Tag: Something For Thursday

Here’s a bit of film music, by the underheard (at least by me) composer Basil Poledouris. This, from the movie The Hunt for Red October, is “The Hymn To Red October”. This cue opens the film as we get our first glimpse of the giant Russian submarine that will dominate the story. Poledouris gives the cue, with the Russian hymn, a certain soaring naval quality that works wonderfully.

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A change of pace today, I think. Over on Twitter today we were discussing the great 1980s geek comedy Real Genius, in the context of Sheila O’Malley‘s piece about director Martha Coolidge. Real Genius somehow wasn’t a big hit when it came out in 1985 or so, but it should have been, and it is rightly seen nowadays as a classic comedy film of the era. Its story involves super-geniuses in the physics department at a California university and what they do when it turns out that their research project, a super-powered laser, is actually a stealth project for the Defense Department, and its humor is warm and witty and the movie creates a world all its own, eschewing a lot of the usual tropes and stereotypes about nerdy, awkward young people. All that is great; it’s a fantastic movie! But in terms of music, it’s for the most part a typical 1980s-pop song “score”, but again with a lot of good choices made in terms of the songs used. It certainly nailed the song for the end credits, the cheerfully goofy “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by Tears For Fears, which fits the film’s mood and subject matter nearly perfectly. Tears For Fears was one of those quintessential 1980s bands, fronted by two odd-looking dudes who played synth-heavy pop music that was often oddly infectious.

So here is Tears For Fears, with “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”.

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Concluding a celebration of Black History Month by way of music, we have a selection performed by musical prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler. Schuyler lived from 1931 to 1967. She was an enormously gifted musician who spent much of her youth touring and performing. She later grew disillusioned with her status as a racial symbol, and she took to a career in journalism and performing overseas. Sadly she was killed while covering action in Vietnam, when the helicopter she was in crashed. Schuyler’s name lives on, attached to a middle school for talented and gifted students in Brooklyn.

Here is Philippa Schuyler performing Bach. In recordings like this you can hear worlds meeting, hundreds of years apart.

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Despite my best efforts in high school and college–and I did make a lot of efforts–I never did become a “jazzman,” as the term was back then. (I have no idea if the jazz world has adopted a more inclusive expression or not.) I played in the jazz bands, and occasionally dabbled with some friends at small-group work, but eventually I had to admit that the best I could ever hope to be was a decent “session musician”, a decent bandmate but not really a soloist or creator. I admire jazz and even love a lot of it, but it’s not in my blood the way music needs to be if it’s going to be your music.

But I can, and did, and still do, admire the hell out of Miles Davis.

I first became aware of Davis in the way that a lot of young people become aware of major musicians, by wanting to know about famous musicians who play the same instrument as themselves. Young clarinetists likely know about Benny Goodman and Richard Stoltzman, and young flautists about Jean-Pierre Rampal and James Galway. As a trumpeter I certainly knew about Wynton Marsalis, Maurice Andre, Adolph Herseth, and Miles Davis. Funny thing about Davis, though: the more I listened to him (and though his music has fallen off my radar the last bunch of years, I listened to him a lot back then), the less I heard him through the aural prism of his trumpet playing and the more I heard him as a musician. Again, I think that any young musician goes through such a thing, if they’re serious about the whole affair of music.

Miles Davis’s music was not the kind of flashy, loud, fast, “big band” kind of jazz. He almost seemed more of a jazz chamber musician, a creator of introspective music that combined many influences and always seemed to be teeming with bright intellectual life. Davis’s most famous album is almost certainly Kind of Blue, for many reasons, but I feature here not that work but another of his greats, Sketches of Spain. For this album Davis used several classical works by Spanish composers as a starting point, including Rodrigo’s famous (perhaps the most famous classical work by a Spanish composer) Concierto de Aranjuez. The album is an early blend of jazz and world music, and it is informed throughout by Davis’s often-haunting trumpet playing.

Here is Sketches of Spain, by Miles Davis.

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It’s Black History Month, so why not feature a man who I consider to be one of the four greatest voices* in the history of pop music? I’m talking about the astonishing, amazing, absolutely one-of-a-kind Sam Cooke. Every time I listen to a song by Cooke, I’m freshly bedazzled by the absolute control he has over his instrument. A voice like his–a kind of gravely high tenor, one of the most unusual kinds of voices to hear–can be so very difficult to control, but Cooke always homes right in on the pitch he intends to hit, and his melismatic gifts are the stuff of legend. Sam Cooke makes singing just about any song sound utterly effortless, but when you try to sing along, you can almost feel him leaving you in the dust, grinning as he goes.

I don’t want to dwell on the awful facts of Sam Cooke’s very strange death, so I won’t. But I will note that the world was robbed of one of its greatest voices that day.

Here are several songs by Sam Cooke.

* The other three are Freddie Mercury, Annie Lennox, and Ann Wilson.

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Featuring black musicians this month in honor of Black History Month, here’s a good one. If your spine isn’t tingled by this, I don’t know what to do for you. Here is William Warfield singing “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat. Just listen to the lyrics of that final verse:

I get weary,
and sick of tryin’;
I’m tired of livin’,
and scared of dyin’.
But ol’ man river–
he just keeps rollin’
along.

Amazing song, sung in what must be one of the great vocal performances of all time.

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Listening to this piece might lead one to assume that it is perhaps a movement from a larger sacred work for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, but it is not: It’s a piece of film music, composed by Patrick Doyle for Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. This piece comes after the Battle of Agincourt, when it becomes clear that the vastly-outnumbered English host has in fact routed the French. King Henry says this:

Do we all holy rites:
Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum,
The dead with charity enclos’d in clay;
And then to Callice, and to England then,
Where ne’er from France arriv’d more happy men.

Composer Doyle–for whom Henry V was the first major film project–wrote a penetrating and lyrical theme of both sadness and hope to accompany a long tracking shot as King Henry marches across the field of battle, carrying one of his English casualties on his back. Braveheart gets a lot of credit for the brutality of its battle scenes, but Henry V was there first, depicting medieval battlefields as places of churned mud and bloody filth. Doyle’s soaring sacred piece soars above all of this, building and building from the soloist onward as more and more of the musical forces join in. The result is sublimely effective, and it’s easy to see why Branagh has returned to Patrick Doyle for his filmscores in many, if not all, of his subsequent directorial efforts.

Here is “Non nobis domine” from Henry V.

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As noted the other day, conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy has retired from public performance. Ashkenazy was born in 1937 in Russia, but in the 1960s he emigrated to the West where he has lived ever since, starting with London and then to Reykjavik and then to Switzerland. His output as a pianist and a conductor propel him into thie highest ranks of musicians of the last fifty years. The other day I featured Ashkenazy as a conductor; today I present him as a performer in his natural element.

Thank you for the music, Vladimir Ashkenazy!

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