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Film Score Blog (August 2009): Jerry Fielding Works and The Super Cops!

Posted By: Thomas Rucki on August 29, 2009 - 3:00 AM

The Super Cops

I consider The Super Cops as one of Fielding’s very best ever. Let me explain myself. Light at first glance, the score is actually very ambitious, strong, versalite, composite in the end but still very well-oiled and homogenous. As usual, you will find the martial beat but arranged with an exotic and colorful way. The ethnic and upbeat orientation is a departure from Fielding’s abstract leitmotiv and tormented scores. The music itself is rich in texture, filled with South American instruments (as the Brazilian friction drum Cuica, the wrought iron bell Agogo and the dried gourd Xequerê) and influences (from the big band, the fanfare, the soul music, the rock music to the samba of Rio’s Carnival and Slavic modernistic classical music) and fits the concept of “primitive modern” (1) and, in the context of the film, it illustrates very well New York’s urban jungle settings. Fielding uses the triangle (see the cues “Blue Imperial”, “Purse Snatcher”, “Caucasian Lads”) that will become the trade mark of his Universal series The Bionic Woman.

Find a selection of tracks classified in three categories that underline the finest sides of the score: note that the music is so eclectic that it also incorporates other previously mentioned styles.

The Military Tempo

• “Main Title” (#1): the martial beat revisited with samba and some… funk!

• “The Sniper” (#2)

• “Blue Imperial/Bed-Stuy” (#4)

• “Hit Men” (#13)

• “Rotunda” (#18)

The Urban Swing

• “Pull the Shade” (#5)

• “Interior Hock Shop/Turn in Your Badges” (#6)

• “Good Friends/To the Dead Child/By the Book” (#7)

• “Tip Top Inn/More Tip Top Inn (#8)

• “Sara’s Strip” (#9)

• “Purse Snatcher/The Hip Strip/Raid on the Hays Bros” (#14): the first four seconds foreshadow the opening theme of The Bionic Woman!

• “Interior Hock Shop/Turn in Your Badges (alternate)” (#19)

The Low-Key Mood

• “The Junkie” (#10): an ominous slick underground tune!

• “Down Rope—Across the Roof” (#11)

• “Caucasian Lads/Pusher Chase/End of Pusher Chase” (#15)

• “After Shoot” (#17)

Opening credits (in stereo) for the Universal series The Bionic Woman (1975).

The Bonus

Beyond The Super Cops, this soundtrack CD offers three types of extras or “added value”: the three scores for the 1973 television series Hawkins that integrate the cues list and the cues timing for a precise listening experience, some source Café music from The Outfit and an unused track from The Super Cops—an alternate, rough and low-key version of the second half of “Pull the Shade” that concludes this second CD.

Hawkins

The first and the most exquisite one (“Life for a Life” contains 12 cues) reminds some passages from “Firefall” (in Kolchak, The Night Stalker) and “Spectre of the Gun” (in Star Trek) and the western score for Lawman (with a derived and softer version of “Branding the Cattle” that is part of the cue “The Big Test”) and the torn-inside aspect of The Wild Bunch. The second score has two tracks: a very short anecdotal one entitled “Harmonica Source” and the real McCoy entitled “Blood Feud” (containing 15 cues) which is an update of Straw Dogs and starts with a powerful dark martial introduction a la Mechanic (cue “Bye Bye, Mean Stanley”) and then dive into the country-western mode. The third score has also two tracks: a short elegant classical music composition entitled “Source” (derived from “Flowers” in Scorpio) and the big introspective piece (“Murder in the Slave Trade” contains 10 cues) is in the line of the sinister, tense, lyrical, depressing and melancolic The Mechanic and two cues (“The Big Lie” and “All Night?”) remind the crescendo opening from the movie’s main title. These three scores are really recommended and deserve a great attention owing to their cinematic complexity.

