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Morricone vinyl for today: Two Mules for Sister Sara 1970, Kapp Records

I think there's a chance I saw a few minutes of this film once, but that's at most. In 1970 Clint Eastwood was still making westerns, only it's an American production this time. He turned down a role in Giú la Testa, not wanting to be in more Italian westerns. He's second billing this time, with the top billing going to Shirley MacLaine. IMDB notes that it would be the last time he'd receive second billing for over two decades, and likewise appear opposite a bona fide female star even longer.

Knowing a little bit about his history with women, and particularly Sandra Locke, I'll leave that where it is.

The opening theme is signature Morricone. There's a mule braying represented by (what it think is) a piccolo note followed by a bass harmonica. (Later the same idea is played out with a piccolo followed by marimba.) There's some recorder, and it leads also to a church-like choir. He's already telling you something about the film by these various musical events built into the mail title theme.

The score overall is a bit conventional, which is not to say bad. It's acoustic guitar-heavy. There's something about those Leone westerns, and Morricone's contribution to them, that really stands apart from any supposedly similar films/scores.

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On the turntable this evening: Sacco & Vanzetti 1971 on RCA Victor

This was a recent purchase at Jerry's Records. I noticed it in the racks. My internal monologue: "Hmm, Sacco & Vanzetti? Maybe. 'Lyrics by Joan Baez, Miss Baez sings 'The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti'? I don't know. Credits include Sinket? Sold!"

What's a Sinket? More properly it would be Synket or Syn-ket. It's an early (designed around 1961) voltage-controlled synthesizer. It was never intended for commercial production, and only a limited number of models were produced. To see pictures of the instrument, it's amazingly compact, much more than the later Moog Modular systems. The name most closely associated with the instrument is that of John Eaton, an American composer who composed for it. Walter Bianchi is credited as playing it here. On one track, he's credited with playing "electronic keyboard", which might mean it's more of the same. After buying this LP, I learned the instrument appears on several other period Morricone scores.

https://120years.net/tag/synket/

I admit that I don't particularly want to listen to Joan Baez. But it's more than that. I don't think they make for a particularly good mix. Morricone's unusual orchestrations, his arranging, doesn't lend itself well to Baez' warbling folk voice. "The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti-Part 3" is a strange and interesting reworking of the song that's already appeared twice in the score. It's beautiful but when Baez enter, she sounds out of place on it. Maybe I miss Edda Dell-Orso's wordless, breathy, erotic or panicked voice.

Ah well, beyond anything else, I'm certain the producers of the film thought Joan Baez' name would help sell more tickets. I can't blame them for that. Nobody's going to rush to the theater because there's a Sinket [sic] on the soundtrack, and few people besides me are going to buy the LP for that reason alone. There's a menacing Synket sound that arises in the middle of "To Die is Duty" that sounds great without being too distracting.

There's a single track, "The Electric Chair", that's all Synket.

I previously mentioned The Untouchables. I'm not a big fan of Morricone's score on that one. He relies a great deal on (I assume FM) synthesizers for much of the content of that movie, which is set during the Prohibition. That is a conflict that grates on me. They go to great lengths to try to recreate the period in costume and setting, but the score relies on far more current technology for the music. Technology that now sounds dated. I bring this up again because, well, I like that there's Synket on this soundtrack, but I wonder if it sounds out of place with respect to this period piece film. I guess it makes sense that it would represent the electric chair, though.

I find things to enjoy on this LP, but unfortunately more than half of the content involved Joan Baez in some way. Another one for the mix tape I guess.

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Slab of wax tonight: Bluebeard (1972)

I started this last night but didn't get to the second half until today.

I'm sure this movie is garbage. It's an updated telling of the story of Bluebeard, who marries and kills. And who has he killed? Virni Lisi, Marilú Tolo, Agostina Belli, Karin Schubert, Nathalie Delon, Sybil Danning, Raquel Welch, and...next is Joey Heatherton! Whatever what will she do?

