Cinesonic
CD reviews
Column
No.2
published in The Wire No. 231, London, May 2003
Artist:
ROY BUDD
Title: THE BLACK WINDMILL Label/Cat#: CINEPHILE CIN CD004
CD
Title: DIAMONDS Label/Cat#: CINEPHILE CIN CD003 CD
Title: FEAR IS THE KEY Label/Cat#: CINEPHILE CIN CD002 CD
We
might be drowning in 70s retro cine-chic, but thin streams
and gorgeous drops from the most disreputable decade still
reach one and excite in unexpected ways. This is particularly
noticeable in the ongoing re-releasing of film soundtracks
previously unavailable or only obtainable through absurdly
costly means. The Cinephile label wears its name down its
spine - and its re-releases certainly tingle. The Black
Windmill, Diamonds & Fear Is The Key are all composed by
Roy Budd. Collectively, they define Budd's palette: glistening
strings, sinewy brass, icy on-the-rocks piano, 24-carrat
Fender Rhodes gems, palpitating vibraphone, the funny-bone
hit of a gangly analogue synth, slinky double bass, sudden
turns by bubbling tablas, and breathy expulsions of patterned
drums. Like a close-up on a whisky tumbler filled with ice
and liquid amber, the sound evokes a retro ad agency sheen
coloured by unmistakably British studio-phonics.
That
these sessions were recorded live may seem a menial point,
but a vital factor in determining the sound of their scores.
While the late 60s has been historically tagged as the advent
of transforming the recording studio due to multi-tracking,
two lines of development are often overlooked. Firstly,
the main adoption of multi-tracking occurred in rock and
rock/pop crossovers: the well-established Ôeasy listening'
brigade of the early 60s did not so readily adopt the Frankensteinian
fragmentation wrought by multi-tracking. Secondly, arrangers
of easy listening throughout the 60s composed for ensembles
whose unique configuration was the core of their radical
potential. This neo-Stravinskian creation of ensembles to
foreground novel sonic colouring was the result of supposedly
Ôold guard' pop producers arranging for quirky mixes of
instruments - but always in a live setting. The resulting
sound on so many instrumental records from the 60s into
the 70s (Kaempfert, Bacharach, Mendes, Esquivel et al) bears
the produce of grappling with anti-acoustic combinations
of sounds which had to be recorded live.
This
Ôlive fragmentation' is deliciously presented in all three
soundtracks' meld of instrument presence and interlocking
sonar fields, courtesy of Budd's work with producer and
co-writer of some of the cues, Jack Fishman. Compared to
the cavernous shell-shocked reverberation which characterises
grand symphonic recordings, The Black Windmill (1971) is
fractalised and portioned into shivering slivers of sound,
while retaining a live totality to both the sound and its
space. It's not unlike roving around a Turner landscape
with a fish-eye lens: the panoramic grandeur is recognisable
but reconfigured. Fear Is The Key (1972) incongruously yet
sublimely weaves in Louisiana swamp blues motifs and Southern-fried
jazz idioms into Budd's martini shaker rhythms, indicating
how his jazz leaning allows him to orchestrate conflicting
styles for effects beyond mere eclecticism. Diamonds (1976)
settles into some delicately strung bass and drum lines
over which strings and horns are draped in sheets of tantalising
harmony. Alternately minimal and maximal, the orchestral
murmuring is always tactile.
Across
all three scores, Budd's unmistakable touch is felt in the
way that every moment and every gesture creates its own
constellation between textures of instruments. As with all
three scores mentioned, to presume that a Ôgroove' is providing
a conveyor-belt for the coolness of the music is facile:
their flow lies in their seamless threading of separate
yet continuous jewelled moments of orchestration.
Artist:
ERIC DEMARSEN Title: LE CRERCLE ROUGE (THE RED CIRCLE) Label/Cat#:
EMARCY/UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAZZ FRANCE 159 900-2 CD
Artist: ANTONIE DUHAMEL Title: PIERROT LE FOU / WEEK-END
Label/Cat#: EMARCY/UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAZZ FRANCE 013 478-2
CD
A
set of 19 French soundtrack CDs have been released so far
by Emarcy/Universal Music Jazz France. Sexily designed in
a Ballard-esque anonymity and featuring copious notes (in
French), the collection draws a long arc across a range
of cinematic styles and genres to evidence the juncture
of Francophile jazz and French cinema. Compilations of Serge
Gainsborough songs and Philippe Sarde scores sit beside
selections from the amazing Fantomas series and scores to
Terrence Young's neo-Nipponesque French Western Red Sun
(by Maurice Jarre).
