MY FAVORITE CDS OF 2006, PART ONE

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1. AMAZING STORIES: ANTHOLOGY ONE - Steve Bartek, Bruce Broughton, Georges Delerue, Danny Elfman, Billy Goldenberg, James Horner, Lennie Niehaus, David Shire, John Williams (Intrada Special Collection)

Amazing Stories has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the most disappointing series in TV history. Steven Spielberg was in the midst of a staggering hit streak with E.T. and the first two Indiana Jones films (and the surprise hit The Color Purple was imminent) when this anthology series hit the airwaves in 1985. The lavish production values and the talents involved -- directors like Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis, Clint Eastwood, Joe Dante, and Spielberg himself, composers like Williams, Goldsmith and Delerue -- gave one the impression that Spielberg could do whatever he wanted with the show, so the fact that the end result was lame stories beautifully mounted was doubly frustrating. The excuses the producers came up with to explain audiences' disappointment with the show -- that TV viewers weren't used to feature quality production values, or that we couldn't expect the stories to be amazing every week -- were frankly more imaginative than the episodes themselves, with many of them based on Spielberg's own ideas (Harry and the Hendersons and ...batteries not included were allegely first conceived as Amazing Stories episodes). Amazing Stories may have improved in re-viewing over the years -- I wouldn't know, as I've never been especially tempted to go back and watch them again (too many really terrific TV shows to catch up on, with a large number of them available on DVD), but the one element of the series that does hold up is the music, and thanks to Intrada, we can now enjoy that music without having to suffer through those scripts. Getting two discs of seldom heard, complete short fantasy scores from the likes of Bruce Broughton, Georges Delerue, Danny Elfman, Billy Goldenberg, James Horner, and John Williams is like a dream come true, with scores ranging from Williams's lush Ghost Train to Delerue's typically touching The Doll (one of the best episodes, thanks to Richard Matheson's script) to the stirring adventure of Horner's Alamo Jobe to the 2010-style electronics of Shire's Moving Day. It's a Silver Age treasure trove, and almost enough to make one want to watch the series again. Almost.

Everything I said about the first Amazing Stories collection applies here as well, with the addition of even more wonderful composers. Jerry Goldsmith's Boo has actually improved over the years, Thomas Newman's Santa '85 showed strong hints of the remarkable beauty of his later work, and it's a particular treat to hear from such perpetually underrepresented talents as John Addison, Leonard Rosenman and Arthur B. Rubinstein.

One of L.A.'s great, lost record stores (it was, for example, where I bought my first issue of Film Score Monthly roughly 15 years ago) was Disc Connection which, during my decades in Los Angeles, moved from Gayley in Westwood to Pico at Veteran to its final place on Sunset, near the Virgin Megastore. On my first visit to L.A. I bought two LPs at Disc Connection, a brand new Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and a sealed copy of the "Poo Records" release (what an awesome title for a bootleg label) of Breakheart Pass. Since then, I replaced it with a similarly unauthorized (to say the least) CD, but at long last, La-La Land has graced us with the first legitimate release of this lively Goldsmith adventure score, one of his handful of "train" scores (along with Von Ryan's Express, The Cassandra Crossing, and the spectacular The Great Train Robbery) as well as the last of a long string of Western scores (though the film is ultimately more of a mystery-thriller, despite the Western setting) before his final film in the genre, Bad Girls (18 years later). The film was a pleasant, forgettable entertainment and its score, though a minor work in the Goldsmith canon, was a typically rousing effort, with a catchy main theme, surging action cues, and Goldsmith's typically striking orchestral effects. It's a treat to have this particular gap in the last three decades of Goldsmith filled; now if only someone could get around to Players, The Salamander, I.Q...

