ISoundtrack composer and former Yes guitarist Trevor Rabin cuts his first song-oriented solo album in 34 years. What took so long? “The time,” he says, “just disappeared.”
BY GARY GRAFF
“I don’t think there was any kind of masterplan in the beginning, or anything close to it,” Trevor Rabin says, summarizing a music career that’s taken him from classroom music stands to Hollywood movie studios — and many points in between. “It all just kind of happened. I think everything took different avenues once it got going.”
Rest assured, the South African–born guitarist, composer, bandleader and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer (with Yes) has traveled a great many paths while playing music for almost all of his 69 years. His latest effort, Rio(Inside Out Music), is his first new song-oriented solo album in 34 years.
The son of overachieving artistic parents — dad Godfrey was an attorney, conductor and lead violinist in the Johannesburg Philharmonic; mom Joy a painter, ballerina, actress and classical pianist — Rabin says he grew up as a prodigy who “could read music before I could read English.” Piano lessons at age five led to classical studies as a youth, as well as thoughts of becoming a conductor. That was well before the rock world beckoned with groups such as Rabbitt, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and nearly Asia, after which he took Yes to the top of the charts with “Owner of a Lonely Heart” 40 years ago. Then in the mid ’90s, partly thanks to a chance meeting with actor Steven Seagal, Rabin entered the scoring world and never looked back. His extensive resume in film and television includes 13 Jerry Bruckheimer movies and projects such as Con Air, Armageddon, Remember the Titansand National Treasure.
Rabin’s scores have also accompanied presidential speeches and the Mission: Space attraction at Disney’s Epcot park. He even became a basketball fan after being commissioned to write music for National Basketball Association and NCAA March Madness broadcasts.
Rabin did find himself on the rock and roll road again with fellow Yes alumni Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman after the band’s Rock Hall induction in 2017, but he acknowledges that more than 25 years of scoring (lucrative, of course) subsumed that other vital part of his musical makeup. “Time just kind of slipped by, you k
