By SKIP HELLER, Published: January 24, 2013
Again presenting eight film scores spread across five discs, packaged in a gorgeous box and enclosed with a beautifully illustrated and comprehensively notated booklet, the Moochin' About staff (who are also the force behind the excellent British magazine Jazzwise) have returned with their second installment of noir and near-noir jazz movie music. As with their previous five disc volume, Film Noir, Beat, Square, and Cool anthologizes dark, moody "crimejazz" film scores coming from composers from both outside and within the relative mainstream of mid 20th century jazz. This series means business. These sets aren't cheap. Also, much of this music has been on compact disc at some point before, so arguments for buying it this way start with superior sound quality and that Moochin' About's editions wherever possible include more of the music from the film than has been previously available.
My review of the previous Film Noir set goes into the history and aesthetic of crimejazz and its close cousins, so this review will skip the history and go right to the music. This set takes a wider stylistic view, from Leith Stevens' Kentonesque Wild One score (which is an intellectual masterpiece) to 1960s hard bop. As previously, Duke Ellington is represented, this time with Paris Blues, which may well be his best writing for film. The film stars Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as expatriot American musicians living in Paris. Newman is a trombonist trying to make the jump from jazz to "serious" music, and the main title theme is exactly the type of Ellingtonia that sums up that aspiration and illustrates its impressionistic nobility. Throughout, the score acquits itself perfectly both as jazz and film score. This can be a bit of a tightrope, but Ellington's cinematic tendencies coupled with his discipline as a composer made him perfect for the job. Paris Blues is one of his most undersold 1960s albums, and shouldn't be.
Charles Mingus' score for John Cassavetes' Shadows is less a true film score and more a Mingus album. Which, in fact, it mostly was. Save for the opening "Untitled Percussion Composition," these tracks are most of an album that has been alternately issued as Jazz Portraits and Mingus Wonderland. It's great stuff (pianist Richard Wyands is especially good), but this music has not been particularly hard to get, great though it is.
The real jewel of this set is Johnny Mandel's Oscar-winning score for the powerful I Want To Live!, which starred Susan Hayward as a party girl framed for murder and sent to the electric chair. Live!claims the distinction of being the first motion picture to use modern jazz written by a card-carrying modern jazz composer/arranger. Mandel's resume at that point included composing, arranging, and playing on the West Coast scene that evolved in the late 1940s (most notably ultramodern bebop work for Woody Herman). I Want To Live! established him in one fell swoop as a giant, and he lived up to it as both an arranger and film composer. Recently, he penned arrangements for Paul McCartney's standards disc. His compositions include "The Shadow Of Your Smile," "Emily" and "Theme From MASH (Suicide Is Painless)."
Read More: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=43776#.UQO0Z6XhEhQ
0 Comments:
Post a Comment