Dave Slonaker
Chuck Owen is a film and TV orchestrator, arranger, and composer and leader of the Dave Slonaker Big Band. He has orchestrated and arranged for many Hollywood composers including John Addison, Bruce Broughton, Danny Elfman, Joel McNeely, Alan Silvestri, Larry Rosenthal, and many others. Film credits include orchestrations for many popular films including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Justice League, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Oz the Great and Powerful, Alice in Wonderland, Spider-Man, Night at the Museum, Air Force One, Sleepy Hallow, and The Mummy Returnts. He has also orchestrated, arranged, and composed music for TV and animation including Jag, Murder, She Wrote, and Tiny Toons Adventures cartoon series.
Equally at home in all styles of music, he formed the Dave Slonaker Big Band in 2012 to perform his jazz compositions and arrangements, gaining a GRAMMY nomination in 2013 for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, Intrada, His music has also been performed by Clark Terry, and the Woody Herman and Count Basie Jazz Orchestras.
Dave grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Handed down a trombone by his father, he studied trombone and piano as a youth. Cueious about classical, jazz, and popular styles of music, he was determined to study both classical and jazz composition and trombone performances. Before moving to Hollywood, Dave was composer-in-residence at the strasenburgh Planetarium of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, componing electronic music soundtracks for worldwide distribution. Concurrently he was a freelance trombonist and the instructor of Low Brass at the State University of New York in Geneseo, New York.
Believing that passing the craft of composing and arranging to a new generation is an important part of being an artist, Dave has taught or given master classes at USC, the Eastman Scool of Music, the ASCAP Television & Film Scoring Workshop, the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC), and the Los Angeles Ravel Orchestral Study Group.