MEET THE AIRWOLF THEMES MUSICIANS

Mark J. Cairns

Born: Northern Ireland, UK

Long-time "Airwolf" fan, Northern Ireland-based Producer and Designer, Mark J. Cairns in collaboration with original composer Sylvester Levay is best known for producing the Airwolf Themes 2CD soundtrack album for the high-flying, mid-1980s American action television series series Airwolf (1984-1986). His involvement with the Airwolf TV series started in early 1987 when he created the International Airwolf Appreciation Association, building it and Airwolf Fandom (which he christened the "Wolf Pack", Pre-Internet) to members in 23 countries worldwide with regular magazines called "File A56-7W".

In 1994, he decided to retire the Airwolf Appreciation Association to work on the first ever dedicated soundtrack for the Airwolf TV series. Created over a 5 year period, the eventual "Airwolf Themes 2CD Special Limited Edition" soundtrack was created by-ear, by the self-taught musician, with the eventual collaboration of original Airwolf composer, Sylvester Levay. It was a tremendous success and in the end, shipped to over 26 countries during the early days of the Internet gaining a value World Record for a Television Soundtrack due to the second-hand pricing it was changing hands for on eBay.

Spurred on by his original efforts with 'Airwolf Themes', he felt that a bigger and better project could work and found his future Orchestrator & Associate Producer, Jan Michal Szulew, who had perfect pitch to achieve the attention to detail required with his orchestration and arrangements of Levay's iconic Airwolf Main Themes. That allowed Mark to focus solely on the episodic "tune of the week" scores for a new collaborative Airwolf Soundtrack album called "Airwolf Extended Themes" of which he completed 20 "episodic" tracks from the series' first 3 CBS-aired seasons (neither Mark nor Jan were interested in working on any of the Canadian-shot Airwolf II Series – aka "Season 4", which is available from its original composer elsewhere) for disc 2 of the album, which was released during March 2014.

Mark also has interests with film & TV production, and is currently working on an Airwolf Fan Movie project called "AIRWOLF: VALLEY OF FIRE", the initial teaser of which is on YouTube.

Sylvester Levay

Born: 16 May, 1945 - Vojvodina, Serbia

Sylvester Levay was the show's main composer on Airwolf producing 'that' iconic theme and was ultimately responsible for creating the lion's share of the episodic music on the show. Having the lion's share he created music for Airwolf's entire 1st Season, more than half of the 2nd Season and the middle half of the 3rd Season.

Born in Serbia, he currently lives outside Munich, Germany with his family, and nowadays works solely on German language musicals (such as 'Elisabeth', 'Rebecca' and 'Mozart!') with his long-term writing partner, Michael Kunze after finishing composing film and television soundtracks around the turn of the Millennium. He would be considered in the same league as Andrew Lloyd Webber but for German language musicals.

Sylvester Levay has worked with many famous people from Elton John to Sylvester Stallone and composed soundtracks for movies like 'Cobra' (1986); 'Cat People' (1982), 'Hot Shots!' (1991), 'Navy Seals' (1990), 'Mannequin' (1987), 'Burglar' (1987), 'Courage Mountain' (1990) as well as being the arranger on 'Scarface' (1983) and 'Flashdance' (1983).

'Airwolf' (1984-1986) was Sylvester's first big "Hollywood" gig by his own admission, but he went on to write for a plethora of other TV shows and TV movies including: 'Time Bomb' (1984), 'Otherworld' (1985), 'Annihilator' (1986), 'Werewolf' (1987), 'Three O'Clock High' (1987), 'Probe' (1988), 'Hardball' (1989) and 'Medicopter 117' (1998-2007).

AIRWOLF EPISODIC MUSIC COMPOSER ON: