Interviewed by Joe Montague
I
can remember many years ago, while I was vacationing in Glacier National
Park which is shared by the state of Montana and the Canadian provinces of
Alberta and British Columbia, that I came around a bend in the mountain, and
there sitting off to the side and without a shirt, was a man playing the
bongos. It would seem to me after several conversations both on the
telephone and through correspondence that it would be easy to imagine
finding guitar virtuoso and superb composer Byron Fry in a similar
situation. The affable artist, who appeared in Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell,
as well as The Elizabeth Taylor Story, and who has written or
arranged music for a variety of television programs and who appeared as a
sidelining musician on both Melrose Place and California Dreams,
lives in the tiny community of Mammoth Lakes, nestled in the Sierra Nevada
Mountain range of California.
Byron Fry can play shredder guitar like few others and yet he recently composed a beautiful symphony, simply titled Fry’s 1st Symphony, while at the same time releasing his rock album Combustible and producing a rock opera for another artist. He has in the past played jazz, rock and everything in between, but composing a symphony was a first, so what led to this monumental decision?
“(It was) the opportunity to work with some great musicians with the Eastern Sierra Symphony Orchestra, which has a season that lasts for one week during the year. Some of the best talent from this time zone converges on Mammoth Lakes and for one week we have a really, really good symphony orchestra in town. There are festivals and various lineups playing all kinds of shows all over town,” says Fry.
Continuing with that thought Byron Fry says, “I think the real question is, ‘What took me so long to write a symphony?’ I have known how since my early twenties, but I never got around to it. I spent decades in LA making music of various subservient natures for television, film or for record sales, but while I was listening with a pounding heart to the works of Copland, Stravinsky, Debussy, Holst and others, I was moved by the power of music, in what Stravinsky calls “its purest form,” meaning that it is not subservient to anything, but the interplay of musical elements,” then in a moment of raw honesty he admits, “Of course if someone offered me James Horners’ gig tomorrow, you know that I would jump at it.”
When the door was opened for Fry to both write a piece for the Eastern Sierra Symphony Orchestra, which came under the direction of conductor Bodigar Avrmov, and to have it played, he jumped at the opportunity. Fry finds irony in the fact that this opportunity presented itself after he moved four hours away from what he refers to as the musical mecca of Los Angeles.
On Byron Fry’s myspace page you hear the diversity of his music as it is showcased with the first two movements from his symphony and his shredder guitar tunes, “Keep It Under One Hundred,” and “Wreckless Excess,” with the Latin vibes of “Baila, Maria,” sandwiched in between. In listening to Byron Fry’s music it seems that the stronger elements of his various styles converge with his song “Melt,” and in a sense his personality comes through, for the song’s quieter passages mirror his laid back reflective nature and the environs which he calls home, while the edgier grooves seem to address the side of his persona which is more outspoken.
It is not an accident that Byron Fry’s musical repertoire demonstrates such diversity, because he was mentored by musical icons.
“In terms of education, everything was just BS until I hooked up with a little backwater place in Studio City called Dick Grove’s Music Workshop and at the time I was online to go to Berklee in Boston to get one of them high falutin’ edumacations. I would have been one of 2,500 guitar majors in an average class size of 350. My dad had a colleague who told him about this school in Studio City where the average class size was about a dozen, with (teachers like) Henry Mancini, Lalo Schiffrin and Sammy Nestico. Everyone who survived the school that I went to, will tell you the same thing; that school was super, super accelerated and within two years that school prepared me to compose and arrange any style of music, for any instrumentation, from one to sixty pieces. It was just an amazing, amazing school and anyone who went through that program, will tell you the same thing. When I got out of that school, I was ready for anything. I have never been challenged in my professional career of twenty-five plus years, as much as that school challenged me. All the TV scoring, all the film scoring, all the crushing deadlines and the ridiculous things that you have to do for TV, nothing was as difficult as this school. That is really what I owe the writing chops to, and the diversity is something I never thought about. It has been my biggest boon and my biggest weakness, because everyone wants to pigeonhole you. Everyone wants to put you in a little slot so that they know what you are and the $64,000 question has always been, will the real Byron Fry please stand up,” he says.
