Los Angeles Times: 'Green Book' composer Kris Bowers taught piano to Mahershala Ali

Actor Mahershala Ali, seated at the piano, was coached in piano technique by the film's composer, Kris Bowers, standing behind him, to portray the story of Don Shirley and the concert tour he undertook through the Deep South in 1962. (Patti Perret (Universal Pictures, Participant, and DreamWorks)

Los Angeles Times

The Conversation: How 'Green Book' composer Kris Bowers taught piano to Mahershala Ali and honors Don Shirley

By Randy Lewis

Dec 13, 2018 

The homework that film composer and music mentor Kris Bowers had to do before taking on his latest assignment speaks volumes about the unique niche in contemporary American music that pianist Don Shirley carved out for himself more than a half-century ago.

That legacy is at the heart of “Green Book,” the widely lauded film based on Shirley’s remarkable life and music, starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen. Already the Peter Farrelly-directed film has collected five Golden Globe nominations, including best picture.

Shirley, who trained as a classical musician, was the first African American accepted into the Leningrad Conservatory of Music in the former Soviet Union. But he was more or less forced to abandon his dream to perform the classical music he most loved and instead find a career in jazz and pop music because his record company persuaded him that audiences would not accept a black pianist on classical stages at that time.

Bowers had been directed toward a life at the keyboard even before birth. His parents' dream was for their unborn son to play piano, to the extent that they played piano music consistently while he was still in his mother’s womb. He went on to study at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, the Colburn School of Music in L.A. and then the Juilliard School in New York.

Though he hasn’t faced the same struggles that Shirley did decades ago, Bowers does feel a connection with Shirley and didn’t flinch in discussing what he knew about the life, music and racism Shirley experienced as he tried to bridge the worlds of jazz and classical music.

I know a fair amount about jazz and classical music, but I have to confess I was not aware of Don Shirley before I learned about this film.

Me either. I actually went back to Juilliard recently to speak to a couple of my old teachers in the jazz studies program there, and a couple of them didn’t know about him either. The really surprising thing to me is that he put out six albums pretty much flying under the radar. So I’m glad to have been able to help bring his music to new audiences.

That surprises me, given that Shirley lived above Carnegie Hall and had a solid following in New York in the early 1960s when this story takes place. How could he have slipped by the attention of many music aficionados in the jazz and classical worlds?

In one of the meetings I had with my [jazz] teachers, I talked about maybe doing a conversation at Juilliard about Dr. Shirley and his music. They said we should talk to people from the classical department, and they were talking about him as a classical pianist, not a jazz musician. So even now it’s hard to place him.

It’s really an extraordinary journey that Shirley undertook: touring the Deep South with the other two members of his trio at a time when segregation was still institutionalized in many places. As the movie points out, he could have stayed in New York and earned a lot more money and without the racism that met him on that two-month tour.