Joe Hisaishi

While possessing a stylistically distinct sound, Hisaishi's music has been known to explore and incorporate different genres, including minimalist, experimental electronic, European classical, and Japanese classical. Lesser known are the other musical roles he plays; he is also a typesetter, author, arranger, and conductor. Hisaishi was a student of composer Takeo Watanabe.

Hisaishi started learning violin in the Violin School Suzuki Shinichi at the age of four, he found his passion in music. At the same age, he also began watching 300 movies a year with his father, which influenced his career. Realizing his love, he attended the Kunitachi College of Music in 1969 to major in music composition. Hisaishi collaborated with minimalist artists as a typesetter, furthering his experience in the musical world.

He enjoyed his first success of the business in 1974 when he composed music for the anime series called Gyatoruzu. This and other early works were created under his given name. He presented his first public performance in the mid '70s, spreading his name around his community.

In 1983, Hisaishi was recommended to create an image album for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Hisaishi and the director of the animated film, Hayao Miyazaki, became great friends and would work together on many future projects. In 1985, he founded his own recording studio—the wonder station. Their collaboration has invited comparisons to the collaborations of Steven Spielberg and John Williams. This big break led to Hisaishi's overwhelming success as a composer of film scores. In 1986, Laputa: Castle in the Sky would be the first feature to appear under the Studio Ghibli banner, and its gentle, faintly melancholic tone would become a familiar trademark of much of the studio's later output. As Hisaishi strengthened his reputation as one of the budding anime industry's top musical contributors, his compositions would proceed to become some of the very hallmarks of early anime in the '80s and '90s.

Hisaishi formulated an alias inspired by Quincy Jones, an African-American musician and producer. Re-transcribed in Japanese, "Quincy Jones" became "Joe Hisaishi". ("Quincy", pronounced "Kuinshī” in Japanese, can be written using the same kanji in "Hisaishi"; "Joe" comes from "Jones".)

(Source: Wikipedia)