John Lissauer

Music career

John Lissauer graduated with a degree in music composition from Yale University, where he also focused on woodwind instrumentals. He moved to New York in 1971. According to Lissauer, his first big gig happened when he was nineteen, when he was brought on to arrange and produce jazz singer Al Jarreau's first recordings.

After having worked with artists such as Lewis Furey and The Manhattan Transfer in his early twenties, Lissauer went on to produce and arrange the 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony by Leonard Cohen. From 1974 through 1976, Cohen toured with a band led by Lissauer, first in Europe and then the US and Canada. Ten years later Lissauer also produced, arranged, and conducted Cohen's album Various Positions, which was well received in Rolling Stone, who singled out Lissauer's "lucid and beautiful production." That album contained three of Cohen's most popular songs, including the seminal recording of "Hallelujah," one of the most recorded songs in American pop music history. Between his work for Cohen and Bette Midler, Lissauer has worked on four gold records. Among other artists he has arranged or produced for are Whitney Houston, Mary Fahl, Tony Bird and Ayo.

Lissauer has also composed, arranged, or conducted the scores for numerous films, and his 1975 score for La Tete de Normande St. Onge won a Canadian Academy Award for "Best Original Score in a Motion Picture." More recently, he has composed the scores for such films as The Last Godfather, End Call, Pokemon: The First Movie and Apartment 1303, and he orchestrated and arranged both the scores for Seven and That Thing You Do for Howard Shore. Since age 21 he has scored over 2000 radio and TV commercials, and has won a number of Clio Awards, including the "Campaign Of The Decade" award for his work on Polaroid with James Garner.

Lissauer has composed and conducted for orchestras in New York, Hollywood, London, Paris, Prague and Toronto, and is also a woodwind player with various local symphonies around New York. He has taught music at both Yale and Kingsborough Community College.

Personal life

Lissauer and his wife, Lilian, have a son, Greg and live in Westchester, New York. On his farm he operates The Katonah Mill Studio; the digital 96-track recording facilities are less than an hour from Midtown Manhattan, and groups that have recorded there come from genres as diverse as heavy metal, avant garde big band, choir and gospel, string quartet, and classical guitar.