Genesis b/w Genesis

Paul James Zaza was born in Toronto on December 28, 1952. He is one of the most prolific composers in the history of Canadian screen music. Over several decades he has scored more than 160 film and television productions, and his work sits at the core of Canada's modern screen-music legacy. Trained as a classical pianist and shaped by studio work, touring and production deadlines, he built a career that joins concert-hall discipline to the practical demands of popular music and large-volume film and television scoring.

Zaza was drawn to music early and went on to advanced training at the Royal Conservatory of Music, studying piano, harmony, orchestration and formal composition. That classical grounding stayed at the centre of his work. He had little interest in an academic career, though, and went straight into the professional music world, picking up the practical skills that later made him indispensable to producers and directors.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked as a performing musician. He played bass in the Toronto production of Hair at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and toured as a rock musician with The 5th Dimension. The road taught him large-scale touring, pop arrangement and live performance under pressure. In that world a musician had to adapt quickly and play clearly, and those skills counted as much as sophistication.

By the mid-1970s Zaza was working full time in Toronto's studios. In 1977 he released a run of instrumental jazz-funk and disco records, among them Le Payback, Zaza and Hot in Here. Long known mainly to collectors, these albums show a composer already fluent in building grooves, writing tight ensemble parts and producing a polished record. They also point to his screen work: rhythmically direct, economically arranged and written to do a specific job.

At the same time he was building his own facilities. He founded Zaza Sound Productions Ltd., which began as a full 24-track recording studio designed with synchronization and film work in mind. As his career moved toward screen music, the studio became a post-production and scoring operation. Many composers depended on outside studios. Zaza controlled his own, and that let him deliver scores quickly, efficiently and with technical precision.

His film breakthrough came at the end of the 1970s with director Bob Clark and fellow composer Carl Zittrer. Their score for Murder by Decree (1979), a dark Victorian thriller that sets Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Jack the Ripper, won the Genie Award for Best Music Score in 1980. The film showed he could work at a high dramatic level, and the score builds orchestral tension with restrained themes and a strong sense of atmosphere. It also began Zaza's long association with genre cinema, the work much of the public knows him for.

In the early 1980s he became one of Canada's most dependable composers for fast-turnaround work. He scored the landmark horror films Prom Night (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981) and Curtains (1983), writing suspense and menace while working inside tight production limits. On Prom Night he had to replace costly licensed disco tracks with original music on an extreme deadline, a job that made him as much a problem-solver on the production as its composer.

He also showed remarkable range. In 1983 he co-scored A Christmas Story, another Bob Clark film, which became a seasonal institution across North America. Most film scores fade once a picture leaves theatres. A Christmas Story comes back every holiday season, so Zaza's music is heard year after year and has settled into popular memory in a way few composers experience.

Through the 1980s and beyond, his output expanded dramatically. He scored mainstream comedies including Porky's and its sequels, along with thrillers, family films, television movies, documentaries and long-form series. He also took on specialized assignments such as re-scoring international material. For the 1993 Canadian English re-dub of Kimba the White Lion he composed an entirely new soundtrack. By the 1990s and 2000s his catalogue had grown so large that sources put the total anywhere from 160 to more than 175 credited productions, depending on how episodic television is counted.

Along with his Genie Award, Zaza received multiple SOCAN awards for the continued broadcast and performance of his music. His professional papers, manuscripts and production materials are preserved as a dedicated fonds at Library and Archives Canada, which recognizes the scope and historical importance of his career.

Zaza never settled on one instantly recognizable sound. His career rests on musical literacy, technical command and adaptability. His scores work because he understands what music has to do for a film: support the story, set the pacing and mood, and carry the edit. Classical training, studio fluency and a practical grasp of production kept him among the most consistently employed composers in Canadian film and television through the industry's busiest decades. His music runs through Canadian screen culture, from cult horror and holiday classics to the television movies watched in millions of living rooms.

-Robert Williston