The Screengrab : charles ives

OST: "The Man with the Golden Arm"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Frank Sinatra, for one. Sinatra knew Elmer Bernstein well from his early sojourns in Hollywood, and once he was cast to play the lead in Otto Preminger's adaptation of a harrowing Nelson Algren novel about a recovering junkie, he approached the director -- not known for his stylistic daring -- and tried to convince him that Bernstein could swing. Preminger decided to take a chance, and as a result, two careers were charged with new vigor: Sinatra won widespread praise for his performance, and convinced skeptical critics that he was capable of being a great actor. As for the composer, he turned in, to the surprise of everyone but Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the most compelling -- and compulsively re-listenable -- crypto-jazz scores of the 1950s. When combined with one of Saul Bass' most stunning title sequences, it all adds up to an absolutely riveting blend of music and visual. Anyone teaching a class about the particular spirit of that period of urban drama needs nothing more for their audiovisual centerpiece than the first five minutes of The Man with the Golden Arm.

BEST TRACKS: The finest tracks on the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm are those where Bernstein collaborated with an actual jazzman -- conducter, arranger, trumpeter and former Woody Herman sideman Shorty Rogers. Rogers' bold, accusatory horn is a big part of what makes the movie's opening theme -- better known as "Frankie Machine", after the name of Sinatra's character -- so unforgettable, and his deft arrangement and understanding of Elmer Bernstein's distinct sense of melody, combined with his own rhythmic sensibility, also makes a success of the wonderfully chaotic "Audition". Other great tracks include the manic "Breakup: Flight/Louie's/Burlesque" medley and the mournful "Finale". Overall, it works thematically, but is still strong enough to stand on its own as a skillful period jazz record.

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OST: "Once Upon a Time in the West"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Sergio Leone had to be talked into making Once Upon a Time in the West. He'd moved on; he wanted to make movies in America, and he'd already begun pre-production on a gangster epic he hoped would do to the golden age of crime pictures what he'd been doing to the golden age of westerns for a decade. But a lot of producers had made a lot of money off of his so-called 'spaghetti westerns', and they wanted to make more. So they dangled such a big paycheck in front of him that, in 1968, he agreed to go back to the well one more time. He was going to finally fulfill his threat to totally dismantle the western and rebuild it from the ground up; and he wasn't going to do it without Ennio Morricone.

Though he scored a number of Leone's best films and came to be associated with the 'sound of spaghetti', Morricone is largely still known to American audiences as the author of the memorable main theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And while that's a pretty strange piece of music in terms of traditional film scores, it doesn't even begin to give you an idea of what a truly wierd musician Morricone really is. Capable at any given moment of unleashing nearly cacaphonous serial music, floods of distorted, ultra-loud guitars, haunting minimalist refrains, bizarre and atonal free-jazz sounds, shrieking electronic tones, or simple and elegant variations on traditional folk music. Such wide and varied sounds are in ample evidence in the composer's vast catalogue; many of his best (and strangest) pieces of music were composed as soundtrack music for long-forgotten Italian movies, but put all together in one pot, a service performed by American avant-garde aficionado and punk vocalist Mike Patton on his indispensable Crime and Dissonance series, they represent one of the most restless imaginations of any contemporary musician. With Ennio Morricone, you knew you'd be getting something of quality, but you might not have any idea whatsoever what it was going to be. Such was the case with Once Upon a Time in the West.

Amazingly -- especially given what a total triumph the final product turned out to be -- Morricone's score for Once Upon a Time in the West almost didn't get used. He wrote its major pieces to fit an early version of the script, and by the time the memorably bleak western started filming, the plot -- as well as the cast and much of the action -- had changed and Morricone was no longer available to rewrite. But Sergio Leone, who was always a good judge of talent, knew what a winner he had on his hands with the stellar score, and did something nearly unprecedented in the history of motion picture production: he changed scenes and tailored the action on screen to fit the parts of the soundtrack that had already been recorded. This wasn't always easy, as Morricone's passion at the time was for incorporating ambient environmental sound into his music, and many of the tunes contained strange, if effective, bits of background noise that were hard to fit to the action on screen; but Leone kept at it, and the result is one of the most perfect blends of film and music of its decade.

