The Planets Reimagined: Jeremy Levy on a Career as a Film Orchestrator (Episode 130)

Work begets work.

Jeremy Levy is a Grammy-nominated composer, arranger and orchestrator who has worked in nearly every medium in Los Angeles. As an orchestrator he has added his touch to scores including The Queen's Gambit, Frozen 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp. His album The Planets: Reimagined, a modern big band jazz take on Gustav Holst's The Planets, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella.

In Episode 130 of The Career Musician, Nomad and Jeremy talk about how a trombone player from a small Missouri town became a working film orchestrator, and what it really takes to build a career as a music arranger and orchestrator in LA. Here is what stood out.

The band teacher handed him a trombone

Jeremy did not pick the trombone. He wanted to play trumpet, but the school had run out, and the band director asked if he could play a trombone instead. He made a sound on it and picked it up fast.

He also got lucky with his school. His hometown had about 20,000 people, yet his high school had a full-time jazz program, a real class separate from the regular band. Jeremy gives the credit straight to the teachers who built it. Nomad loved that, because without our teachers, where would any of us be?

From there it was a dual track: a classical trombone performance degree at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, plus jazz bands, trios, wedding gigs and sitting in around town at night. Kansas City taught him something he says he has not experienced anywhere else: riff bands, where a big band builds an arrangement on the spot, by ear, one section at a time.

Follow where your life is taking you

Jeremy went east before he went west, to the jazz program at the University of Miami. He was accepted as a performer, then the scholarship money dried up. The school noticed the arranging work in his application and asked if he wanted to switch to the arranging program instead. He said yes, and it turned out to be the right call.

"I kind of felt like the pull of, you have to follow where your life is taking you."

Jeremy Levy, 12:58

That is Luck = preparation + opportunity. The opportunity was a closed door. The preparation was the arranging he had already done, sitting right there in his package.

Moving to LA was not a one-step process

He did not finish school and pack the car. He stayed in Miami for two more years, toured internationally and saved money, which helped a lot later. He watched classmates move to Los Angeles, get their feet in and still be there a year later. That gave him the nerve.

His entry point was a month-long scholarship program at UCLA for student composers. It put him in a room with LA session players, film composers and elder statesmen of arranging, plus students who already lived in town. You made friends, they called you for things, you called them for things, and little by little the gigs started coming.

Nomad named the quality that makes a move like that work: tenacity. When you make a big move, you need nerves of steel.

Keep a passion project, even when the work is good

Most of Jeremy's income, he estimates 85 to 90 percent, comes from orchestrating film, TV, video games and streaming shows. It is fulfilling work. It also has a sameness to it, with crazy time crunches at the end of every project. So soon after he moved to LA he started a big band, the Budman/Levy Orchestra, with saxophonist Alex Budman.

"At some point you need to get back to actually making music, or writing music, or kind of getting back to the things that kind of drew you into music."

Jeremy Levy, 19:16

The Planets project started around 2019. He wrote it over about nine months, in between paid orchestration work. It also arrived after the birth of his first child, and he called it one little thing that was just for himself, a way to regain some control during a season of big life changes.

He did the marketing himself

The Grammy nomination was a goal, not an accident. Jeremy chose The Planets because it meant a lot to him, it means a lot to other people, and it is in the public domain, so there were no copyright issues. People already know it, which gives a listener a reason to press play.

Then he did the work. His label submitted the record. He joined Grammy groups on Facebook, worked the mailing lists, made follow-along score videos for YouTube and edited a split-screen quarantine big band video himself, learning Final Cut Pro along the way. He rebuilt his website so he could run press and his web shop. He only hired a publicist once the nomination came out.

Nomad pointed out how often career musicians get overwhelmed by all the peripheral work. Jeremy just did it, one deadline at a time. That is Make Music Your Business.

An orchestrator's real job is organization

People imagine the composer sends a piano sketch. Not anymore. The orchestrator gets a detailed computer mock-up that sounds great, but played as-is by a live orchestra it would only get you about 60 percent of the way there. The orchestrator sorts out every detail so the vision is realized in the real world, and that includes knowing what to throw out.

On a large Netflix series with hundreds of minutes of score and nowhere near that much recording time, the team kept a master Google Doc with a checkbox for every section: soloists, woodwinds, brass, strings, guitars. They planned in advance what could stay as samples and what had to be live. Jeremy still orchestrated everything, with notes on what to record first, so any spare studio time could be used. They ended up with more live brass than expected.

"Staying organized really allowed us to just maximize Tim's money."

Jeremy Levy, 38:53

That is Reliability beats virtuosity at the highest level. On a union session where every minute costs money, the orchestrator who keeps the team out of the weeds is the one who gets the next call.

The takeaway

Asked how he defines success, Jeremy kept it simple: staying busy, providing for his family, and seeing past work lead to more work. He met one of his favorite clients through a colleague who kept passing him jobs, and they have kept working together ever since. As Nomad always says, work begets work.

"If things work out, then you just kind of keep working together, and at some point you have a career."

Jeremy Levy, 44:32

Do good work, stay organized, keep something that is just yours, and treat every relationship like it matters. Find Jeremy's music and arrangements at jlevymusic.com, and if you are chasing your next call, start with the free Get the Gig Guide.

Get the gig. Keep the gig. Build the career.

Watch on YouTube or find every episode on the TCM Podcast page.