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| Photo of Ennio Morricone with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza by Roberto Masotti |
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
There are giants that we share the earth with, and, until Monday, Ennio Morricone was among them. There are far better eulogies that can be written about him than I ever will be able to jot down. So I'll talk about buying this CD.
After John Williams, Morricone was the first film composer I could recognize by ear. I latched onto his score of "The Untouchables", and as I kept watching movies in the early 90s, like "Hamlet" and "Bugsy" and "The Mission", I kept noticing that the same Italian guy with the name I didn't know how to pronounce kept making music that moved me. Somewhere along the way, I learned he had made the music for The Man With No Name Trilogy, and got really hooked on this piece with whistling (it was "Theme from 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly'"). I started working at this Borders-style bookstore in the music department, and this bad boy was showing its cover from the end of the soundtrack section. I used my employee discount to get 50% off $12.99 (plus tax). I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed initially that none of "l buono, il brutto, il cattivo" appeared on this disc. But I got over my disappointment fairly quickly.
Even 30 years after its release, this is a pretty good survey of Morricone's spaghetti western scores from 1963 to 1968. The opener, "A Gringo Like Me" from 1963's "Duello nel Texas", has this earworm quality to it that, within three listens, will have you singing along with Peter Tevis. There are fair enough chunks of both "Per un pugno di dollari" and "Per qualche dollaro in più" to convince you to drop some bread on vintage Italian copies on vinyl. But the pieces I keep coming back to are his four cues from "C'era una volta il West", released in the States in 1969 as "Once Upon a Time in the West". To me, a track like "L'Uomo Dell'Armonica" is just a memorable as "L'Estasi Dell'Oro".
I could rattle off how many records the man sold, or how many scores he composed, and how many times he got robbed of a Grammy. That's part of the legend, but irrelevant to the story I'll tell. As a teenager whose exposure to modern composition only came from film scores, Ennio Morricone helped open my ears up, and widen my eyes to a wider world than punk and thrash records. His nickname was "Maestro" for good reason; he taught me to listen in a different way. Is there any greater praise?
Click here to download.
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