From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You want to ask yourself the musical question,

what do the Grateful Dead, J Leno, Sting, and Art Blakey

have in common? Well, their lives have all been made better by my guest, Brantford Marcellus,

whose turn to scoring film. He's contributed to film score, certainly, in the past, and won the

Dramed Desk Award for his work, scoring the revival of Fences. Gosh, almost 13 years ago now, I guess.

I still think about his terrific album, one of my favorites, I guess,

his 35th anniversary this year, Random Abstract.

His newest effort, for she's joining us, is the score to the George Wolf directed film,

Russell and a Life of Byrd Rustin Brantford.

It's a thrill to have you here. Thank you for doing this.

It's great to hear you again, my man.

One of the things we just were chatting very briefly before we got started about this score is that it's really propulsive.

And whenever Byrd enters, first of all, you play him into the movie.

You give him an entrance. You give him an entrance.

You give him a theme.

And then so often when he's on screen, we get to hear either bass or drums because this sense of movement is really key to who he is as a character.

I want to talk to you about where that comes from.

George has very strong opinions about music.

One of the things that's like almost always, like no strings.

I don't want to hear strings.

I want to hear either jazz or blues or sometimes R&B.

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