If you do a web search on this film, you'd probably come across Roger Ebert's bizarre review of it. It probably wasn't enough for him to say the film was a piece of shit, or that Richard Burton is terrible in it. (He says something about Burton's decline as an actor, even in 1972). He focused on Joey Heatherton's mouth, how it almost never closes. I suspect Pauline Kael's influence, for better or worse.

Richard Burton is a complete ham. I don't care about his pedigree. I really liked him in 1984, his final role, for the same reason a friend didn't like him. I found him understated and menacing, he thought Richard was boring.

In a previous post I mentioned Ronald Stein, how his scores were sometimes of a higher caliber than the films they supported. We're probably in that territory here with Ennio. It's nicely creepy at times, somewhat recalling some early 20th century composers.

Morricone soldiers through on this project. Do I hear some version of a hammered dulcimer in there? Or hammered open piano strings? He's in a more "classical" mode through much of this, even if he still demonstrates his love for unusual instruments. From the standpoint of listening to this album as a discrete work apart from the film it underscores, there's a jarring moment when it goes from moody, somewhat clustery string with minimal piano...to a ridiculously upbeat studio orchestra march. I have to wonder about the context.

This is another release by Cerberus Records, in their Ennio Morricone Film Score Society series. It looks as though most, but possibly not all, of the releases in that series have been reissued on CD, and in some cases deluxe new vinyl. Now I wouldn't mind finding copies of the ones that apparently haven't been reissued.

https://www.discogs.com/label/71553-Cerberus-Records-2

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Tonight's Morricone vinyl: Autopsy (AKA Macchie Solari) Original film release: 1975. 2018 2LP vinyl reissue, Arrow Records.

There's quite a bit of Morricone that sounds like this score, and I love it all. Dark, atmospheric, atonal strings and winds with a groove bass. This one's especially dark.  There's an opening theme, minor but sweet, lovely oboe melody with wordless vocals (surprise). Closing theme is the same, and then it's entirely horror mood music in between. I have several that are somewhat similar so I'm spacing them out. A good deal of the Crime and Dissonance collection is of the same vein, though this one might be even more extreme in general. There's a cue featuring whistling with high cluster strings that's almost Xenakis-like.

Edda Dell'Orso is once again credited with vocals, as with Veruschka. I suspect this won't be the last time before I'm through with my Morricone collection. Credit is also given to whistler Alessandro Alessandroni, and conductor Bruno Nicolai. Nicolai is a composer in his own right, but I think I've seen his name on other Morricone projects as conductor. I guess Ennio was too busy scoring five other films at the time to conduct this himself.

It's not that important, but I remember specifically where I bought this. Dave's Music Mine on the Southside was going out of business, and I wanted to visit one last time. They were offering a BOGO. I was struggling to choose anything that I wanted. I found this in the RSD section, added a Merzbow record (because I could), and that was my final purchase there.

It's pressed in snazzy orange marbled vinyl. So many things are pressed in colored vinyl now that I try not to be impressed by that, but I still like it.

I'm usually not super-fussy about these things, but the pressing and mastering sound really fine. It probably helps that, as a discogs.com reviewer wrote, the longest side is just over thirteen and a half minutes in length.

I've been reading that the film is an excellent and very creepy horror/giallo. I hope it's available for streaming.

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Today's platter spin: Giù la testa, AKA Duck, You Sucker! AKA A Fistful of Dynamite AKA Once Upon a Time...The Revolution

One of two Morricone western movie soundtracks in my vinyl collection. I've come to realize that I've seen few of the films associated with the Morricone soundtracks in my personal collection. I haven't seen The Chosen; my friend hipped me to Veruschka-poesia di una donna being on Youtube, but I haven't watched it entirely yet; I've seen just a few minutes of this film. I'm going to have to do better in this case. I know there's more soundtracks coming of which I've not seen the original film.

This one's from another Sergio Leone western. I think like many people, I'm not generally a fan of westerns, but I like those by Leone I've seen. Specifically, the so-called "Man with No Name" trilogy with Clint Eastwood.

