Category: Television

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1971 1972 1973 1974 2008 Film H Isaac Hayes Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Shaft Anthology: His Big Score And More!

7 min read

Order this CDReleased in 2008 (to an audience that almost immediately bought out the print run of all 3,000 copies that were pressed), Film Score Monthly’s The Shaft Anthology is a revelation even if you’re already familiar with the existing release of Isaac Hayes’ album of music from the original movie. For one thing, the album released by Hayes alongside the film did not contain the original recordings as heard in the movie, but took the common approach of a more album-friendly re-recording that had better flow as a listening experience. (This frequently happens because film scores tend to contain a lot of discrete cues that might seem to be jarringly short to those not accustomed to listening to scores in their original form, hence the time-honored tradition – upheld by Williams, Goldsmith, and many others – of re-recording “concert” arrangements that sew the better short pieces together with linking material.) As a result, there is much here that was not on Hayes’ hit album – and even where there’s material that the two albums have in common (such as “Theme from Shaft”), the film version is a different recording, sometimes quite noticeably different. FSM’s 3-CD set aimed to deliver the full score from Shaft down to its shortest track, and with Hayes backed by the Bar-Kays or Movement (or some combination thereof) as his backing band, even the briefest track is a treat to hear.

The plan was to bring Hayes back for the sequel, Shaft’s Big Score!, but as the original film and its soundtrack had made him a hot commodity, Hayes simply didn’t have an opening in his schedule to handle scoring duties on the second movie. Tom McIntosh, who had lent orchestration expertise to Hayes on the first film, was still under contract to MGM and present on the studio lot, expecting to assist Hayes again, but instead found himself collaborating with director Gordon Parks, who opted to try his hand at scoring his own picture (paving the way for John Carpenter). (The delicate subject of who did the most actual musical work on Shaft’s Big Score! – and thus who should get the toplining screen credit – remained something of a long-running point of contention between Parks and McIntosh.) Whoever did the work, the Shaft’s Big Score! is better than you might expect. On the one hand, you’re probably not expecting the songcraft to be on Hayes’ level, but it’s certainly not lacking in either effort or orchestration. (Needless to say, everything in this entire box set is expertly played and extraordinarily well-produced – Hayes’ score from the original film is populated by musicians from the Stax Records stable of players, so it seems to be understood that, with that as the starting point, everything else in the Shaft franchise has to be at that level.) It may not be Hayes and his backing band, but the music of Shaft’s Big Score! is also not a letdown. Since the film’s director had direct input into the score, the second movie’s soundtrack is arguably more “soundtrackish” than the first, but still finds time to pause for a song (“Type Thang”, “Don’t Misunderstand”, “Move On In”) or two. The template established by Shaft is hewed to closely.

Though the extensive liner notes booklet acknowledges Shaft In Africa, it also reveals that the rights to that soundtrack – available elsewhere – did not allow it to appear in the box set, which means that almost half of disc two and all of disc three are devoted to the previously-unreleased-in-any-form complete episode scores from CBS’ short-lived Shaft TV series. That such a series happened at all – with Richard Roundtree remaining in the starring role, and on CBS, arguably the stodgiest old-school network on TV at the time – is still one of the most counter-intuitive moves in the history of film and TV, though to no one’s surprise, the television rendering of Shaft was vastly watered down from the far less filtered version of the character from the big screen. The result was a show that heavily compromised the films’ version of John Shaft, and probably made CBS’ older, largely white audience break out in a cold sweat. Still, the music tries to hold up its end of the bargain of connecting to the film franchise: the melody of Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft” is quoted often, and the TV episode scores spend equal time trying to summon the movies’ classic soul vibe, and dwelling in the space where a lot of ’70s TV music dwells (i.e. we can’t afford as large an orchestra as a movie, but we’re going to make the best of it). When there are tracks like “Cars And Bridges” connecting the TV series to the sound of the movies, There’s still a lot to love within the reduced expectations of Shaft: The Series.

4 out of 4Long out of print and much sought after, at least parts of The Shaft Anthology live on in other releases (Shaft’s Big Score! is available separately, and the first disc (minus the last two tracks) containing the complete score from Shaft itself is now part of Craft Records’ more easily attainable 2017 release Shaft: Deluxe Edition. This leaves the television scores as the real “killer app” of The Shaft Anthology, taking up nearly half of the box set. It’s gotten pricey on the secondary market, but the whole set is worth tracking down.

