JEFF RUSSO

Jeff Russo is one of the world’s leading film and TV composers, currently on a mission to boldly produce exceptional soundtracks for both Star Treks Discovery and Picard. For these critically-acclaimed soundtracks, he even had his own custom-built sample library co-developed with Orchestral Tools (now available for us all to use) complete with a Klingon Choir…

Jeff Russo never intended to be a leading film and television composer although that is certainly what he has become. After making his mark on the ground-breaking series Fargo he has now become synonymous with Star Trek, composing the scores to two of the latest and most successful incarnations of the brand: Discovery and Picard. However, it was the lure of rock ‘n’ roll that first drew Russo into music making and he originally found fortune as guitarist in the 90s alternative rock band Tonic with lead singer Emerson Hart. The band was successful enough to release several albums and tour extensively, but while on a break from the band, Russo hooked up with Wendy Melvoin from the duo Wendy & Lisa and ended up writing some cues for some of the television series that they were scoring. He was consequently bitten by the film-composing bug.

“Wendy asked me if I wanted to try my hand at writing a cue for them,” Russo recalls. “They gave me all their stuff, like their samples, and I tried writing a cue and they really liked it. I ended up writing a bunch of music for them as an additional writer for about a year on Crossing Jordan and The Bionic Woman.”