rainbows in curved air (or curves in rainbowed air)

Soundtracks

I caught the last 5 minutes of a dodgy Chevy Chase movie but as the titles rolled on the screen, I heard Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ & this set me off thinking about cool soundtracks. (What is it with Chevy & Paul, Al?).

There are so many clever & fascinating soundtracks around these days. My current favourites include: ‘Love Lisa’, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ & ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’.

My life has been mapped with reference to many epic scores & they have stayed with me all my life. I first became aware of the genre with Ennio Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns in the 60s. I have since jumped right into the Italian soundtrack weirdness.

Another Italian, who has recently died, but produced stupendous films with tremendous music was Michaelangelo Antonioni. His ‘Blow up’ & ‘Zabrieski Point’ lit up my life. The latter even had a great Pink Floyd track on it: ‘Heart Beat- pig meat’. This was perhaps their last decent piece of work.

A hard to find, but a firm favourite is Harry Nilsson’s ‘The Point’. Did I actually see this movie at one time or is that just in my head? Also crucial to my Third Ear Band collection was their soundtrack to Roman Polanski’s ‘MacBeth’. There is a family/clan connection with the latter as I believe the ‘beatties’ may have held the jaikets for the mighty MacBeth clansmen.

Mad mental sounds jump out at you, never mind the visuals in Jodorowsky’s ‘El Topo’ & ‘Holy Mountain’. Don Cherry puts in a terrific shift on the latter.

I haven’t even touched on the sheer quality & diversity of the Boolywood features. I will leave that for a future post.