Tom Erba

So I started in music at the ripe age of 3...a classmate in preschool brought a violin to show & tell, and I begged moms & pops for months to let me play one. They finally acquiesced, and I went at it non-stop. Studying the Suzuki method, I was a member of the Sacramento Junior Symphony at the age of 6. Then came my teenage years, puberty, and rock & roll. Enter the drums, and years of headaches for the family! I was exposed to a pretty wide spectrum of music from a very young age. I was the drummer in the Davis High Jazz ensemble, which attended the Montreaux Jazz festival in 1998. Attending Stanford University's Jazz Workshop in 87, I took master classes with the late Billy Higgins (Mles Davis, Sonny Rollins). My life changed forever - I befriended Billy's protege Kharon Harrison at the workshop, and visited him in Baldwin Hills the next summer, hanging out at Fifth Street Dick's, and soaking up the vibrant Lemert Park scene every chance I had. After returning home to Sacramento, I completed high school and left to study music composition at US Santa Barbara, where I performed regularly with my jazz quartet at venues in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. During my freshman year, I was in a bad accident and suffered a major cerebral contusion. Reduced to the cognitive level of a 5 year old for nearly a year, I stayed with my family to make a slow recovery, and asked many deeper questions of myself, about both my existence and place in the world, and what music meant to me. After returning to Santa Barbara to finish school, I immediately migrated to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music, both for records and for picture. After sendng out a million emails to every composer I could find, I scored an internship at oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer's Media Ventures as an assistant, and worked on such films as TEARS OF THE SUN, and MATCHSTICK MEN. After Media Ventures, I was approached by award-winning veteran composer Stephen James Edwards, who quickly hired me as a staff composer for his source music library, Source In Sync. I quickly released 5 full-length genre releases on Source In Sync, with placements in dozens of Network Episodics including Alias, Desperate Housewives, Las Vegas, CSI Miami, and The Shield. Nifty - I was a working composer! In 2005, Warner Brothers produced 13 all-original episodes of the classic animation cartoon Tom & Jerry. I submitted an orchestral demo for the project and was selected to be the newest composer at Warner Brothers Animation, beating out a large pool of veteran, incumbent composers, many of them 20 years my senior. I heard they were pretty peeved about it, but, frankly, I had music to write! An instant hit, Tom & Jerry Tales is currently airing both internationally and domestically, and has become the number one animated television show on Saturday morning, airing on Kids WB. To my delight, numerous fan websites have been launched since the show's release, and I've had quite a few nifty complements on the old-school, Scott-Bradley approach I took with the sound of the orchestra. So here we are - let the music play!