Let me make an aside here, since it's only slightly off-topic. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is the most epic and lauded of those three films. And it's a great film. But I love how the plot and soundtrack music intermingle in For a Few Dollars More. The character El Indio has a pocketwatch that plays a music box melody. It's a beautiful, simple melody, clearly played on celesta. He gives another character the point when the music stops to draw his gun. Eyes lock, Leone-style. The celesta gives way classical guitar...then organ...than full orchestra with a prominent trumpet solo...then back to the celesta. It's one of the most effective convergences of music and plot I know in cinema.

This is supposed to be part of a trilogy that includes Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Well, I question that, considering the latter was made thirteen years after this film.

Morricone is Morricone for sure here. Musical cues vary between lush orchestrations, weird cuteness, and outright bizarreness. Take the "Marcia Degli Accatoni" (I think). It starts with contrabassoon and a male voice uttering "mwah" in a frog-like tone. Enter, a bass recorder or ocarina of some sort. Add some strings and guitar, some sopranino (I'm guessing) recorder, and he even quotes Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik along the way. It would be disappointing if he composed a Leone western score in 1971 without having something this strange in it. Elsewhere in the cues there are also whistling, wordless or other nonsense syllables ("shum, shum, shum"), and some sort of electric or electronic keyboard (wasn't certain if it was a clavinet).

One of my unrealized projects, specifically for OPEK, was a performance of music entirely drawn from film soundtracks. I already had arrangements of cues or themes from Taking of Pelham 123, Last Tango in Paris, Godzilla vs. Mothra. As I'm listening, there's a long track in the second half of the score, "Invenzione per John," that might have made an interesting arrangement for that band. It wouldn't exactly be a representative Morricone work, but then, I'm not sure any other piece is either.

Just after writing that, I read on the Wikipedia page for this film that Elvis Mitchell loved this score and made special mention of that particular cue as well. It is quite beautiful, so of course the next track on the album is the most jarring.

I bought my copy at Jerry's Records, to the surprise of nobody who knows Jerry's. I think it was an unsold auction item that he let me pick out his bins before putting it out on the racks. I could be wrong about that. I remember fewer and fewer circumstances where I bought my records. I still love Jerry's Records but I miss having Jerry himself there!

If I was making my mixtape of Morricone favorites, I'd definitely pull a few selections off of this one.

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Going in no particular order, next up is the album Veruschka (soundtrack to Veruschka-Poetry of a Woman, AKA Veruschka-poesia di una donna), 1971 (original film release). 2LP.

There's little in the way of a description of this film on the IMDB page: "Fashion photographer Franco Rubartelli's visually lush and moody head film about European supermodel Veruschka."

I can't say whether this is a documentary in any true sense of the word. The music must have been important for the film, considering there's as much of it as there is. The instrumentation, as best as I can tell, is piano, strings (possibly string quartet, maybe more, probably not full string orchestra), harp, flute, electric bass, guitar, drums plus various percussion and mallets. Late in the score there's a clearly improvised track including trumpet. That is most likely Ennio himself.

The only thing I can glean from the content of the film is that Veruschka appears in no fewer than four different body paints, based on the front and back covers and B and D side labels.

The back cover sees her in a bird-inspired face paint, which is also the image used for the front cover of the Morricone collection Crime and Dissonance. I highly recommend this double CD. Released on Mike Patton's Ipecac Records, it focused on Morricone's strangest works, rather than his more famous or crowd-pleasing compositions. Actually, not all of it is particularly weird; there's a little (an easy go-to comparison) Phantom of the Opera organ, and a short track of furious Roma-inspired solo violin. The strangeness is emphasized when juxtaposed with some of the more improvisational or atonal tracks. Two tracks from Veruschka are included.

For a film focused on a supermodel, it probably wouldn't surprise anyone the sweetness of some of the score. There's the wordless vocalise again, or lyrics sung in a highly breathy, eroticized voice. The only credits given on the cover go to the producer (Gianni Dell'Orso) and the vocalist (Edda Dell'Orso). I suspect that Ms. Dell'Orso did many vocals for the composer, based on hearing other recordings. I'll have to watch for her name again.

