Paul Buckmaster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Buckmaster is an artist, arranger, and composer. He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Elton John, but he has also worked as an arranger on various hit songs, including David Bowie's "Space Oddity" (1969), and has played with Miles Davis, on On the Corner.
Born in London, England, Paul was taught the cello from age 4. At age eleven, he won a cello scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Buckmaster played and composed in a number of jazz and progressive music groups including the Third Ear Band, Nucleus and Suntreader.
Buckmaster met Miles Davis in 1969 and began to study with him in New York City in 1972. He appears Davis' album On the Corner (1972), for which he wrote arrangements and played electric cello.
He began working with Elton John in 1970, helping arrange his second album, Elton John, and initiating a collabrative effort that exists to the present day. In addition to the aforementioned artists, Buckmaster has arranged music on albums by The Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Mott the Hoople, Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon, Faith Hill, Backstreet Boys, The Darkness, Keith Urban, Angelo Branduardi and Celine Dion.
More recently, Buckmaster won a Grammy Award as Best Arranger for the sweeping string arrangement of Train's 2001 song "Drops of Jupiter". He was brought back for the band's following album, My Private Nation.
In 2004, it was revealed that he had worked on arrangements for the songs "Madagascar", "The Blues", "There Was a Time", and "Prostitute" as part of the sessions for the as-yet unreleased Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy.
In 2005, Buckmaster arranged and conducted an orchestral accompaniment for the song "Landed", from the Ben Folds album Songs for Silverman. While the song went on to be a hit single, the string arrangement, at the request of Folds, was left out of the single and album cuts and is now available on the DualDisc version of the album.
