Rob Mounsey


Rob Mounsey is an American musician, composer, and arranger.

Music career

Mounsey was born in Berea, Ohio, and grew up in Seattle, Washington, spending a few years each in Findlay and Granville, Ohio. At the age of 17, he was awarded a 1970 BMI Student Composer Award for his orchestral work Ilium, New York, Is Divided into Three Parts. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston from 1971 to 1975.
In 1976, he moved to New York City to become a studio musician, arranger, and producer for a wide range of well-known artists, including Aaron Neville, Aztec Camera, Brian Wilson, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, Chromeo, Diana Krall, Diana Ross, Donald Fagen, Eric Clapton, James Taylor, Karen Carpenter, Madonna, Michael Franks, Natalie Cole, Paul Simon, Rihanna, Steely Dan, and others. He performed on keyboards in 1981 for Simon and Garfunkel's Concert in the Park.
In 1985, he played keyboards in a New-York-based group called Joe Cool with Will Lee, Jeff Mironov and Christopher Parker. They released one album, Party Animals, on the Pony Canyon label in Japan, followed by a Japanese tour.
Mounsey released three solo albums as a recording artist: Dig, and two self-released albums on his own Monkeyville label, Back in the Pool and Mango Theory.
He toured as musical director and pianist for Idina Menzel in her Pops Symphony tour, for which he created nearly all of the arrangements.
He has composed for film and television, including the 1988 Mike Nichols film Working Girl, the film Bright Lights, Big City and the HBO hit series Sex and the City. Mounsey wrote two long-running Emmy-winning themes for the television show Guiding Light. He is a six-time Grammy Award nominee, and a winner of two Emmy Awards. He is a Zen Buddhist who resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Selected Discography

As leader

With Ronnie Cuber
With Michael Franks
With Art Garfunkel
With Cissy Houston
With Steve Khan
With Diana Ross
With David Spinozza
With Spyro Gyra
With others