In his 17 years in Hollywood, J.A.C. Redford has written music for such films as "The Trip to Bountiful" and "Newsies" as well as the Emmy Award-winning TV series "Coach" and "St. Elsewhere."
But there's another side to J.A.C. Redford, a side that has also produced the Easter choral symphony "A Paschal Feast," the children's ballet "Clementina's Cactus," Five Songs for Flute and French Horn and, most recently, the Christmas celebration "Welcome All Wonders," to be premiered Saturday, Dec. 11, at Abravanel Hall.That performance will be by the Utah Chamber Artists, which commissioned the work last spring following their performance of the Rachmaninoff Vespers, which Redford returned home to hear.
"The idea of doing a Christmas work appealed to me," Redford says, adding that he and the group's artistic director, Barlow Bradford, had discussed the possibility over breakfast a few weeks before. (They had been put in touch by UCA board president James L. Sorenson and his wife, with whom Redford had gone to school.)
But, one gathers, there has always been another side to J.A.C. Redford, or "Jack," as he is called.
The son of retired University of Utah theater professor H.E.D. Redford, he was christened Jonathan Alfred Clawson Redford, "but Mom called me `Jack' from the first, except maybe in moments of pique."
Early musical exposure, as he remembers it, came by way of the family hi-fi listening to recordings of Stravinsky's "Firebird" Suite and Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story." That and attending the U.'s summer festivals every year, with their heavy doses of musicals and opera.
"That gave me a grounding in writing dramatic music that I never could have had in school,' " Redford maintains. But at the same time he says the place he really cut his teeth writing and arranging was for a rock-fusion band he and Mark Cheney were part of at Skyline High School.
Buddy Mark Jardine, later of Tenpenny fame, subsequently introduced Redford to Irish music, "so here I had experience in classical, folk, rock, jazz. You name it. And one of the interesting things about working in film is that it draws on every one of those."
Redford's entree to film scoring came while he was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. "I did some documentaries with Brian Capener and some educational films for the State Board of Education." The move to Los Angeles came in 1976, with the idea of doing either pop album work or film scoring, "and I just naturally gravitated toward film. That's where my skills really find more expression, particularly the dramatic elements. Also, I tend to write more orchestrally than popular albums will sustain."
Of his film scoring to date, Redford is especially proud of "The Trip to Bountiful" and his work on "St. Elsewhere." "I think it helped create part of the tone of the picture," he says of the latter, "and had a unique profile. It wasn't just wallpaper."
In the next few months he'll be working on the music for "Mighty Ducks II" for Disney as well as the upcoming TV series "Down Home" with, as he puts it, "the `St. Elsewhere' guys." But right now he's primarily focused on "Welcome All Wonders," which he describes as "five pieces linked together."
"He's been faxing them up one piece at a time," Bradford says. "We got the last one about two weeks ago and performed some of them for the first time Sunday, out in Willow Creek Stake." The audience, Bradford reports, "responded well, and the choir is just in love with them. The thing I think is so wonderful - and I expressed this to J.A.C. the other day - when I read the poems I thought, `Oh, these are nice poems.' Then when we got the music and saw what he had done, it added great meaning to the poems themselves. They made tremendous sense."
That would please Redford. Indeed, most of what he talks about are the texts he chose, one from the 17th-century English poet Richard Crashaw, one from Vassar Miller, one from 16th-century poet Robert Southwell and two from Brian Wren.
"It's a pretty diverse group of texts," he acknowledges. "But one thing that seemed to link them was the idea of the incarnation, the idea that God became flesh. The Southwell poem in particular contains a lot of wonderful lines about those paradoxes, for example the opening, `Behold the father is his daughter's son/The bird that built the nest is hatched therein.' That's the kind of thing that attracted me.
"And that's generally my approach to texts. I don't want them to just become a springboard for the music in the sense that the music becomes more important than the text in the sense that the text is obscured. That's a legitmate technique - it's just not the one I prefer. So hopefully a person listening to this piece for the first time will come away with a deeper understanding of the text than they would if they just read the text alone."
The rest of Saturday's program, the group's first at Abravanel Hall, will, according to Bradford, consist of "traditional carols in untraditional arrangements," things like his own versions of "What Child Is This?" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," along with Kings Singers versions of "The Christmas Song" and "Jingle Bells."
But then, he adds, "that's really a trademark of our organization. Even when we do small choral pieces for piano and choir, I'll take them and rewrite them for orchestra. It's really a magical combination."
Saturday the magic begins at 8 p.m., with tickets priced from $7 to $10. For information call 255-2233 or 355-ARTS.