Back when I was working at CAPA High School (Pittsburgh's school for the creative and performing arts), I'd play various CDs before classes began. I'd had on some Morricone, either Crime and Dissonance or Giornata nera per l'ariete, and there was that breathy voice. No notes or lyrics, just a vocalization that could have been interpreted as either sexual arousal or gasping in fear. Another teacher commented that he thought maybe it was good there weren't any students around at the time.

Being a soundtrack, you get to hear the main title theme (as well as several secondary themes) worked over a few times. There's a little of that 70s Morricone atonalism, and even some improvisational phaux-exotica. There's also at times a prominent harp run through a delay. It adds to the spaciness of this "head film," but also dates it. I was thinking of the delay used on portions of Fantastic Voyage, with the same results. The voice is also run through delay a few times.

I looked up Wikipedia-level information on Veruschka, and I'm happy to inform that at 81, she is still alive. I expect another tragic fall-from-grace story after her modeling stardom, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Her young life is interesting and did see tragedy, so I encourage you to look her up yourself.

I've listened to this entire OST. As with many soundtracks, it's all good but as a listening experience could have been pared down to a single LP. No complaints otherwise.

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Ennio Morricone died yesterday at the age of 91. To say he packed a lot of music into those years is an understatement. Approximately 500 film scores? Plus he did some composing of concert music and conducted his works.

So why not follow up my big Messiaen project with a few words about some Morricone recordings? I count that I have twelve albums on vinyl (one a collection) and also have a few CDs somewhere around here.

Like my Messiaen posts, I'm not offering anything resembling serious musicology or even critical review. Just one person's thoughts as he listens to these things, an excuse to dig into a particular artist's work more deeply and write some thoughts along the way.

As a composer, these is no one Morricone. There are of course those wonderfully colorful scores to the Leone westerns. There's the lushness of The Mission and Cinema Paradiso. There are the crime and horror scores of the 70s, employing grooves, improvisation, and often atonal strings. Yet, if you listen to enough, you can hear his hand on much of it.

I recognize the phenomenon of listening to soundtracks as a separate experience from the visuals of a film. It's how the music stands up that interests me. I know of scores that work beautifully with the film but are not especially interesting when heard separately. I'd put Silence of the Lambs in that category. There are probably scores that outshine the films, or at the very least are at a much higher caliber than the rest of the film. Ronald Stein comes to mind, whose scores for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and It Conquered the World are quite good work.

So I'll dig on some Ennio. First up: The Chosen (AKA Holocaust 2000 AKA Rain of Fire). It's a 1977 film starring Kirk Douglas, an engineer building a nuclear power plant in the Middle East, who discovers his son is the Antichrist. (!!!) It's what I read, folks.

I hate to continually use the words "weird" or "odd" when describing the music. His scores are an odd mix sometimes though. A lush, sweet theme, some atonalism, often quite a bit of vocalise. There's some wordless, female voices a few times here ("Visions of the Holocaust [Main title]") that recall the voices on "Magic and Ecstasy" on the Exorcist II soundtrack. At other moments I find it similar to the score to Brian DePalma's The Untouchables, in my estimation a just-okay film with a lesser Morricone contribution. (The use of synthesizers in that work seems very out of place, and ultimately dated now.)

By the way, I surely can't be alone in considering DePalma one of the most overrated film directors. That will ruffle some people I'm sure, and discussion for another time maybe.

Back to The Chosen, it's very good but is not one of the more interesting things I've heard from the composer that stands up to listening apart from the visual experience. With around 500 scores, many of them are going to sound soundtracky, right? This work was never reissued on CD, and the vinyl cover comes in two colors. It was released on Cerberus Records, with a noting that it's an Ennio Morricone Film Score Society release. I'm not going to bother checking whether it's on anything like Spotify, but my guess would be not.

How many scores did they help release? About twenty of discogs.com is any true indication, a few of which have since been reissued.

And how many of his scores have seen audio release? Definitely not all of them. And is that such a bad thing?

I might have to hunt down a few more at Jerry's Records, where I bought this.