Alumnus Zach Bornheimer ('17 and '15) Wins at GRAMMY® Awards as Associate Producer
Congrats to USF School of Music Alumnus Zachary Bornheimer, who is now officially a GRAM-MY® Award Winning Album Associate Producer for the album Data Lords by the Maria Schnei-der Orchestra. Bornheimer completed his Bachelor’s in Music Studies and his Master’s in Jazz Composition from the USF School of Music, which is where he began a relationship with Maria Schneider when she performed in our Concert Hall in 2014 as a part of the Monday Night Jazz series with the Tampa Jazz Club.
Since then, they have been working together and collaborating musically and have really devel-oped a style together over the years. Originally, Zachary was helping with things like copy work but then began taking on more responsibilities which led to proofing scores, mixing, mastering, digitizing, and helping make artistic decisions such as the song order on the winning album.
The album Data Lords was created as a two part thematic jazz experience where the first section represents “The Digital World” while the second section represents “The Natural World”. The two parts played off of these elements and worked on “making big band feel more emotional.” Data Lords won for Best Large Jazz Ensemble and the song “Sputnik” won for Best Instrumental Composition.
Bornheimer reflects that he and Schneider’s work together has always been remote with him in Tampa and her in New York so he says that working on this album together in a pandemic was not terribly different from how they were already operating, if anything, more resources became available. It did cut down significantly on his performance life however so he was glad this project came along to be able to still produce, create, and collaborate with other artists in a safe capaci-ty.
Currently Bornheimer is also designing and developing software, which gives him the flexibility to be able to pursue his love of music. He said “Maria is such a joy to work with and I’m really hoping we can make another album, even though I don’t know how we could possibly top this one."