My portfolio includes scoring, arrangement and composition work for video games, feature film and television. As a musician and producer I have released over forty albums of jazz, folk, electronic, punk and modern classical music. I am currently accepting new commissions.
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Why Chris Schlarb?
The world is full of musicians, composers and producers. The hard part is matching the right person with the project they are best suited for.

Here is a quick example: if you want to approximate an orchestra of instruments with a single keyboard, I am probably not the right one for the job. My best work utilizes any number of unique, real world instruments including tabla, euphonium, mandolin, marimba and upright double bass. I thoroughly enjoy working with real instruments, in real spaces, with real musicians.

If your film, video game or album requires texture and atmospheric depth, unique or unusual live instrumentation, and thoughtful arrangement, I would love to hear from you. For the last decade I have explored the ambient, jazz, folk, electronic and modern classical genres as a member of both the American Composers Forum and ASCAP.

I specialize in taking small and medium sized budgets and turning them into expensive sounding recordings. I operate my own mobile recording studio and engineer most sessions, saving time and cost.

My work can be heard on this site and read about in the New York Times, All About Jazz, Time Out New York, Chicago Reader and Pitchfork.

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Joni Mitchell- The Hissing of Summer Lawns (2003)

hissingofsummerlawns.jpg
Post-Court and Spark Joni Mitchell isn’t easy. While some say she peaked with the emotionally gut wrenching Blue, others say that the former album was her commercial and artistic apex. While both albums hold in them some of Mitchell’s most personal lyrics (especially the fragile songs on Blue, which chronicle her divorce, decision to put her daughter up for adoption and her affair with Graham Nash), only the exiled, The Hissing of Summer Lawns points toward all of Mitchell’s immense talent.

Later in her career Mitchell has had a minor resurgence with her back catalogue, specifically the anti-commercial “Big Yellow Taxi”, which has been covered and sampled, perhaps best by Q-Tip for the pop/rap “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” by Janet Jackson in 1997. Curiously, 22 years earlier Mitchell made a compelling case for herself as rap artist of the year- male or female- with the music and lyrics she presented on Hissing. On “The Jungle Line”, which effectively “samples” the warrior drummers of Burundi, Joni talks of addiction while juxtaposing New York’s underbelly with thick jungle and drug imagery.

The short view of “Edith and the Kingpin” is one of a young girl being taken in to the prostitution trade by an old-school pimp. “Harry’s House- Centerpiece” gets the mash-up treatment by taking the romantic Mandel/Hendricks‘ standard about a couple’s simple love and suffocates it in the tale of an empty house wife unhappy in her marriage but unable to forgo its material trappings. Mitchell’s words throughout are acidic and sad. The music dense and incredibly spare, mixing folk, avant-garde, world and jazz into a new vocabulary.

With screenplay-like detail and oftentimes disturbing views of American life in the 1970’s Joni Mitchell effectively gets a head start on Nas, Tupac and Biggie without even so much as a mic check.

Originally published in Sound Collector Audio Review #5

Apr 02, 2007 | bibliography