About Dave Grusin
Robert David Grusin 1934) is an American composer, arranger, producer, jazz pianist, and band leader. He has composed many scores for feature films and television and has won numerous awards for his soundtrack and record work, including an Academy Award and 10 Grammy Awards. Grusin was also a frequent collaborator with director Sydney Pollack, scoring many of his films like Three Days of the Condor , Absence of Malice , Tootsie , The Firm , and Random Hearts . In 1978, Grusin founded GRP Records with Larry Rosen, and was an early pioneer of digital recording.
Grusin was born in Littleton, Colorado, to Henri and Rosabelle Grusin. His family originates from the Gruzinsky princely line of the Bagrationi dynasty, the royal family that ruled the Kingdom of Georgia in the ninth to 19th centuries. In Slavic languages, "Grusin" is an ethnonym for Georgians. Grusin’s father, Henri, was a violinist of Jewish ancestry who was born and raised in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, from where he emigrated to the United States in 1913. Grusin's mother, Rosabelle, was a pianist. He is the older brother of fellow jazz keyboardist, composer, and producer Don Grusin.
Grusin studied music at the University of Colorado at Boulder and graduated in 1956. His teachers included Cecil Effinger; and Wayne Scott, a pianist, arranger, and professor of jazz.
Grusin produced his first single in 1962, "Subways Are for Sleeping", and his first film score, for Divorce American Style, in 1967. Other scores followed, including The Graduate , Winning , The Friends of Eddie Coyle , The Midnight Man , and Three Days of the Condor .
In 1978, Grusin founded GRP Records with his business partner Larry Rosen, and began producing some of the first commercial digital recordings. Grusin was the composer for On Golden Pond , Tootsie , and The Goonies . In 1988, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for The Milagro Beanfield War. Grusin composed the musical signatures for the 1984 TriStar Pictures logo and the 1993 Columbia Pictures Television logo.
In 1998, Grusin ranked #5 and #8 on Billboard's Top 10 Jazz Artists, at mid-year and at year's end, respectively, based on sales of his album "Dave Grusin Presents West Side Story."
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