Danny Elfman

Elfman was tasked with adapting and arranging 1920s and 1930s jazz and big band music by artists such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker for the ensemble, which consisted of up to 15 performers playing upwards of 30 instruments.

He also composed original pieces and helped build instruments unique for the group, including an aluminum gamelan, the 'Schlitz celeste' made from tuned beer cans, and a "junkyard orchestra" built from car parts and trash cans.

Daniel Robert Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American film composer, singer, songwriter, and musician.

Elfman was born on May 29, 1953, in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish family of Russian descent.

He is a son of Blossom Elfman (née Bernstein), a writer and teacher, and Milton Elfman, a teacher, and the brother of actor, musician, and journalist Richard Elfman.

Elfman was raised in a racially mixed affluent community in Baldwin Hills, California, where he spent much of his time at the local movie theater discovering classic sci-fi, fantasy and horror films and first noticed the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.

Elfman has admitted to fabricating stories about his past out of boredom, including a false birthplace of Amarillo, Texas, and parents in the United States Air Force.

In his early school days, Elfman exhibited an aptitude for science with almost no interest in music, and was even rejected from elementary school orchestra "for having no propensity for music."

This would change when he switched high schools in the late 1960s and fell in with a musical crowd, who introduced him to early jazz and the work of Stravinsky and his 20th-century contemporaries.

After finishing high school early with plans to travel the world, Elfman followed his brother Richard to France, where he performed violin with Jérôme Savary's Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group.

He then embarked on a ten-month, self-guided tour through Africa, busking and collecting a range of West African percussion instruments until a series of illnesses forced him to return home.

At this time, Richard was forming a new musical theater group in Los Angeles.

After returning to Los Angeles from Africa in the early 1970s, Elfman was asked by his brother Richard to serve as musical director of his street theatre performance art troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

The Mystic Knights performed on the street and in theaters, and later in nightclubs throughout Los Angeles until Richard left in 1976 to pursue filmmaking.

As a send-off to the group's original concept, Richard produced the film Forbidden Zone based on the Mystic Knights' stage performances.

Elfman composed the songs and his first score for the film, and appeared as the character Satan, who performs a reworked version of Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher."

Before the release of Forbidden Zone, Elfman took over the Mystic Knights as lead singer-songwriter in 1976.

In 1979, he pared the group down to eight players to record and tour as a ska-influenced new wave band.

That summer, the group's name would change to Oingo Boingo.

He came to prominence as the lead singer and primary songwriter for the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s.

Elfman shifted the band to a more guitar-oriented rock sound in the late 1980s, which continued through their last album Boingo in 1994.

Following Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Elfman scored a string of comedies in the late 1980s, including Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield, Burton's Beetlejuice and the Bill Murray film Scrooged.

Non-comedy work included the all-synth score to Emilio Estevez's crime drama Wisdom and the big band, blues-infused music for Martin Brest's buddy cop action film Midnight Run.

Since scoring his first studio film in 1985, Elfman has garnered international recognition for composing over 100 feature film scores, as well as compositions for television, stage productions, and the concert hall.

Elfman has frequently worked with directors Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, and Gus Van Sant, contributing music to nearly 20 Burton projects, including Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Wednesday, as well as scoring Raimi's Darkman, A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Van Sant's Academy Award-winning films Good Will Hunting and Milk.

He wrote music for all of the Men in Black and Fifty Shades of Grey franchise films, the songs and score for Henry Selick's animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the themes for the popular television series Desperate Housewives and The Simpsons.

Their biggest success among eight studio albums penned by Elfman was 1985's Dead Man's Party, featuring the hit song "Weird Science" from the movie of the same name.

As fans of Oingo Boingo, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985.

Elfman was initially apprehensive because of his lack of formal training and having never scored a studio feature, but after Burton accepted his initial demo of the title music, and with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek, Elfman completed the score to great effect, paying homage to influential film composers Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann.

Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life.

The band also appeared performing their single "Dead Man's Party" in the 1986 movie Back to School, for which Elfman also composed the score.

In 1989, Elfman's influential, Grammy-winning score for Burton's Batman marked a major stylistic shift to dark, densely orchestrated music in the romantic idiom.

This continued in his scores for Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Sam Raimi's Darkman and Clive Barker's Nightbreed, all released in 1990.

With Batman, Elfman firmly established a career-spanning relationship with Burton, scoring all but three of the director's major studio releases.

Highlights include Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Big Fish (2003) and Alice in Wonderland (2010).

In 1993, Elfman wrote the score and ten songs for the Burton-produced stop motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick, and also provided the singing voice for main character Jack Skellington, as well as the voices for secondary characters Barrel, the Clown with the Tear-Away Face and others.

Citing permanent hearing damage from performing live and conflicts with his film-scoring career, Elfman retired Oingo Boingo in 1995 with a series of five sold-out final concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre ending on Halloween night.

Among his honors are four Oscar nominations, two Emmy Awards, a Grammy, seven Saturn Awards for Best Music, the 2002 Richard Kirk Award, the 2015 Disney Legend Award, the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award in 2017, and the Society of Composers & Lyricists Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.

On October 31, 2015, Elfman and Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek performed the song "Dead Man's Party" with an orchestra as an encore to a live-to-film concert of The Nightmare Before Christmas score at the Hollywood Bowl.

Elfman told the audience the performance was "20 years to the day" of Oingo Boingo's retirement.