Jasha Klebe is a composer known for emotive melodies and impactful scores. Most notably, Jasha co-scored the BAFTA and Emmy nominated music of BBC’s Planet Earth II, alongside Hans Zimmer and Jacob Shea. He additionally provided music to the follow up series, Blue Planet II, as well as wrote the Emmy nominated music of National Geographic’s Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes. Jasha also composed the score to Netflix’s 2015 Oscar-nominated documentary, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom and National Geographic’s, Diana: In Her Own Words.
Jasha began his musical career at the age of 5, singing at his Grandparents’ opera house, Cinnabar Theater, in Petaluma, CA. He studied classical piano and trombone for over 15 years before he moved to Los Angeles and started working at Remote Control Productions under Hans Zimmer. Over the 4 years with Hans, Jasha wrote on such films as The Dark Knight Rises, Rush, Man of Steel, and several other notable projects. Jasha was also the music arranger for the 84th Academy Awards, as well as keyboard/ synthesizer player within the event’s orchestra. We get into that once-in-a-lifetime experience and how Zimmer’s confidence in this young musician allowed him to shine.
In 2013, Jasha began to serve as one of the headlining composers at Bleeding Fingers Music. Within this role, Jasha contributed countless hours of music to some of the most acclaimed series on television, including shows on ABC, CBS, MTV, Netflix, Lifetime, A&E, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, National Geographic, BBC, and he performed live on The Late Show with Colbert alongside Shea and Zimmer.
His music can be most recently heard on Stephen Dunn‘s and executive producer Russell T Davies‘ re-imagining of Queer As Folk, (which premiered on Peacock on June 9).
Early on, showrunner Stephen Dunn expressed his love of unique found sounds, percussion, and piano. He provided a creative space for Jasha where the ideas were limitless and nothing was off the table. In the composing process, Jasha created character themes and applied these found sounds to each of the leads. For Example – Mingus is a skateboarding young drag queen, so Jasha turned to the sounds of the skateboard – hits, swipes, the wheels, etc, all pour into this character’s theme.
The click-clack of stiletto heels, the sounds of “kat kats” harking back to the art of vogue, and the noise of beer bottles clanking are just some of the elements composer Klebe used in the upcoming relaunch of QUEER AS FOLK for Peacock. As a gay-identifying man (he/him), Jasha had an unforgettable experience working on a show that set out to be unapologetically queer, and made by an incredible team of queer individuals. He dug deep into his own life experiences in order to lend his talents to scoring the series: whether it be fears of coming out, the need to feel accepted, to be in love, or heart broken.
Check out our in-depth and candid chat with the very delightful Jasha Klebe!
You can learn more about Jasha’s music and upcoming projects at his official website which has links to his works and all his social accounts.
