally since the age of 15; his first composition (based on an Erroll Garner lick) was entitled "Tiber Rag" and was submitted as a high-school Latin project in 1962.

Forrester was further educated at Ohio University and while there furnished music for the early films of Andy Warhol, a fellow Pittsburgher. Forrester was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, registered voters in Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965 and was a draft resister during the Vietnam War, serving several months in prison in 1970/71.

Forrester and the former Mary Harrison, a dancer, married in 1970; they have had one child, Max. In 1973, following several years on Federal parole (passed in Boston and San Francisco), Forrester moved to New York City, where he has lived and worked ever since. In the late 1970s, Joel was introduced to Thelonious Monk by a friend, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. He received Monk's personal encouragement — Monk told Forrester, "You can play!" and advised him to concentrate on making new compositions.

With saxophonist Phillip Johnston, Forrester co-founded, in 1981, the Microscopic Septet, with which he played, composed, toured, and recorded for 12 years. When the band broke up in 1992, Forrester took his family to Paris, where they lived for a year. While there, he developed a second musical career as an improvising accompanist to silent film, earning the plaudits of the Paris Free Voice, which called him "the world's finest" at that lost art. In coming years, he would play for films in the leading museums of Paris: The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Forum des Images.

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