If you can only name one film composer, chances are it's John Williams. If you can name two, the second is bound to be Ennio Morricone. The Italian master is one of the most prolific film composers—or composers of any type of music—of all time, with hundreds of film scores to his credit. He gained immortality with his brilliant and original scores for Sergio Leone's "Spaghetti Westerns", most notably The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966.
While it's impossible to pin down Morricone's style in only a few sentences, it's safe to say that there's a streak of playfulness and experimentation that runs through all of his work. His most famous pieces are notable for their creative use of the human voice not for singing, as such, but as instruments; sometimes for rhythm, sometimes for melody.
Crime and Dissonance is a double-CD set that pays homage to the experimental side of Morricone's craft. All 30 tracks are culled from obscure Italian crime films he scored between 1968 and 1974. It contains none of his "classics", but it is representative of those essential qualities that make Morricone's voice so singular. The compilation was put together by Mike Patton of Faith No More fame and was released on his Ipecac Recordings label. According to the liner notes, written by New York avant garde stalwart John Zorn, the collection represents Morricone and Patton's "shared passion and commitment to the extreme and the experimental."
The music runs the gamut from lush orchestration to sparse dissonance, with variety enough to entice the devoted fan as well as the neophyte. Some of the pieces, such as "Giorno Di Notte" from Una Lucertola Con La Pelle Di Donna, take a cue from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (released only two years prior) and explore the experimental side of jazz with wah-wah guitars propelled by busy, fluid drumming. Others generate suspense with a more traditional string arrangement or, in one case, a sinister pipe organ. Yet even when he treads the traditional ground of the soundtrack genre, Morricone is always able to put his unique stamp on the music.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
very nicely done Pete and agree with your assessment: some extremely weird and classic stuff here spannign a much wider sonic palette than we are used to from a single artist/composer!
2 - Tan The Man
His work on "Cinema Paradiso" is incredible.
3 - rob a.
The set was actually curated by Alan Bishop, of Sun City Girls. He earlier compiled the "Morricone 200/2001" lps for an Italian label. SCG have been making/championing all manner of sonic weirdness for 22 years, so let's give Alan due credit for the quality and focus of this compilation.
SCG:
Bishop's overview of Morricone's work:
4 - Pete Blackwell
Fair enough, but Zorn gives credit to Patton in the liner notes. Maybe it was the concept that was Patton's?
5 - rob a.
The _money_ was Patton's. ;-P