The Source Café Music

You can easily skip the three “generic” country-western source music tracks but the fourth one (“All Purpose Extra Blues Source”) is a nice, silky and sophisticated change of tone.

Opening credits from Straw Dogs (1971).

A Word to the Wise

Support the soundtrack CD of The Super Cops because Fielding is yet to be known. The Super Cops was FSM's greatest title in 2006 that I can listen over and over and still finds fresh, tough and exciting and opens your mind to a brand new realm of sounds. In the legendary scores to be released, find the essence of Fielding’s work: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Junior Bonner, Michael Winner’s The Big Sleep and Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz.

By all means necessary, order Jerry Fielding’s The Super Cops:

http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm?ID=5047

Click on the cover to view the CD Page with the details!

Footnote:

1. Primitive Modern is the title of a 1956 jazz album by Gil Mellé which develops the idea that extreme simplicity and bareness bred by modernistic arrangements and abstract writings combined sometimes with electronics or music concrète are a return to the core of music in his most ancient form and origin in time.

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Comments (15):

Posted by Jim Phelps on August 29, 2009 7:58 AM

THE SUPER COPS finds Fielding at his most accessible and is a great first purchase for beginners, though Jerry is definitely an acquired taste--it took me years to finally "get" him. Those who only associate the composer with harsh atonalities will find fun, funkified action cues and for those who know Fielding's material well, will hear both subtle (in SUPER COPS) and not-so subtle humor (nods to previous works in HAWKINS and the source cues) throughout this CD.

And don't sell those Country & Western cues short! They're wildly entertaining and abundant with humor! The sped-up tempos are amsuing, but when playing innocuously in the background, fit the mood perfectly.

I liked playing "spot the previous score" with HAWKINS--a show I'm dying to see--as Jerry was rather contemptuous of TV, as his Incredible Hulk quote in the liners indicates. The man was constantly working and I can understand why he'd borrow from himself--also to humorous effect, as in THE KILLER ELITE's source cue--as well as flourishes from THE MECHANIC. It's not pastiche, but rather those memorable Fielding trademarks: plucked and swirling strings, low and tense piano, and snare-drum percussion.

Nice appraisal of the FSM release.

P.S. I work with an ex-NYPD officer from this time (he worked from 1968-85) and his beat was "Bed-Stuy"; I wonder if he knew those guys!!!

Posted by Simon Morris on August 29, 2009 2:36 PM

Interesting post from Thomas/Stefan (still can't get used to using his real name...) there. I never gave much thought to THE SUPER COPS and it's connection to 'Slavic modernistic classical music' or the concept of 'primitive modern'; obviously I don't listen closely enough eh?

But apart from that, this is indeed Fielding at his most accessible and funky - I love the various 70's-styled percussive devices, and the opening seconds of track 14 and it's similarity to THE BIONIC WOMAN wasn't lost on me either. And I also found Fielding's HAWKINS music a more engaging listen than that which Jerry Goldsmith composed, actually.

Anyway - when I first heard this score and exclaimed "Fielding's got da funk!", obviously I did mean that I recognised the primitive modern concept but I just couldn't phrase it correctly.

I'd certainly echo Thomas' advice and tell those unfamiliar with Fielding (or even those who prefer his 'darker' works) to give this set a try. Oliver Nelson's jazzy ZIGZAG can only be a bonus :)

Posted by Jim Phelps on August 29, 2009 3:30 PM

I've had that "Primitive Modern/Quadrama" Gil Melle (no accent over the second "e" then) album for many years and it's largely a fresh, loosely swinging jaunt through late-fifties hip! :D I love his work with that quartet and that's initially how I "discovered" Melle. He, along with Oliver Nelson were unknown to me as film/TV composers. For the longest time I just thought that Gil was this high-concept composer who existed in some small corner of the post-Bop world.

