Composer Information

Name:
Jason Brandt
WWW:
Official Website

Biography

Born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Jason Brandt & family moved to Scottsdale, Arizona at age 7 where he soon began to study piano, guitar, drums, voice & bass. In his early years he spent much time composing rock, jazz & classical compositions on a simple four track recorder which allowed him to create & record many layers of sounds & ideas via his guitars, keyboard & drum machine. This soon blossomed into many opportunities to write for fellow musicians in rock bands, dance concerts, jazz combos & other various ensembles.

The desire to further his musical & artistic abilities led him to the University of Arizona to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition. Jason studied composition under Daniel Asia, big band arranging with Neal Finn, and jazz piano & filmmusic with Jeffrey Haskell. In Jason's senior year he wrote music for more than half of the graduating class' films while concurrently writing 5 concert works (2 being 3 movements each) for his senior recital. Many of these films have gone onto film festivals around the country as well as ifilm.com.

Upon graduation, Jason moved from Tucson to Phoenix to study choral & orchestral conducting at Arizona State University and to write music for many local films. During this time Jason also began studying non-linear film editing on the AVID Media Composer & AVID XPress as a hobby and has edited two music videos as well as created sound design for several projects. After 2 years, Jason left Phoenix to move to Los Angeles to attend a year long graduate program in filmscoring at the University of Southern California. He studied with Christopher Young, David Raskin, Ed Kalnins, Jack Smalley, Richard Bellis, Buddy Baker, David Spear, George Burt, Leonard Rosenman, Brian King, Terry Woodson & John Burlingame as well as famed orchestrator Steven Scott Smalley at UCLA. Jason was also awarded the 'ASCAP Harry Warren Scholarship SMPTV' for one of his musical compositions while attending this program at USC.