The
Americans made film noir - but the French named it. Their
perspective on its dark and brooding portraiture focussed
on the emptied psyche of the genre's unsavoury characters
- criminals and detectives alike. Film Noir provided the
French a means to excavate their own sometimes morose psyche.
While Americans still claim film noir to be a sociological
milieu, the French always saw it as deep excavations of
the personal. French cinema from the late 50s into the 70s
produced many astounding refraction of film noir, and one
director who stands out is Jean-Pierre Melville. Seminal
French-noir by Melville include Un Flic, Le Samourai and
Le Cercle Rouge; the latter two feature jazz scores by Eric
Demarsen.
Le
Cercle Rouge is a fine example of the distinctively self-contained
tracks that Demarsen provided Melville. This score alternates
between tightly strung drones which shimmer and surge in
response to an uncontrollably increasing tension ("Vogel
s'enfuit", "Les Habitants Du Placard"), to almost absurd
bursts of jazzy dance hall vibrancy ("Razzia Chez Boucheron").
Not to be read by their surface, the tense moments exude
great beauty, while the bold and brassy passages operate
like the bar downstairs whose combo plays into the early
morning preventing you from sleeping. Befitting Melville's
uniquely strung-out denouements where criminals place all
they have on the one bet, the score to Le Cercle Rouge aims
everything at the one point; the music evolves into an elegiac
mournful circle, with thick chordal clusters of horns drawing
long breathes over liquefied vibraphones and ride cymbal
patters.
At
another end of the Franco-American spectra is Antoine Duhamel's
score to Jean Luc Godard's Pierre Le Fou (1965) and Week-End
(1968). While both films are among Godard's most tantalisingly
acerbic rebuffs of American imperialism in the form of widescreen
Pop Art critique, Duhamel's scores are lush and romantic
without resorting to clich?. Listened to alone, the absented
visual bombast of the films colours the music as a series
of languid reveries, with superb orchestrations which slowly
rise and swirl in warm unfurling chords. Duhamel's work
modulates Godard's intellectual vitriol while remaining
faithful to the emotional tenor of the film's characters.
Artist:
JOHNNY PATE Title: BROTHER ON THE RUN Label/Cat#: CASTLE
CMRCD287 CD
ÔBlaxploitation'
is a genre bound to induce smirks well before one faces
its musical produce with an air of respect. Worse, the reclamation
of Blaxploitation film music under the rubric of jazz can
be patronising despite its good intentions. Blaxploitation
music - as bold and unavoidably colourful as the clothing
of its characters - need not be rendered Ôsophisticated'
in order to appreciate its dizzying multiplicity.
Johnny
Pate's work as arranger of Curtis Mayfield's song-score
for Superfly is an important contributor to the city-sonic
sound that epitomises the urbanorama of Blaxploitation.
Mayfield's songs actively narrate Superfly, but his close
work with Pate (who transcribed and orchestrated Mayfield's
Ôdictations') generates the non-verbal sensory momentum
of the score. Composers alone were not responsible for the
Blaxploitation sound: Isaac Hayes, Herbie Hancock, Norman
Whitfield, Gene Page as well as Pate brought their arrangement
chops to the table. Pate fully composed and arranged Brother
On The Run, directed by Herbert L. Strock in 1973. The score's
CD release on Castle (as part of Sequel Productions' remastering
of a number of Afrocentric titles from the Perception back
catalogue) is an undiluted taste of a funk'n'soul brew:
not overly spicy, but heavy, heady and hewn.
