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| This is a comments thread about FSM CD: The Thief Who Came to Dinner |
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Gotta love those conga drums!
And I personally think Mancini made better use of the Martenot [is that what it is here? or is it an organ made to sound like one?] in this period than another composer (nameless) who did it a whole lot, a whole lot later.
And nobody could write more fun parts for a Fender Rhodes. Nobody. With other folks it sounded like someone was substituting for an acoustic piano, but in his writing it was very much its own instrument.
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Hi David,
Actually it's not an ondes Martenot here, it's I think several keyboards that were cutting-edge at the time...I think I saw "Yamaha" written on the paperwork. I tried to identify the keyboards in the liner notes where I could. Very well said about Mancini's fender rhodes writing!
Lukas
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The sound of the Fender-Rhodes keyboard was a signature of many 70's scores and the two best proponents were Mancini and, better yet, Lalo Schifrin. Roy Budd used it to great effect also.
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In The Thief Who Came to Dinner, Mancini shows that - like Quincy Jones and his score for The Split - he can write a catchy and memorable bassline and use it throughout the score.
I think it may have been Lukas who observed that there's more melody in some of these 70's basslines than there is in many entire scores being written today. Alas, as Jim Phelps points out now and then, we don't seem to be getting many of these types of scores being released (so far), as the '80's seem to be taking some precedence.
That's why I'll miss the FSM label.
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Mancini wrote some ACE secondary themes in his career, and the one in "Soft Scene" is up there among the top.
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Hi David,
Actually it's not an ondes Martenot here, it's I think several keyboards that were cutting-edge at the time...I think I saw "Yamaha" written on the paperwork. I tried to identify the keyboards in the liner notes where I could. Very well said about Mancini's fender rhodes writing!
Lukas
The melody of "Thief" is performed on an Arp synth. The Yamaha was a model CS80 and had some great sounds. In particular a "ribbon" over the keyboard that created the glissando sound on Mancini's "Mystery Movie Theme". Eventually these were replaced by smaller keyboards that did the same thing.
Roy
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I finally opened my copy of this one and it does not disappoint.
Mancini was the man to beat, at this kind of writing.
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Posted: |
Nov 10, 2016 - 5:54 AM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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I finally got this CD!!!
What took me so long? This is a 2009 FSM release, right? Well, if I can explain myself, y'know how when you bought an LP as a teen and you heard it so much back then that you thought you knew it like the back of your hand? Well, that's what happened to me, and that's what put me off getting it. It was only Number 94 on my "Wants" list for that reason.
So there I goes, driftin' through life thinkin' I really knew the Mancini score. I must have heard it a million times between about 1975 and 1982. So when it came out on FSM, it went to Number 94 on the "to get" list. I knew it had been expanded, but I'm no huge fan of expansions, especially when the album's perfect, so that's my excuse.
Then, after several years of buying very little, and particularly in the last few months due to exchange rate blah blah blah boredom, whining and dining, I thought to myself, "Hey dude!" (I call myself that sometimes), "You only live once, you complete nutmeg! And the FSM releases are still about the cheapest U.S. CDs available! So buy this, or be forever a nincompoop numbskull"! So I bought it, and all my nutmegness evaporated. I had made a wise choice.
This is a totally brilliant CD! Even the album prog - which I thought I knew - sounded "new", perhaps because it had been 32 years since I last heard it, and I'm not the same callow youth as I was. But it was just as brill, if not more so. And the 18 mins of bonus tracks are excellent too! Which is kind of my big-thing-point....
I very very rarely reprogramme CDs. I just listen to them as they come. But in this case I think I'll do an experiment. The bonus tracks (leaving out "Hank's Country Source" stuff) are so good in themselves that I think I'll try to hear the whole thing in film order. The instructions are in the booklet, and I think I'm just about OK enough to follow them. There aren't any boring additions, or annoying tracks (which surprised me seeing as Hank usually put in some silliness in most of his lighter stuff - and the film is hardly Tarkovski). Yes, some of them may be more subdued for example than the Main Prog, but it's all top notch Mancini and I think these bonuses, inserted in film order, would make a totally well-rounded and utterly splendid listen. I'll let you know, if I get around to doing it.
I'm thinking of doing the same with Grusin's fantastic THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, but that looks a bit more problematical.
Meanwhile, if you haven't got Mancini's THE THIEF WHO CAME TO DINNER, you're an uncool nutmeg. As was I until last week.
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I'm surprised it's taken you this long to get the CD, Graham 
It's a very enjoyable Mancini score.
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