Ira Newborn
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Ira Newborn (1949- ) is an American musician and composer, best known for his work composing motion picture soundtracks.
Among the many movies Newborn has scored or for which he’s written songs are Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Uncle Buck, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the smoky jazz score for Into the Night for whom he wrote music for B.B. King, and Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. He also stepped in as musical director and producer for The Blues Brothers.
Newborn’s most famous association may be as the soundtrack composer for the Naked Gun series of police satires starring Leslie Nielsen. Newborn’s brassy big band/blues theme song for the franchise first appeared on the TV series that inspired the movies, 1982’s Police Squad!.
Newborn has also worked in concerts, commercials, Broadway, and the recording industry as performer, arranger, composer and conductor.
Newborn is also a professor at New York University, from which he received his bachelor’s degree in 1972. Influenced by everything from Johann Sebastian Bach to James Brown to the Beatles, guitarist Newborn led and played in several musical groups before signing on as the musical director for the vocal group The Manhattan Transfer.
Newborn's younger brother, Jud Newborn, is a leading lecturer, author, Holocaust scholar and curator. Like his brother, his career also touches on film. He was awarded his Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of Chicago, and was recruited to help create New York's Holocaust museum, The Museum of Jewish Heritage, where he served as Founding Historian and curator. A former Fulbright Fellow, he is co-author of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, the definitive account of a legendary German White Rose anti-Nazi resistance group launched by students in Munich in 1942. The book tells the full story behind the 2005 Oscar-nominated German film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Jud Newborn is also a noted lecturer who has spoken at such institutions as the Simon Wiesenthal Centerin Los Angeles and San Diego's Old Globe Theater to New York's National Arts Club and the United Nations. Jud Newborn now serves as Special Projects Curator and Director of Development for the Cinema Arts Centre, one of the leading art cinema complexes in the world, founded 9 years before the Sundance Institute.
Among the many artists on whose records Ira Newborn has worked are Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Billy Joel and The Pointer Sisters. Besides contributing to the "blockbuster" status of many motion pictures, a number of his film scores have received "cult status."