Devoid
of vocals except for the title theme sung by Adam Wade,
Brother On The Run is a good example of a folk idiom like
soul parlayed into film music form. The feel of the music
is like a funky soulful record whose vocals have been replaced
by the film's images as narrator. This is a musicological
phenomenon peculiar to Blaxploitation: the score does not
enhance or describe dramatic action; rather, it Ôbacks'
the film as it would a singer, complete with verse/chorus
structure and solos. Sounding not unlike music playing in
a succession of bars or emanating from a car radio, cues
in Blaxploitation soundtracks are often coded as ways of
getting from point A to B. Brother On The Run thus features
titles like "Auto Chase", "En Route To Maude's", "Lady Leaving
Store", and of course various takes on "Brother On The Run".
Pate's music is undoubtedly rhythmatized, but it's also
narration in motion. This is decidedly different from most
other film score approaches which paint pictures, capture
spaces and frame settings, making Brother On The Run something
other than standard cine fare.
Artist:
QUINCY JONES Title: DOLLAR$ Label/Cat#:REPRISE/WARNER MUSIC
FRANCE 9362-47879-2 CD
Artist: ENNIO MORRICONE Title: EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC
Label/Cat#:REPRISE/WARNER MUSIC FRANCE 9362-47879-2 CD
Sometimes
in the arts, those with the highest profile are presumed
to not be contributing anything to their field but their
fame. Quincy Jones might signify a media empire to some,
an ersatz producer to others. He also happens to be one
of the most radical score composers in the history of American
cinema, yet his work in that area is critically undervalued.
Maybe this is because of Jones' habitation of a grey zone
between the defiantly egocentric humanism of jazz improvisation
and the Eurocentric grandeur of tonal orchestration. Deftly
braiding the organic pointillism of Duke Ellington's harmonic
reterritorialisation of chords across diverse instruments
and George Gershwin's symphonic transformation of slight
blues figures into epic monuments of jazz-ness, Jones' writing,
arranging and orchestration belie an astounding complexity.
Dip into any of his scores from the 9 years between 1964
and 1972 (totalling 40 films) for proof.
Quincy
Jones's score to Richard Brooks' 1971 film Dollar$ appears
for the first time on CD as part of this series. It's among
Jones' most idiosyncratic scores, and forms a pair with
The Hot Rock a few year's later, as both feature the unclassifiable
Don Elliott Voices. In reality the dextrous and delirious
multi-tracking of a single singer - Don Elliott - the DEV
create a sound somewhere between the Andrew Sisters and
Gyorgy Ligeti. I kid you not: "Snow Creatures" defies you
to not hear a string section as Don Elliot Ôfades-up' his
chorus of Jones' Ellington-esque harmonies. It's a wholly
unreal sound, and one typical of Jones' sharp ear in extracting
unique traits from performers he worked with in non-film
productions (Jones' used Elliot for some Roberta Flack sessions).
Jones has succinctly described his approach: "My instrument
is playing the musicians." Beyond the traditional jazz format
of merely spotlighting soloists, Dollar$ exemplifies his
archly modernist take on integrating the performer into
both score and mix (the sound Jones achieves is crystalline
in its micro detail). It's almost too much for a film to
take.
Fortunately,
a CD can bear it all. Just as ill-fitting within America's
Eurocentric fixation on 19th Century music for cinema is
one of Ennio Morricone's most distinctive scores - for John
Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic. As passed-over as the
film has been dismissed, Morricone's faux-Arabesques and
mock-Rock distinguish this score as a suite of outrageously
fake yet wildly thrilling music. Stretched across Moroccan
wails, simulated vocal possessions, and groovy chick Ônyah-nyah-nyahs',
Morricone salaciously threads his main theme of Easternised
prog-rock. More than thin mimicry, his distinctive arrangements
raise the score above retro, beyond camp and deep into an
hysterical sonic Otherness rarely celebrated in film music.
Dollar$ is part of another eclectic film music re-issue
series comes courtesy of Reprise/Warner Music France. Titles
include remastered versions of Jerry Fielding's score to
Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet, J.J.Johnson's score to Jack
Starrett's Cleopatra Jones, Michel Legrand's score to Robert
Mulligan's Summer of Ô42, plus 7 definitive Lalo Shifrin
scores. All come with a fold-out of the original LP soundtrack
cover, and the informative biographical notes are in English.