    Disc One: Shaft ((1971)
  1. Title Shaft (Theme From Shaft) (4:34)
  2. Shaft’s First Fight (1:46)
  3. Reel 2 Part 2 / Cat Oughta Be Here (1:43)
  4. Bumpy’s Theme (Bumpy’s Lament) (1:44)
  5. Harlem Montage (Soulsville) (3:32)
  6. Love Scene Ellie (Ellie’s Love Theme) (1:43)
  7. Shaft’s Cab Ride / Shaft Enters Building (1:38)
  8. I Can’t Get Over Losin’ You (2:06)
  9. Reel 4 Part 6 (1:37)
  10. Reel 5 Part 1 (1:35)
  11. Reel 5 Part 2 (A Friend’s Place) (1:44)
  12. Source No. 1—6M1A (Bumpy’s Blues) (3:05)
  13. Source No. 1—6M1B (Bumpy’s Lament) (1:32)
  14. Source No. 1—6M1C (Early Sunday Morning) (3:05)
  15. Source No. 2—7M1A (Do Your Thang) (3:21)
  16. Source No. 2—7M1B (Be Yourself) (1:54)
  17. Source No. 2—7M1C (No Name Bar) (2:28)
  18. Shaft Strikes Again/Return of Shaft (1:36)
  19. Source No. 3 (Caffe Reggio) (4:23)
  20. Shaft’s Walk To Hideout (Walk From Reggio) (2:27)
  21. Shaft’s Pain (3:03)
  22. Rescue / Roll Up (10:44)
  23. Bonus Tracks)
  24. Theme From The Men (4:09)
  25. Type Thang (From Shaft’s Big Score!) (3:53)

    Disc Two: Shaft’s Big Score! (1972)
  1. Blowin’ Your Mind (Main Title) (3:30)
  2. The Other Side (1:49)
  3. Smart Money (2:10)
  4. The Search/Sad Circles (2:31)
  5. Asby-Kelly Man (1:45)
  6. First Meeting (1:56)
  7. Don’t Misunderstand (1:46)
  8. Fight Scene (1:06)
  9. Ike’s Place (4:09)
  10. Move on In (3:38)
  11. 8M1/8M2 (1:25)
  12. Funeral Home (4:02)
  13. Don’t Misunderstand (instrumental) (1:53)
  14. 9M3 (0:44)
  15. Symphony for Shafted Souls (Take-Off / Dance of the Cars / Water Ballet / Call and Response / The Last Amen) (14:06)
  16. End Title (1:16)
  17. Don’t Misunderstand (demo) (2:00)

    Shaft (Television Series, 1973-74)
    The Executioners

  18. Courtroom/Leaving Court (2:36)
  19. Dawson’s Trial (1:58)
  20. Shaft Leaves Barbara / East River / He’s Dead, Barb / Cunningham’s Breakfast (1:58)
  21. Visiting Jane / Act End / Jury Meets (2:02)
  22. Cars and Bridges (2:43)
  23. Leaving Airfield / Shaft Checks Hospital (2:22)
  24. Shaft Gets Shot / Shaft In Car (1:29)
  25. Night Blues (1:02)
  26. Day Blues (1:04)
  27. Pimp Gets Shot (2:59)
  28. Handle It / Follow Cunningham (3:31)
  29. Shaft Escapes / Stalking Menace (2:42)
  30. End Theme (0:30)

    Disc Three: Shaft (Television Series, 1973-74)
    The Killing
  1. Opening (2:33)
  2. Diana In Hospital (2:37)
  3. Window Shop / Leaving Hospital / Ciao (1:28)
  4. Restaurant Scene / Punchin’ Sonny (2:52)
  5. Hotel Room (3:05)
  6. Diana Splits / Booking Shaft (1:31)
  7. Shaft Gets Sprung / Searchin’ (2:09)
  8. Pimps / Lick Her Store / Wettin’ His Hand / Diana Ducks Out (2:12)
  9. Juke Box / Hands In The Box (2:31)
  10. Shaft (2:53)
  11. Iggie’s Tail (2:21)
  12. Kyle Goes Down / Case Dismissed (1:21)

    Hit-Run

  13. Opening (1:57)
  14. He’s The Best / Reenact / Good Day (2:38)
  15. Travel Shaft (0:42)
  16. Coffin Time (1:34)
  17. To the Club (1:22)
  18. Ann Appears / Shaft Gets It (2:14)
  19. Jacquard (2:31)
  20. Dart Board / Kissin’ Time (3:09)
  21. Omelette (1:55)
  22. Cheek Pat / Don’t Shoot / Shaft’s Move (1:05)
  23. Funny Time (0:58)
  24. At the Club (2:12)
  25. Ending (1:49)

