Robert (Bob) Buckley

Robert Buckley has been active as a composer, arranger, performer, producer, and conductor in Canada and around the world for more than 30 years.  The diverse nature of his background has given him the opportunity to write every conceivable kind of music, including jazz, rock, symphonic, country, techno, experimental, Broadway, and contemporary.  He has composed string arrangements for albums by Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, and Our Lady Peace, and he has composed two musicals for the Charlottetown Festival, one of which has been running for nine years.  Among the hundreds of television programs and movies he has scored are the computer-animated series ReBoot, Transformers, and Shadow Raiders, and the computer-animated films Casper’s Haunted Christmas and Scary Godmother.  In 1994, he composed the music for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, B.C., and in 1986 he composed “This is My Home” for the Canada Pavilion at Expo ’86.

Born in England, Bob took up the piano at the age of ten and began composing soon thereafter.  Following studies with California composer Hubert Klyne Headley, who exposed him to the twentieth-century music of Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel, and Shostakovich, he went on to study composition, conducting, and arranging with American composer William Bergsma at the University of Washington and electronic music at the University of British Columbia.

Upon leaving university, Bob began appearing on the weekly television series Let’s Go as keyboardist, saxophonist, and musical arranger.  In his quest to combine rock, jazz, and symphonic music, he formed the band Spring, with which he had his first top-ten single, and he performed the original work Song Cycle with the Vancouver and Edmonton Symphony Orchestras.  His keyboard and songwriting talents subsequently contributed to five albums with the rock bands Straight Lines (CBS Records) and Body Electric (A&M Records), including several top-ten singles and a gold record with the number-one single “Letting Go”.

His current projects include Tinsel, a musical on which he is collaborating with English novelist Michelle Magorian, The Bridge, a physical theatre show to be presented by Axis Theatre in Vancouver, Café Diablo, to be presented next year in Holland and the new Disney television series, Dragon Booster.

David, a long time resident of Vancouver, began his musical career playing trumpet in the North Vancouver Schools Band. Medicine, not music, became his profession and he is now a practicing physician in North Vancouver.

Over they years, David has played in many bands in Vancouver and New Zealand, including the North Shore Concert Band, Jazz Connexion, Doctor D and the Soul Demons, Capilano Brass, and the Docs of Dixieland. He has written many compositions and arrangements for concert, jazz, Dixieland, R & B Bands, and brass quintets. He admits that his creative energy has been a little restrained by the constraints of a busy practice augmented by an addiction to traveling in Latino countries and the South Pacific.

The Milagro Beanfield War Suite arrangement of David Grusin’s music mentioned above, was his first foray into concert band music. This can be heard on the North Shore Concert Band’s album Fiesta Pacifica. Also available from NS Musico are his jazz titles Cuando Talei Sonria, Set Sail, and Words in the Sand.