I know, as a student of film music history, it's a kind of sacrilege to rate the new David Arnold Bond score more highly than the likes of Steiner's Dark Victory or Newman's The Razor's Edge, but before I was a film music geek I was a Bond geek, and Arnold's Casino Royale is the best Bond score since John Barry left the series 20 years ago. Though no one can ever truly replace Barry, as his Bond scores are (despite their commercial popularity) perhaps the most underrated body of scores in film history, Arnold continues to rise to the task, helped by the fact that Casino Royale is the best Bond film in the nearly 40 years since On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The Casino score is a lively mix of Barry-esque brassiness and Arnold's own more modern action sound, and Arnold's melodies are his strongest yet. The main title song, "You Know My Name," got undeservedly bad reviews (it improves upon re-listening, and I've listened to it literally dozens of times), and Arnold's incorporation of the theme provides many of the score's highlights -- despite the song's rock-ish sound, Arnold's variations on the motif within the score are among the most satisfyingly Barry-ish moments (while his love themes also have a pleasing Barry quality). Though the Sony CD is unfortunately missing the song (available separately on a CD from Interscope), it features a particularly well-selected collection of cues, and while Sony has thoughtfully made the complete score available for download (the rare use of download-only which I approve of), the CD provides all the truly necessary music.

Just as Intrada's four CDs (so far) of Amazing Stories scores present an awesome assortment of Silver Age composers, this boxed set of all of Bernstein's Film Music Collection original re-recordings (plus the long-awaited re-recording of Kings of the Sun) is pretty much a complete Golden Age set for all your marooned-on-a-desert-island-with-a-CD-player needs. The collection includes my choices for the two most beautiful scores ever written -- Herrmann's Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Bernstein's To Kill a Mockingbird -- though others might make the same claim for Newman's Wuthering Heights or Rozsa's Madame Bovary or North's exquisite Death of a Salesman (all also included). But if that isn't enough, there's Rozsa's glorious Thief of Bagdad and his lovely Young Bess; North's vibrant Viva Zapata!; Herrmann's alternately grim and thrilling Torn Curtain; and even more classics from the likes of Bernstein, Steiner, Tiomkin and Waxman.

Ghostbusters was one of the top grossers of the mid-eighties (and is currently #47 on the U.S. all-time list), so the fact that it took 22 years for its score to be commercially released is especially maddening -- I remember how the mere five years it took for The Final Conflict score to be released seemed like an eternity. (For those interested in such trivia, The Lion King is the highest grossing film [#16 on the U.S. list] that hasn't had a full score album released, though its soundtrack does feature a mixture of the film's score and the songs, which are at least if not more musically dominant in the film. Bruce Almighty [#42] and My Big Fat Greek Wedding [#44] also featured songs with some score on their CDs, while the rapidly rising Spider-Man 3 [#46 as of Sunday] currently has no score release planned whatsoever). After decades as a composer whose great scores ranged from the epic (The Ten Commandments, Hawaii) to the intimate (To Kill a Mockingbird, Summer and Smoke), it was surprising that Bernstein should have his last great hit streak specializing in comedy, with Airplane!, Stripes and Ghostbusters his biggest successes in the genre. Just as Airplane! was a deft parody of B-movie thriller music while Stripes featured a truly rousing military theme, Bernstein's Ghostbusters managed to be an imaginative fantasy-horror score while supporting the film's genuinely inspired humor. The one advantage in having to wait two decades for a score is that, instead of a 30-40 minute release missing major cues, we get a full hour of score including never before heard cues. With Ghostbusters, Stripes and Spacehunter, Varese had made major steps in filling in the gaps of Bernstein's terrific '80s scores -- is it too much to hope for The Great Santini, Class and Slipstream?

