Biography

Randy Kerber is an accomplished composer, orchestrator and keyboard player with a prolific recording career in film, television, and pop music. He began his first national tour with Bette Midler in 1977, at the age of 19. Kerber was nominated for an Oscar in 1986, along with Quincy Jones and others, for Best Original Score for the motion picture, The Color Purple. He was nominated for a Grammy for his arrangement of "Over the Rainbow" for Barbra Streisand.

As a studio keyboardist, Randy Kerber has worked on over 800 motion pictures including Titanic, A Beautiful Mind, and the first three films of the Harry Potter franchise, including the featured celeste solos. The piano in the opening and closing scenes of Forrest Gump, which features a feather floating in the wind, was performed by Randy Kerber.

He has been an orchestrator on over 50 films, including work with Academy Award winner James Horner. He worked with Eric Clapton as keyboardist, orchestrator, and conductor on the film Rush - playing on the Grammy Award-winning song "Tears in Heaven".

During his career, Randy Kerber has worked with a wide range of artists such as Michael Jackson, Paul Anka, Leonard Cohen, Rickie Lee Jones, Whitney Houston, Michael Bolton, Rod Stewart, B.B. King, Bill Medley, Annie Lennox, Art Garfunkel, Anastacia, Celine Dion, Natalie Cole, Al Jarreau, Ray Charles, Neil Diamond, Elisa, Julio Iglesias, Barry Manilow, Ricky Martin, Bette Midler, Corey Hart, Eric Burdon, Kenny Rogers, Donna Summer, George Benson, Diana Ross, Marta Sanchez, Frank Sinatra, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Dionne Warwick; and groups including Air Supply, America, Def Leppard, The Temptations, Manhattan Transfer, Lisa Stansfield, The Three Degrees and A. R. Rahman

Recently, Randy Kerber has performed piano solos on Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Robert Zemeckis' Flight, and Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra for which he also trained Michael Douglas. He is also a featured jazz pianist on Damien Chazelle's La La Land. Kerber has worked closely with actors Jason Schwartzman for his role in the Disney film Saving Mr. Banks and Zoe Saldana for her turn as Nina Simone in the biopic Nina.
- IMDb mini biography by: Randy Kerber

In the old days, the picture would have to be "locked", meaning no more changes can be done to the picture and you could start writing the music. Now, because it's digital, a film is basically never locked, pushing the post-production to the very end with a release date coming. Sometimes you get new revisions when you've already written to the last revisions. They'll say, "We haven't changed much". But they've snipped things out and all of the timings get thrown out...There used to be a huge room in the back of the studios that stored the magnetic tapes where the music was recorded. Everything is recorded to Pro Tools now. And, as far as the music editor goes, streamers used to be directly scribed onto magnetic film, but now software does all the math for you.

The ability to bring authenticity to different genres is the most important thing about being a studio musician...What people don't realize is that it's a unique skillset to able to read the music and bring a degree of performance to what you are reading. It's like a good actor who can do a cold reading from a script and be in that character...You can become adept at very quickly skimming a page. It's like a golfer who can read the course and know by looking at it how the ball is going to fall.

There's new music all the time - always a new take on something. I like to bring as much life to it as I possibly can. I get a lot of pleasure from that. The thing I tell young people is: be passionate about what you want. The love of what you do will manifest events in your life...Relationships are important in this business. Treasure the people you meet; it's something you can potentially build on later.

I love the orchestra and I love dotting all the I's, crossing all the t's, and marking all the dynamics to bring some finesse to a composition...There is a psychology to how the page looks to a musician. If there's too much information, it's restricting. If there's too little information, they may not care. I feel like I bring a level of care that makes the musician interested in playing the music.

We still use microphones we used in the 1950s and 1960s - great vintage, classic mics. And we are still recording live orchestras, and that's fantastic! You cannot take away the magic of all those human beings with beating hearts playing in a room together.. It's unquantifiable. Instruments resonate; sample sounds don't move through the air in the same way. When people walk onto a scoring stage for the first time and listen to a cue we play, the look on their faces makes my heart sing.