    The Kidnapping

  26. Chasin’ Shaft (3:00)
  27. Sleep, Dog, Sleep (1:37)
  28. Here Comes The Fuzz (2:11)
  29. I Said Goodnight / Walkie Talkie (3:46)
  30. Shoot Out (2:34)

    The Cop Killers

  31. Rossi Gets It / Hospital / Who The Hell Are You? (2:06)
  32. Honky Horn (1:22)
  33. Sleeping Pigs (1:35)
  34. Splash Time (1:32)
  35. Shaft Gets It (1:50)
  36. Vacate The Van (1:41)
  37. Fork Lift (2:09)
  38. Shaft Theme (End Credit Version) (0:30)

Released by: Film Score Monthly
Release date: September 10, 2008
Disc one total running time: 1:10:18
Disc two total running time: 1:17:50
Disc three total running time: 1:18:49

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Categories
1981 2024 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends: Original Music From The 1981 TV Series

3 min read

Order this CDDid anyone have this release on their 2024 bingo card, 43 years after the show premiered? I’m not saying it’s in any way unwelcome – far from it – just very unexpected. But Marvel is having (or, perhaps, has had, depending on who you ask) its moment, so one cynical view that it’s possible to take is that even the most tenuous connection to the Marvel universe is ripe for some fresh exploitation. But if that takes the form of memories from your Saturday mornings in 1981, can you really remain that cynical?

On the downside, it’s an exceedingly short album, but as was often the case with animated TV of this vintage, a composer was hired to assemble a library of music that could be deployed interchangeably from episode to episode. Even those tracks that seem like they’re tagged for use with specific characters or situations (i.e. “Electro Man Theme”, “The Green Goblin”, “Ms. Lion Theme”) were probably used outside of those contexts, repeatedly and relentlessly. Whatever the show’s editors thought would fit a specific scene, they’d cut it together from the show’s internal music library and make it work. The strange magic of this era of animation (and this is something that’s been covered in past reviews of such soundtracks as Star Trek: The Animated Series and Battle Of The Planets) is that the constant reuse bred a delightful familiarity; if you were watching these shows in real time every Saturday morning, these tunes burrowed into your head as much as anything you heard on the radio.

With its 1981 timestamp, the musical lexicon of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends includes all-purpose funk (“Bobby The Iceman”), which almost sounds like a lost opus from Buck Rogers’ Space Rockers, and the slightly more sinister, sinewy “Firestar Theme”. If it ever seemed like there was an implied romance between Spidey and Firestar, the track “Spider-Man And Firestar” is probably responsible for planting 90% of that idea. Action tracks like “Three Heroes Prepare To Go” have distinct disco flavorings, just a reminder that disco didn’t just instantly die on New Years’ Eve 1979 – it hung around into the early ’80s and cross-pollinated with new wave and other genres.

3 out of 4It’s all lavished with lush production – honestly, it all sounds better than I remember, and much like the other specimens of vintage animation music cited earlier, there are real players, not a stack of synthesizers. I really was only ever a very casual viewer of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends at the time, but I always jump at vintage animation soundtrack releases like this because they’re greater than the sum of their parts somehow. The intricate musicianship and production were worthy of something with a bit more staying power than an animated show that were frequently treated as disposable entertainment.

  1. Main Title – Spider-man And Friends (00:59)
  2. Bobby The Iceman (01:05)
  3. Firestar Theme (01:24)
  4. Spider-Man And Firestar (00:59)
  5. Three Heroes Prepare To Go (02:20)
  6. Electro Man Theme (01:21)
  7. The Green Goblin (01:21)
  8. Suspense Action (01:11)
  9. Loki Theme (00:44)
  10. Aunt May (00:42)
  11. Rock Jazz (00:35)
  12. College Theme (00:47)
  13. Impending disaster (01:35)
  14. Ms Lion Theme (01:32)
  15. End Title – Spider-man And Friends (00:30)

Released by: Dulcima Records
Release date: February 24, 2024
Total running time: 17:01

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Categories
C Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Changes – music by Paddy Kingsland and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

6 min read

Order this CDOriginally released for Record Store Day 2018 and then given a general release in digital form, this album is the complete soundtrack composed by Paddy Kingsland (Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Doctor Who) of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the 1975 post-apocalyptic series The Changes. Filmed in 1973 but held for two years, as if the BBC thought that the political and societal troubles that might coincide with the show’s subject matter would fade with time, The Changes is an evergreen. It’s tangibly a product of the early 1970s, and yet it has aged like fine wine. And so has its music.

