Kristopher Bowers is an American composer, pianist, and director. He has composed scores for films including Green Book, King Richard, The Color Purple, The Wild Robot and Goat, and television series Bridgerton, Mrs. America, Dear White People, When They See Us, Secret Invasion and Spider-Noir.

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Kristopher Bowers (born April 5, 1989) is an American composer, pianist, and director. He has composed scores for films including Green Book, King Richard, The Color Purple, The Wild Robot, Goat, and Hexed, and television series Bridgerton, Mrs. America, Dear White People, When They See Us, Secret Invasion and Spider-Noir.\n

At the 96th Academy Awards, Bowers won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film for The Last Repair Shop, along with his co-director Ben Proudfoot. Their previous collaboration, A Concerto Is a Conversation, also received a nomination at the 93rd Academy Awards.\n

Bowers is the recipient of the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for Amazon Prime Video's adaptation of The Snowy Day. He has garnered multiple nominations at the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, and Critics' Choice Awards.\n

During his career, Bowers has recorded, performed and collaborated with José James, Jay-Z, and Alicia Keys. He has also collaborated with filmmakers Blitz Bazawule, Ava DuVernay, Reinaldo Marcus Green, Malcolm D. Lee, Chris Sanders, and Justin Simien.\n

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Early life and education

Bowers was born in Los Angeles, California, on April 5, 1989. His father is a film and television writer, and his mother is an executive at DirecTV. Although neither of his parents received more than a high school education, they wanted their son to play the piano, so they played recordings of pianists while he was still in the womb.\n

Bowers began piano lessons at the age of 4 and private classical music lessons starting at around the age of 9. Growing up, Bowers listened to \"classic soul records and hip-hop before falling under the spell of jazz, classical music, and film scores.\"\n

Bowers studied jazz and classical piano at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts where his teachers included Mulgrew Miller and Donald Vega. He studied jazz at Colburn School for Performing Arts. He graduated in 2006, then attended Juilliard and obtained a bachelor's and master's degree in jazz performance. While a student, he performed frequently in New York City.\n

Career

2011–2016: Early career as a performer

Bowers played on Jay-Z and Kanye West's 2011 album Watch the Throne, and later toured with Marcus Miller throughout 2012. Bowers' debut album, Heroes + Misfits (Concord, 2014), premiered at No. 1 on the iTunes Jazz charts. One AllMusic reviewer commented that Bowers was \"based in jazz but with an ear for contemporary R&B, film scores, and electronic music\". Bowers' first film composition was for the 2013 documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. In 2014, Bowers performed at the International Jazz Day Concert in Japan, the Festival de Jazz de Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain, and at the London Jazz Festival.\n

Bowers' work on the showtime documentary Kobe Bryant's Muse (2015) gained him attention as an up-and-coming composer well-versed in a wide range of compositional styles. In the same year, he scored two other Showtime documentaries: I Am Giant, about the football player Victor Cruz, and Play It Forward, about Tony Gonzalez. He was one of six composers invited to the Sundance Composers Lab in 2015. Bowers also teamed up with the choreographer Kyle Abraham, to create Absent Matter, which premiered at the Joyce Theater in New York City. During the following year, Bowers and Abraham collaborated again on Untitled America for Alvin Ailey.\n

Bowers performed at The White House in 2016 for the International Jazz Day Concert hosted by President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama.\n

Bowers has also paired his music with immersive dining experiences; in 2016, he was hired by Bang & Olufsen to create a score to accompany a multi-course meal prepared by chef Fredrik Berselius, founder of Aska. The next year, Krug commissioned Bowers to write compositions inspired by and paired with one of their signature champagnes.\n

2017–2019: Focus on scoring for film and TV

Bowers developed his scoring career across film and TV with the 2017 documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You and the film Little Boxes, as well as the television programs Religion of Sports and Dear White People. Bowers' music for the Amazon children's Christmas special, The Snowy Day (2016), based on the 1962 book of the same title by Ezra Jack Keats, won him a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition. For his score to Ava DuVernay's mini-series When They See Us (2019), Bowers received his first Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited or Anthology Series, Movie or Special.\n

Bowers composed the score for Green Book (2019), earning him a nomination for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Score. Green Book was ultimately nominated for five awards at the 91st Academy Awards, winning three awards for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali. For the film, Bowers also served as Ali's on-screen hand-double for the film's piano close-up shots and taught Ali to play piano.\n

2020–present: Oscar success and emergence into directing

Bowers' debut as a director began with A Concerto Is a Conversation (2020), a documentary short film he co-directed with Ben Proudfoot. Centering on Bowers' conversations with his grandfather about personal and family history, the film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the 93rd Academy Awards.\n

For their next collaboration, The Last Repair Shop (2023), Bowers and Proudfoot won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film. The film spotlights some of the individuals working at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s music instrument repair shop, the last to provide free instrument repairs to the city’s public school students. Following The Last Repair Shop’s success, Bowers and Proudfoot launched a $15 million capital campaign, in partnership with the LAUSD Education Foundation, to support the music education of the next generation of Angelenos.\n

In 2022, the Monterey Jazz Festival commissioned a composition from Bowers, which he presented at the annual event. The piece, Ásylo (Greek for sanctuary), commemorates the 30th anniversary of the nearby Monterey National Marine Sanctuary. Bowers had previously performed at the festival as a high school student for three years starting in 2003.\n

Since 2020, Bowers has composed the score for Netflix's period drama, Bridgerton. Upon each season's release, Bridgerton has been the most-watched or among the most-watched original series launch on the service. For his work on the show, Bowers received Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series and Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. He also produced two original soundtracks for Netflix's Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (2023): the first as the series' score, and the second with classical reinterpretations of pop songs. Bowers collaborated with Alicia Keys to reimagine her song \"If I Ain't Got You\" for the album's lead single.\n

Bowers's film scoring work accelerated in this period with Justin Simien's comedy horror film Bad Hair (2020), Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021) and the Chevalier (2022). In 2023, Bowers scored three films and two television projects, including Haunted Mansion, Origin, The Color Purple, Secret Invasion, and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, continuing his working relationship with Justin Simien and Ava DuVernay. Bowers' score for The Color Purple garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.\n

Bowers received further acclaim for his score for DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot (2024), which garnered nominations from the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, and BAFTAs, as well as the award for Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film from the Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL).\n

Artistry

The New York Times' 2011 review of one of Bowers' early shows as a bandleader referred to his playing as \"serious, thoughtful, organized, restrained; he made the piano sound good. His set had range and ambition and said something strong, sweet, and normative about phrasing and rhythm in jazz right now.\"\n

Bowers' influences include \"Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly ('for his comping and incredible feel'), Duke Ellington ('for his compositions'), Ahmad Jamal and Count Basie\", as well as John Williams.\n

Awards and honors

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Honor\n

Honor - DownBeat magazine: “25 for the Future”, 2016
Honor - ROBIE Pioneer Award from the Jackie Robinson Foundation, 2019.

Filmography

Films

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Television

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Documentaries

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Video games

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Discography

An asterisk (*) indicates that the year is that of release.\n

As leader/co-leader

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As sideman

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References

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External links

Kris Bowers – official site
Kris Bowers at IMDb
\"Piano Jazz with John Weber\". NPR 2012 interview and solo and duo piano performances.
\"Composer Kris Bowers Unpacks the Idea of ‘Black Excellence’: ‘It Exists in the Small Moments of Every Day’\". Variety Artisans column
\"How ‘Bridgerton’ Composer Kris Bowers Set Up a 'Dangerous Connection' in Season 2\". Hollywood Reporter podcast

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Kris Bowers

Broadcast History