B-Flat Bliss Blares at Big Foote: A Portrait of Darren Solomon
Imagine sitting in front of a desktop monitor. You are immersed in a multimedia matrix of musicians jamming in a bath of b-flat sonorities, as a poet reads his own touching words. Strangely beautiful. Now… imagine experiencing that while sitting in a top-notch ad music studio in New York City. “Huh…?” laced with “Awesome!” That was our exact reaction while visiting NYC’s Big Foote Music to interview their staff composer, Darren Solomon.
Darren Solomon. Photo by Bob Krasner
A Clio award winner, Solomon is a stellar TV ad composer who tackles all genres (rock, pop, hip-hop, jazz, and techno) with great authenticity. Whether it’s writing music for ads or developing personal projects that go viral on the web, like “In B-Flat 2.0,” Solomon seems never to fall short of producing interesting and intriguing work. This is the unique kind of creative intuition, personality, and good old-fashioned soul Darren brings to his work at Big Foote Music on a daily basis.
Benign Beginnings and Big Breaks
Growing up with a father who listened to jazz and classical music, Darren’s musical mind was nurtured at a young age. “I was a snob,” he explains. “I thought all other kinds of music were inferior.” This at ten years old! Being too small for the upright bass, Solomon started playing cello in elementary school, but eventually switched to bass in middle school.
“My brother, who’s older, would always have good music blasting in his room, stuff that I liked,” Solomon recalls. “I remember Earth, Wind & Fire was probably the first thing that wasn’t jazz or classical that I got into.
“When I got my electric bass, which was probably in eighth grade or something like that, all I wanted to do was play along with Earth, Wind, and Fire. And that’s basically how I learned electric bass, just playing along.”
A simple enough start. His first big break would follow years later at the end of his sophomore year at NYU, when one door opened just as he was closing another. “I was moving out of the dorm and the last trip I made to the dorm was for my answering machine,” he explains. “I had left it plugged in, and when I came back it was blinking. I hit ‘play’ and it was Ray Charles saying that he had heard my (demo) tape and inviting me out to LA to audition for him. I was just over-the-moon delighted.
“I called Ben & Jerry’s, ‘cause that’s where I was working to make a little pocket money. I told them I wasn’t gonna be in the next day, because I had to go audition for Ray Charles. That’s a great phone call to make. I highly recommend that phone call, if you can ever make that.”
Solomon got the gig, and toured with Ray Charles for two years. The first year he took off from college, but followed up by balancing college and gigging during his third year of school. “I think half of my teachers didn’t believe me,” says Solomon. “I would tell them, ‘I’m going to play a show in Tokyo this weekend,’ and they would kind of chuckle.”
“That was definitely my education. That was the first time I realized ‘I can make a living at this.’” [See Darren perform with Ray Charles on The Tonight Show in 1990.]
Solomon finished touring with Ray Charles, graduated and began another two years of touring with Barry Manilow. During his free time he built a home studio and began scoring films, and then got some good advice from his wife, an animator, who encouraged him to contact Ray and Sherman Foote of Big Foote Music.
It was the year 2000. A look and listen to his film score reel got Solomon’s ankle in the door, with bass-playing gigs and commercials demos quickly resulting. Six months later he made full-time staff composer at Big Foote, and the plaudits have followed in step.
In 2005 Darren won a Clio Award for his outstanding music on an M&M commercial, featuring Megan Mullally of “Will and Grace.” Another of his acclaimed spots is the dreamy “Buried Treasure” for State Street:
Science for Girls and “In B-Flat”
As much as he enjoys working with advertising clients, Solomon also seizes the opportunity to express his own creativity through other projects, such as his electronica group Science for Girls. Their self-titled album was released in 1997 and gained a following amongst the “chill” community. Stream the Science for Girls songs “Northern Lights”: Northern Lights and “You’ll Never Know”: You’ll Never Know
“In B-Flat 2.0” is a project that Solomon launched from a blog entry featuring six YouTube videos all imbedded into one post. Five videos featured Darren playing different instruments, all in the key of b-flat, while the sixth featured a spoken-word video. This is mad interactive, yo — the user can start each video at will to create a musically unique multimedia experience (try it, you’ll like it). For worldwide connectedness, Darren eventually chose submissions from the global music community as well as some friends to take part in the project.
“In B-Flat” proved to be an attention getter, going live in May of 2009 and immediately receiving a lot of coverage that’s led to some heavy traffic: to date, most of the videos have received somewhere between 500,000-700,000 hits. Solomon gets excited about the fact that musicians from all around the world have jammed to in B-Flat in their live shows, but he also insists on keeping it real — when approached with an advertising offer, Solomon turned it down.
What Lies Ahead?
The future is looking bright for Solomon. He has written most of another Science For Girls album and is anxious to produce it this year while he looks forward to utilizing the rich musical and cultural palate available, both in the New York City scene and the global community. To this multidimensional composer, tools like the Internet are a vehicle, canvas, and source for creativity and imagination.
“I find myself getting really excited about what’s going on in music right now,” Darren Solomon says. “I feel like we’re living in such an exciting time, musically, that I’m just happy to be making music in the year 2010!” – Jeffrey DiLucca
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