King Richard Composer Kris Bowers Has Something to Say

Around the time that Richard Williams and Oracene Price uprooted their daughters Serena and Venus from Compton to Florida in hopes of creating tennis phenoms, Kris Bowers’s parents were also in Los Angeles, setting their toddler son on a path toward greatness. Bowers has now composed the score for King Richard, the Warner Bros. movie chronicling the Williams sisters’ early years that mirror so much of his own. “Watching Richard and Oracene do that for their kids, I could connect so much to that part of the story,” he says. “Whenever you see any successful person, but especially a person of color, I think about what those parents must have done to navigate through to make sure that their kids achieved in that way.”

Like the Williams family, Bowers and his parents have roots in Compton, where he was born before growing up in Mid-City in the ’90s. (“They called it Carson-adjacent, because they didn’t want to call it Compton.”) And like the Williamses, his parents decided even before he was born that he would dream big. Bowers, whose family was the subject of the 2020 Oscar-nominated documentary short A Concerto Is a Conversation, says his father was moved by a piece of piano music he heard on the radio while driving home one day: “It so took him by surprise that he was affected in that way that he got home and told my mom that they needed to have a kid and that kid was going to play piano.”

So when Bowers’s mother, Kimberle, was pregnant, they put headphones up to her belly. They put him in piano classes when he was four. By the time he was nine, he was learning classical and jazz. “When everybody else was playing outside in the summer, I was usually practicing piano,” he says. “Me being a piano player was about being able to get into better institutions, to be in a better environment, to get into better schools.”

By 30, Bowers had graduated from Juilliard, worked with Jay-Z, performed for President Obama, won an Emmy, and scored best picture winner Green Book. “It’s been really eye-opening for me to think about how much my parents sacrificed and struggled with and dealt with, all for me to achieve the things that I’ve done,” says Bowers, now 32, who recently received a Grammy nomination for his Bridgerton score. “And also how much of my life is really a plan that they set in motion.”

Bowers says all that came into focus just as director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who’d worked with him on 2018’s Monsters and Men, reached out about King Richard. “Kris is a musical savant. There’s literally nothing he can’t do sonically,” says Green. “He is as great a human being as he is a composer, which makes the humanity in his scores urgent, deeply layered, and intrinsically palatable.”

For King Richard, Bowers returned to the place it all started: the piano. Using only strings, harp, percussion, and piano, Bowers built a score that mirrored tennis—like how a felt-covered hammer within a piano, when it hits the string, can evoke a tennis ball bouncing against a racket. He saved percussion primarily for the moments when Venus and Serena are playing tennis, to emphasize their abilities as prodigies. In a scene where Venus is trying out in front of a coach, Bowers says, “You really see her step into her power, and there’s a lot of percussion there.” Later, Bowers focuses on a theme emphasizing competition. A five-note figure first appears in the beginning of the film, when Venus and Serena are racing each other to deliver phone books to their neighbors, and then returns whenever the pair are competing on the court.

For Bowers, his own journey to composing for film, which has not historically been a path for Black artists, will always be bound up with his youth. “Being a young Black boy that didn’t have space to be angry or sad, really, I realized that I could be angry or sad about something and go to the piano and play and then move through that emotion,” he says. “Once I found that, it was always about the piano for me.”