In One Bar

Certain composers have such distinctiveness to their tool bag that you can recognize their style in one bar. Even if it’s not a composition but an arrangement.

Even if it’s an arrangement of a composer as distinctive as Stephen Sondheim, and a song as recognizable as “Not While I’m Around.”

Thomas Newman is a wonderful composer, noted for his many scores including Little Women, American Beauty, Finding Nemo, and The Shawshank Redemption, among many others. (I’m a particular fan of his credit sequence for Six Feet Under.)

Enjoy his beautiful new-ish (2015) piano arrangement of Not While I’m Around.