Kara Talve

Los Angeles-based composer Kara Talve blends her backgrounds in classical and jazz into sweeping orchestral scores, contributing to TV shows like The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Simpsons. Born in Long Island, New York, the daughter of a jazz fusion guitarist father, she grew up listening to Bill Evans and Allan Holdsworth while playing Stravinsky and Debussy at the piano with her Greek-born grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. She was first inspired to compose film music by Thomas Newman's score for The Shawshank Redemption. Talve graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston, with a bachelor's in film and video game scoring, and she moved to L.A. to try and make it in Hollywood. There she interned at Bear McCreary's Sparks & Shadows studio, and also became a protégée of Hans Zimmer, taking a job as an assistant at his composing collective Bleeding Fingers Music, and gradually working her way up. As part of that collective, she collaborated with Zimmer on the scores for the television series The Tattooist of Auschwitz and (with Anže Rozman) both seasons of Prehistoric Planet. On the former, she recorded her grandmother's original piano, shipped from Paris after the end of WWII, with all its imperfections; on the latter, the trio had instruments custom-built out of dinosaur bones and fossilized wood for an ancient, otherworldly sound. Talve also scored Baz Luhrmann's Faraway Downs mini-series, and became the main composer for The Simpsons in 2022. ~ TiVo Staff, Rovi