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Artist: Laura Karpman
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Laura Karpman:

Rock Hudson - All That Heaven Allowed

Lakeshore Records is set to release the Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed–Original Motion PIcture Soundtrack digitally today, August 9, featuring original music by the Oscar-nominated and five-time Emmy Award-winner Laura Karpman (American Fiction, Why We Hate). The poignant modern jazz score recently received a nomination for an Emmy for “Outstanding Music Composition For A Documentary Series Or Special (Original Dramatic Score)” which marked her eighth Primetime Emmy nomination. The HBO Original Documentary is streaming now on Max.

ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED is an intimate portrait of actor Rock Hudson, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated leading men of the 1950’s and ‘60’s and an icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age, whose diagnosis and eventual death from AIDS in 1985 shocked the world, subsequently shifting the way the public perceived the AIDS pandemic. Born Roy Fitzgerald and renamed “Rock Hudson” by his agent, with his 6’5” frame, strong physique and chiseled good looks, Hudson was the embodiment of romantic masculinity and heterosexuality. The film explores the story of a man living a double life, one whose public persona was carefully manufactured by his handlers and orchestrated by the studio system, while fearing a potentially career-ending discovery that he was privately living as a gay man.

Says Karpman:  “Bless Stephen Kijak for loving and wanting a thoughtful jazz score to tell Rock Hudson’s
amazing life story in the HBO Film Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed. The score for this
documentary film is rich, complex and in most cases, pure jazz.  Jazz is a multi-faceted musical language
that brings welcomed dimension to this complex story, exploring Hollywood history, the queer closet
and the onset of AIDS.  I am proud and honored to have worked on this important film, and want to
thank all my musicians, especially Elena Pinderhughes, who continues to be my good luck charm!”

Laura Karpman:

American Fiction (OMPS)

Sony Music Masterworks today releases AMERICAN FICTION (ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK) with music by award-winning composer LAURA KARPMAN. Available everywhere now, the album features original score music written by Karpman for Cord Jefferson’s boldly hilarious film, which follows a novelist named Monk as he confronts issues of race, identity and his own artistic commodification. A longtime jazz aficionado who spent her Julliard days playing piano in neighborhood clubs, Karpman was initially inspired by the protagonists’ namesake, American jazz pioneer Thelonious Monk, crafting a piano-heavy soundscape with slightly off-kilter flourishes to match the film’s darkly humorous tone. Originally premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award, American Fiction debuts in select theaters today, wide in January.  

Of the project, composer LAURA KARPMAN says, “When the brilliant Cord Jefferson asked me to write a jazz score for American Fiction, it was a dream come true. This thinking-person’s film so profoundly resonated with me because of its great humor and infinite heart. The score for American Fiction centers around two main themes: Monk’s theme, which plays with the craggy edges of both the protagonist and his musician namesake, and the family theme, which cradles the beautiful contours of love, harmonically in sync, but not always played perfectly together.”

Laura Karpman:

WHY WE HATE

Laura Karpman (Underground, Paris Can Wait, Step, Black Nativity) has scored the Discovery docu-series Why We Hate. The show is directed by Geeta Gandbhir & Sam Pollard and investigates the human capacity for hatred and how we can overcome it. The 6-parter traces the evolutionary basis of hate and uses stories from past and present to reveal the nature of the primal and universal emotion. Steven Spielberg, Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and Frank Marshall (Jurassic World, The Sixth Sense) are executive producing the Amblin Television & Jigsaw production with Stacey Offman, Richard Perello (Super Troopers), Darryl Frank & Justin Falvey (The Americans, The Haunting of Hill House), Yael Melamede, Erica Sashin and Steve Tisch (Forrest Gump, The Equalizer). Karpman has previously scored the Spielberg-produced 2002 mini-series Taken. Why We Hate will premiere later this year on Discovery.

Laura Karpman:

ASK YOUR MAMA

"Ivesian collage with club-culture remixing"- The New York Times
"Carnegie Hall reaches a climax with Laura Karpman's new work"- The New Yorker
"Fevered, restrained, super-lush in turns...always impressive."- Vanity Fair
"Audacious, mesmerizing… Karpman has the skill to shift musical gears with ease." - Gramophone

ASK YOUR MAMA - Setting of  Langston Hughes' 1961 epic poem by Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman
A Carnegie Hall commission & RELEASED via AVIE RECORDS. A plural vision of the American dream deferred, ASK YOUR MAMA bursts the boundaries of time, place and expression, tracing the currents and tributaries of cultural diasporas, from African to the Americas, the South to the North, cities to suburbs. The prophetic voice of Langston Hughes echoes throughout, "ONE'S COUNTRY IS YOUR MAMA." Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and released by Avie records.

11 New  106 Total
SYND: PBS: NewsHour, Classical 24, TRH
Direct: MOOD
Markets include: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Orlando, Madison WI, Montreal
Online: Variety, Huffington Post, examiner.com, Gramophone, Smithsonian.com, Taintradio, Thought Catalog, KUHS, Rainbow Times, The Music Matters, Radio Phoenix, Jazz From Gallery 41, Fainfaire, AccuRadio, Jazz Weekly