:cool:

Posted by Stefan Miklos on August 29, 2009 4:28 PM

Have you ever watched the series "Hawkins", by the way?
In the booklet, Lukas Kendall lists all the original scores from "Hawkins" and, apart from Goldsmith and Fielding, George Romanis and Jeff Alexander did two scores. I wonder how it sounds like?

Posted by Simon Morris on August 29, 2009 4:30 PM

HAWKINS was shown here in the UK, although I have to say I didn't really like it much. Despite starring Jimmy Stewart, it never really struck me as being all that popular.

Posted by Jim Phelps on August 29, 2009 9:09 PM

HAWKINS was shown here in the UK, although I have to say I didn't really like it much. Despite starring Jimmy Stewart, it never really struck me as being all that popular.

Was it on any time recently? I don't think it's been played in the States since 1973, though the pilot may have made the rounds on one of the "Superstations" in the days before I cared about such things--or took them for granted. :(

Posted by musicwizard on August 30, 2009 3:42 AM

I liked playing "spot the previous score" with HAWKINS--a show I'm dying to see--as Jerry was rather contemptuous of TV, as his Incredible Hulk quote in the liners indicates. The man was constantly working and I can understand why he'd borrow from himself

It’s funny you say this. Indeed he “recycled” his older scores a lot of the times (most of them have some sort of reference to The Mechanic) and quoted Lutoslawsky’s Concerto for Orchestra on a few occasions but he seems to get away with it.
I mean James Horner was more than once sentenced “the dead penalty” on this board for using three notes (!!!) of a previous score or quoting Prokofiev :-)

I agree that he accepted too much work. More than he could handle actually according to Lennie Niehaus, saying he did more than only orchestration once in a while and writing a few cues himself (based on Fielding’s material) to get the score finished on time.
What suprises me the most about Fielding is that he came up with something so fresh for such an awful movie as The Super Cops is.
He wasn’t able to continue his workingrelationship with Michael Winner on The Stone Killer and Death Wish because of schedule conflicts (doing The Super Cops instead??).
That would have been a hell of a score!

Posted by Jim Phelps on August 30, 2009 8:07 AM

He wasn’t able to continue his workingrelationship with Michael Winner on The Stone Killer and Death Wish because of schedule conflicts (doing The Super Cops instead??).
That would have been a hell of a score!

If Fielding had scored DEATH WISH, it'd most likely be the score we remember him for, and then threads dedicated to him wouldn't drop like a mugger shot by Paul Kersey.

Posted by chriss on August 30, 2009 12:44 PM

It’s funny you say this. Indeed he “recycled” his older scores a lot of the times (most of them have some sort of reference to The Mechanic) and quoted Lutoslawsky’s Concerto for Orchestra on a few occasions but he seems to get away with it.
I mean James Horner was more than once sentenced “the dead penalty” on this board for using three notes (!!!) of a previous score or quoting Prokofiev :-)

I've often wondered too that there's not more "criticism". Fielding often did "self borrowings" and used Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra more than once. Also bits from Lutoslawski's Funeral Music or Bartok's 2nd Piano Concerto can be found in his film scores. But perhaps Fielding did this in a more sophisticated way. He adored the work of these composers and he was in a way more paying hommage to their music than just plagiarizing it. He had developed his own unique composing style out of the avantgardistic writing especially coming from the eastern european composers. With Horner's music I only have the feeling that he is doing this because it is easier for him finishing a composition in time.

Posted by musicwizard on August 30, 2009 2:20 PM

Fielding often did "self borrowings" and used Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra more than once. Also bits from Lutoslawski's Funeral Music or Bartok's 2nd Piano Concerto can be found in his film scores.

Well maybe it’s because a lot of people don’t listen to modern music so they’re not familiar with these compositions and therefore don’t recognize them.
You know it’s funny that everyone’s “upset” that Horner used Khachaturian’s Gayane Ballet in the Aliens main title but bits of Penderecki’s The Dream of Jacob are just everywhere in the entire score!

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