John Barry

Throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, John Barry ranked among the most prominent creators of film scores, moving fluidly across an array of musical idioms and approaches. Although his film legacy is most closely identified with the James Bond series, he secured five Academy Awards, none connected to those productions. Born Free earned him Oscars for Best Score and Best Song, while The Lion in Winter, Out of Africa, and Dances with Wolves represent additional high-profile achievements. Earlier, from 1957 into the early 1960s, he led the John Barry Seven and became a familiar presence in British popular music and the first wave of rock and roll.

Born in York, England, on November 3, 1933, John Barry grew up as the son of a modest cinema-chain proprietor and a onetime concert pianist. As a child he displayed intense musical curiosity, beginning with piano studies before shifting to trumpet during adolescence. After years immersed in classical repertoire, he embraced jazz, admiring Harry James above all and favoring the sounds of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, and the Dorsey Brothers.

He received instruction in piano and composition from Dr. Francis Jackson, music master at York Minster Cathedral, and developed a strong aptitude for arranging. Exposure to his father’s theaters fostered an early awareness of cinema’s impact, yet it was the 1945 film A Song to Remember, centered on Frédéric Chopin, that revealed to him the potency of music within motion pictures and sparked his lasting interest. He also singled out Max Steiner’s score for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Anton Karas’s music for The Third Man as formative cinematic influences. In his mid-teens Barry performed with a local jazz ensemble and, at eighteen, secured placement in a military music unit during National Service. Over two years he experimented with arranging and later refined his technique through a correspondence course taught by Bill Russo, an arranger for Stan Kenton. Returning to civilian life, he submitted charts to leading British bandleaders such as Ted Heath, Jack Parnell, and Johnny Dankworth; Dankworth adopted two of them, and at Parnell’s urging Barry formed his own group, eventually called the John Barry Seven.

He relocated the ensemble to London in 1957 and sought a spot on Jack Good’s television program The Six-Five Special, only to be rejected initially. After several weeks of successful live dates, including backing Tommy Steele, the producers reconsidered, and the group appeared on the show. Their performances generated widespread popularity, with Barry emerging as the focal point through both trumpet work and vocals. As rock and roll surged, he often adopted Elvis- or Carl Perkins-inflected singing styles.

These broadcasts led to a contract with EMI’s Parlophone label. The Seven next served as a house band on Good’s subsequent program Oh Boy!, which featured rising rock-and-roll talents including Cliff Richard. Barry then took the role of music director for the dramatic series Drum Beat, starring singer-actor Adam Faith. Between 1959 and 1962 the pair produced a succession of major British hits on Parlophone. During the same span Barry arranged and conducted for additional EMI acts such as Desmond Lane, the England Sisters, and Bill and Brett Landis. The John Barry Seven scored their own successes with “Hit or Miss” and a cover of the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run,” distinguished by crisp, assertive execution and prominent use of electric piano and other uncommon instruments at a time when electric bass remained rare. They ranked among the leading instrumental groups and recorded albums for EMI’s Columbia imprint, already home to their chief rivals, the Shadows.

In 1960 Barry received his first film-scoring assignment for the delinquency drama Beat Girl, again starring Adam Faith. The resulting soundtrack blended brass, electric guitar supplied by Seven member Vic Flick, and orchestral forces. He later created the album Stringbeat, pairing the group’s timbre with a string orchestra. Though the Seven competed directly with Cliff Richard’s Shadows for instrumental chart success, 1962 brought pivotal developments. Barry was hired to complete the score for Dr. No after Monty Norman had begun the work; the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, were sufficiently impressed to retain him for the next Bond installment and ultimately for every entry through A View to a Kill in 1985. Several of his co-written Bond songs—“Goldfinger,” “Thunderball,” and “You Only Live Twice”—became hits for Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, and Nancy Sinatra respectively. Among the most distinctive is “We Have All the Time in the World” from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, performed by Louis Armstrong. Following Beat Girl’s establishment of his domestic reputation, Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger propelled him onto the international stage.

Born Free further elevated his standing, with both the score and its Oscar-winning title song. Thereafter he was sought for ambitious British and Hollywood projects ranging from the experimental Dutchman to prestige dramas such as The Lion in Winter, which brought his third Oscar. In 1962, the year of the first Bond film, Barry departed EMI for the independent Ember Records. At Ember he produced and arranged for numerous artists, among them Chad & Jeremy, and oversaw best-selling comedy releases including Fool Britannia, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s pointed satire of the Profumo affair.

Amid mounting film commitments, Barry occasionally issued his own albums, frequently featuring re-recordings of earlier screen music. In 1999 he released the classical-leaning The Beyondness of Things. A severe injury sustained late in the 1980s led to an extended recovery aided by skilled medical care; one early outcome was the expansive orchestral score for Dances with Wolves, notable for intricate writing and sweeping, Mahler-like melodic contours, which earned him a fifth Oscar. He received a sixth nomination in 1992 for Chaplin. In 2001 he composed the music for Enigma and recorded the non-film album Eternal Echoes. Among his final contributions was the co-written song “Our Time Is Now,” with lyricist Don Black, recorded by Shirley Bassey for her 2009 album The Performance. John Barry died of a heart attack in Oyster Bay, New York, on January 30, 2011. Although his twenty-first-century output proved less frequent, his broad, critically and popularly acclaimed career affirmed his place among the foremost musical figures of the latter twentieth century.