BEST TRACKS: The soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the West -- which, for all its perfection as a compliment to the film, works very well on its own as a listening experience -- starts out with three of the most powerful, precise and stunning pieces of music in all of motion picture scores. The opening theme, named for the film's title, is a glorious, majestic piece of symphonic music, evoking the wide-open spaces of the West and invoking pure Americana as it echoes the intertwining themes of Charles Ives. The second track, "As a Judgment", brings us some perfect gunfight music, ramped up to a maximum of chaotic tension with vibed-out, reverberating, echoey, feedback-driven guitars whose distortion carries in them a mood of hate. And the third, "Farewell to Cheyenne", is a pitch-perfect conjuration of traditional cowboy movie music, with its propulsive percussion and wailing harmonica. The whole score is simply fantastic -- other great tracks include the 12-tone masterpiece "The Transgression", the eerily heroic "Man with a Harmonica", and the subversively folksy "Jill's America" -- but it starts off with nine minutes of utter perfection.

OST: "Run Lola Run"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

In previous installments of "OST", we've discussed films where the score is extremely well-suited to the action on screen, where the music composed or compiled is almost perfectly matched with what's happening before your eyes. Very rarely, though, does a soundtrack come along where the music seems almost intrinsic -- where the blend of visual and audible art is so seamless, so perfectly intertwined, that it's almost impossible to imagine one without the other. One such soundtrack is that of Tom Tykwer's breakout cult hit, Run Lola Run; its driving, kinetic score helped propel the story action along to such a degree that it can be perfectly encapsulated in the public imagination with one brief snippet of the fetching Franka Potente careening through the urban streets at full tilt, with the thudding, hyper-speed techno her only accompaniment. Indeed, it's a testament to the power of the score that it's become a sort of shorthand for the whole movie, lending itself to endless quotation and parody.

But the Run Lola Run soundtrack has a lot more going for it than mere cultural zeitgeist, and its perfect integration with the film itself is no accident. For one thing, it benefits enormously from Tykwer having composed the majority of the score himself, in conjuction with partners Jonny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, both German session pros, producers and soundtrack veterans. Musically, it's a nearly perfect piece of work, a flawlessly concussive distillation of German techno (and what better to accompany a film set in contemporary Berlin, a city that seems to run on techno?); the addition on the soundtrack album of a number of German techno bands -- most not well known, but with musical sensibilites that mesh exactly with the Tykwer-Klimek-Heil aesthetic -- only makes it better. But even beyond that, there's a reason that most filmgoers carry around in their heads a conception of Run Lola Run that blends together music and art so perfectly. Not only did Tom Tykver take his time (try saying that funf zeit schnell) when composing the score, seeing it from the very beginning not as an accessory to drape over the completed film, but he also did so using the same approach he used when filming the visuals: an extremely tight, disciplined theoretical method which was so precisely and skillfully edited that it seems explosive, wild, even sloppy in the final product. Not content to simply put together a score made up of professionally assayed Berlin techno, Tykver actually gave his compositions a theoretical basis that makes them work even better. The main hooks (including the stuttering, percussive piano riff) from the movie's main themes, "Running: One" and "Running: Two", are actually citations of American avant-garde composer Charles Ives' ensemble piece, The Unanswered Question. A highly disciplined formalist piece, Ives' work only gives the outward impression of wildness and abandon, and thus forms the perfect basis for Lola's soundtrack, which does exactly the same thing.

BEST TRACKS: The soundtrack album starts out with a winning, if atypical, electro-pop ballad, by Franka "Lola" Potente herself, called "Believe" that's a nice introduction before things get completely nuts immediately after -- like the film, it gives you just a moment of calm and reflection before it explodes into hyperkinetic movement. From there, we launch headfirst into the bulk of Tykwer, Klimek & Heil's masterful techno score, as Lola runs and runs and the relentless beats and synths push and push on tracks like "Running One", "Running Two" and the excellent "Supermarket". After this, Potente returns again, as vocalist and co-writer, on "Wish (Komm Zu Mir)", a tremendous track that blends her icily romantic sensibilities with Tykwer's punishing motivational techno. It's a stunningly effective mix of the two styles, and maybe the best musical expression on what may be the most successful soundtrack of the 1990s.