Musical Background
Eastwood comes from a musical family, as explained in an October 27, 2006, article from The Independent newspaper:
| “ | When I told my father, film actor/director Clint Eastwood, I wanted to be a musician he was happy about it. Music has always been important to my family. My parents gave me my taste in music and my love of jazz from an early age. My father plays piano, my mother used to play, and my mother's mother was a music teacher at Northwestern University in Illinois. | ” |
It comes as little surprise, then, that music was a prominent fixture in the Eastwood home. According to his biography with Hopper Management, Eastwood grew up listening to records by jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, and the Stan Kenton Big Band with his parents, both jazz lovers. Eastwood attended the Monterey Jazz Festival numerous times with his parents, as well. "One advantage of having a famous father was I got to go backstage", Eastwood explained in an interview conducted by stepmother Dina Ruiz Eastwood. "I met a lot of artists, greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. Looking back on that, I can see how much the musicians I met there influenced my career."
Eastwood began playing electric bass in high school, learning R&B, Motown, and reggae tunes by ear. After studying with French bassist Bunny Brunel, he began playing gigs around the New York and Los Angeles areas, eventually forming the Kyle Eastwood Quartet, who contributed to 1996's Eastwood After Hours: Live at Carnegie Hall, a concert saluting Clint Eastwood and his love of jazz. Clint Eastwood has always been supportive of, and interested in, Kyle's work, as Eastwood told The Independent: "As far as my father is concerned, as long as I was serious about my music career, he was supportive of me."
Two years later, in 1998, Sony released his first CD, From There to Here, a collection of both jazz standards and original compositions. After signing with the UK's Candid Records in 2004, Eastwood moved to Dave Koz's label, Rendezvous, which has released his last two albums: 2005's Paris Blue, and 2006's Now.
In addition to his solo albums, Eastwood has also contributed music to eight of his father's films: The Rookie (1990), Mystic River (2002), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Changeling (2008), Gran Torino (2008), and Invictus (2009). He was nominated with music partner Michael Stevens for a 2006 Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Original Score (Letters from Iwo Jima).
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