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.
Pages
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.

Record Labels


Asthmatic Kitty


Sounds Are Active
Archives

title

Bill Frisell + Joey Baron @ Jazz Bakery (1.13.08)

Bill Frisell is a unique voice in American jazz guitar, and for that reason alone he deserves to be listened to. His rhythmic counterpart and longtime collaborator Joey Baron is a musician of startling facility, equally capable tossing out be-bop fills or smashing in eardrums by playing blast beats, as he did with Frisell in John Zorn’s Naked City. On Friday night they appeared together at Culver City’s Jazz Bakery, thirty minutes late and a few experiments short.

Opening with a ring-modulated guitar sound reminiscent of his early ‘80s album Smash And Scatteration, Frisell stood almost motionless stage left, a bespectacled cactus. With a thinly strung, light blue semi-hollowbody Telecaster in hand and a small set of pedals at his feet, Frisell asserted himself as the best country-folk accompanist in jazz. He displayed little fire and took fewer chances, fretting through improvisations and back catalogue tunes.

Opposite him, beater Baron whittled away on oversized chopsticks, mallets and overturned cymbals, once going so far as to strike the underside of a drum after wedging his stick between it and the ground. Baron was consistently sensitive and rhythmically dense when not forced into the ‘you play a chord, I’ll play a beat’ dichotomy.

An oblong interpretation of ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ fermented a few genuine surprises, unfortunately the final eight minutes of the set consisted of Frisell playing a repetitive four-chord progression as Baron and the audience were forced to work the rest out for themselves.

Originally published in L.A. Record

Feb 16, 2008 | bibliography