There have been longer-awaited original score releases than Ghostbusters (I've been waiting 31 years for John Williams' Family Plot and I'll probably have to keep waiting), but it's hard to think of a more long-awaited re-recording than Monstrous Movie Music's latest two collections of classic genre movies from the 40s, 50s and 60s. Their impeccable re-recordings of scores like Tarantula, Them! and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms are among the best and most accurate representations of vintage scores ever released, as well as presenting B-list scores which, though not considered Golden Age classics, are the kind of scores which made many of us film music fans in the first place (in my youth, I taped the main title from Tarantula off my parents' TV). To follow up the original Monstrous Movie Music and More Monstrous Movie Music sets, the label recorded three new collections, spotlighting The Creature from the Black Lagoon (with other "jungle" scores), Mighty Joe Young (plus other Harryhausen works) and This Island Earth (and other alien-oriented scores). The 2000 release of the Creature CD was everything one could hope for, but the other two discs took an additional six years to come out. Ray Harryhausen's films were among the pivotal aspects of my youth, as well as a huge influence on my love of film music -- the Herrmann and Rozsa Sinbad albums were among my very first soundtrack purchases -- and to have spot-on re-recordings of music from Mighty Joe Young, 20 Million Miles to Earth, and even the Harryhausen segment of The Animal World makes my Harryhausen music collection essentially complete.

For many years, Desplat was nothing more to me than just another prolific European composer whose scores I collected erratically, and who had no real musical identity for me. I didn't see The Advocate (a medieval courtroom drama whose only distinction was that Miramax tried to hype it with a Crying Game-style secret which is actually revealed in the opening of the movie) when it was released in the U.S. , though I did notice that the Luzhin Defense CD was much more lush and melodic than I expected, but I didn't give it any extra play. My Desplat ignorance finally waned when I saw Girl with a Pearl Earring, featuring his evocative mixture of classicism and minimalism, and a year later his fresh and striking score for Birth put him on the list as one of the top composers to watch. I reviewed my entire Desplat collection for a column a couple years ago, and I was struck by how musically dissimilar his scores tend to sound, which is admirable in a film composer but can also keep a composer from developing a devoted following -- it is often the recognition of a distinctive voice that makes a composer a fan favorite, and though the films are different in tone and subject matter, Desplat's The Queen is a clear successor to (though not a ripoff of) his Birth. A dryly witty comedy-drama about the Royal Family's reaction to the death of Princess Diana would hardly seem a likely place to find a standout score -- dialogue-driven films tend to be minimally scored, for obvious reasons -- but The Queen benefited from one of the most noticeable yet emotionally and dramatically satisfying scores of the year, melodic and lovely, earning Desplat his first Oscar nomination and garnering him major assignments like The Golden Compass and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

In my youth, there were films which I was looking forward to so eagerly that even upon actually seeing them, I couldn't allow myself to believe they were as bad (or even disappointing) as they ultimately were. The idea of Stanley Donen, director of some of my favorite films from my youth (Charade, Arabesque, Bedazzled, Two for the Road) making a post-Alien sci-fi horror film was a sure-fire, must-see-opening-day film, and the end result, though in retrospect not actually any good at all, was utterly fascinating, from the erratic visual effects from the occasional burst of uber-gore to nudity from Farrah Fawcett and Kirk Douglas to Stuart Craig's colorful sets. The strangest aspect of all was Elmer Bernstein's score (heard only in an extremely edited version in the movie), and much as I enjoy the album, which gives us the first opportunity to hear Bernstein's complete work on the film, I can't honestly say if it's actually a good score (and I strongly suspect it isn't). Clearly Bernstein wasn't just going through the motions -- he may have seen the film's bizarreness as an opportunity to experiment with a variety of musical styles. It's possible that without the experimentation of Saturn 3, he would never have been able to achieve the imaginative consistency of his superb Heavy Metal. There are many better (much much better) Bernstein scores, but Intrada's Saturn 3 disc is a compelling and rewarding listening experience and a source of endless fascination, and just writing about it makes me want to put it on right now (except I'm at my day job and don't have the disc with me, and it would probably annoy my co-workers).

Much as I love having a quasi-complete Harryhausen collection, this collection of 50s-60s sci-fi scores, featuring a complete This Island Earth as well as the theme from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (more Harryhausen!) and War of the Satellites and a welcome suite from Ron Goodwin's Day of the Triffids (Village and Children of the Damned next, please?) is an even greater treasure trove of music from my youth.

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