Light/Sun

Steven Kindler (violin) and Jan Hammer (piano, electric piano, Moog synthesizer, Oberheim synthesizer, Freeman string synthesizer, Mellotron, digital sequencer, drums, percussion). From the album The First Seven Days (1975).

In 1988 Hammer was asked to write and perform “The Runner” for a TV commercial series in England, and also wrote and played the song for the pan-European television series Eurocops, which aired in seven countries. In 1989 he recorded Snapshots with each song composed, interpreted and produced by himself. The promotional video for “Too Much to Lose”, the album’s first European single, featured Jeff Beck, with whom he had already worked before, Ringo Starr from The Beatles and David Gilmour from Pink Floyd.

In the early 1990s Hammer toured with acclaimed drummer Tony Williams and they took part in the Montreal Jazz Festival. Hammer then went on to write film soundtracks, beginning with I Come in Peace (1990) science fiction by Craig R. Baxley, and then the 20 episodes for the UK police television series Chancer (1990 and 1991), several episodes for the HBO channel of the horror series Tales from the Crypt (from 1989 to 1996), an advertisement for Amnesty International, Knight Rider 2000 (1991) also science fiction, the action film The Taking of Beverly Hills (1991) by Sidney J. Furie and the thriller Sunset Heat (1992) by John Nicolella.

Beginning in 1990 he produced a series of four VHS videos and DVDs with art movies created with computer graphics called Mind’s Eye. The movies were entitled The Mind’s Eye: A Computer Animation Odyssey (1990), Beyond the Mind’s Eye (1992), which was a bestseller and gave rise to the album with the same title, The Gate to the Mind’s Eye (1994) and Odyssey Into The Mind’s Eye (1996). Starting in 1993 and during the 2000s, Hammer composed all the original music for TV Nova, the first commercial television network of Eastern Europe, which broadcast in the Czech Republic.