At least on paper in the BBC Enterprises sales material, The Changes is a children’s adventure series, but hey, you know the drill: much like ’70s contemporaries like Children Of The Stones and Pertwee/Letts/Dicks-era Doctor Who, there’s a lot more to it than that. The story involves a piercing sound that suddenly renders all machinery inert, a “bad sound” that somehow traveled through the electrical wires criss-crossing the U.K. Now everyone – including the show’s lead character, adventurous pre-teen Nicky – has an aversion to “the bad wires” and to anything mechanical, be it a car, a television, a radio, or a toaster oven. The world is plunged back into a dark age of superstition, something that surely could only happen in a speculative fiction piece like this, and yet Nicky knows that the world used to be different – and better – and tries to find out what happened, with the help and protection of a band of traveling Sikhs, who find themselves unwelcome in a world that has suddenly grown paranoid of progress, outsiders, and anything different. Who would do this, what would they stand to gain from it, and can it be reversed? Yes, definitely just fiction.

Kingsland’s later work with the Radiophonic Workshop includes both the radio and television incarnations of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and almost ridiculously memorable episode scores for Doctor Who (among them Logopolis, Castrovalva, Full Circle, Mawdryn Undead, and others). One of the things that makes him the most musically distinctive voice in the Workshop is that he never relies entirely on electronic sound. He has a gift for instantly-catchy earworm melodies, almost-funky basslines, and marrying purely electronic sounds with well-judged acoustic elements. That’s his style in a nutshell, and it’s dialed up to 11 for The Changes.

The main theme, a compact morsel of percussion, synths, a succession of dissonant chords, and a funky synth-clavinet line, is practically the least memorable thing on the album. The second track establishes a world-weary theme for Nicky as she sets out on her travels. The series is something of a travelogue, filmed entirely on location (and entirely on film, a rarity for the BBC in the early ’70s), and the music rises to meet that challenge. There’s time for the various themes to breathe and develop, and incidentally, that makes the album a great listen as well. There are some short tracks, sure, but for the most part the music is given ample time to explore themes and their variations. The family of Sikhs who accompany Nicky arrive in “A Special Kind Of People” with added percussion and a lovely persistent sitar presence.

A combination of the Sikh theme and Nicky’s traveling theme becomes the show’s end credit music, which frequently changed throughout the ten episodes as new plot developments arose. Unique to the various formulations of the end credit music is a heraldic, noble brass statement that concludes in a troublingly unresolved chord progression, sort of an unspoken musical “to be continued” – and when I mention these various instruments, they’re the real deal, not synthesized approximations. Kingsland’s use of synths throughout justify the Radiophonic Workshop’s name on the cover, but this album is more Kingsland unleashed than it is purely radiophonic. All of it is anchored by Kingsland’s almost supernatural ability with a bassline, which simultaneously provides some propulsion and rhythm and opens up interesting harmonics with the other instruments.

4 out of 4When I binge-watched The Changes for the first time sometime around 2016, I strongly suspected that I was hearing Paddy Kingsland’s greatest musical achievement with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, even though the rest of the sound mix was competing for prominence at times. Hearing this album without the rest of the show’s sound mix and dialogue strongly confirms that suspicion. Even if you’ve never heard of the show for which this music was made, I give this soundtrack a hearty recommendation. It stands up very well to listening without the context of the TV series, and between this and his handful of other memorable music highlights, I’ll never understand how Paddy Kingsland managed to avoid a huge career and worldwide recognition. Everything he’s done – including The Changes’ fascinating fusion of synths, electric bass, and layers of ethnic instrumentation – has stuck with me for a very long time, and the soundtrack as a standalone experience was long overdue.

By the way, the noise from the “bad wires” – three piercing, discordant minutes’ worth of it! – is included as a bonus track, but in controlled laboratory testing, it failed to incite me to smash up the electronic device from which it emanated. So there’s that, at least.

    Episode 1: The Noise
  1. The Changes Opening Titles (0:35)
  2. Home Alone (Nicky’s Theme) (3:05)
  3. Everybody’s Gone (2:07)

    Episode 2: The Bad Wires

  4. A Note On The Door (1:14)
  5. A Special Kind Of People (3:34)
  6. Your Ways Are Not Our Ways (1:08)
  7. The Changes Closing Titles (56″ Version) (1:01)

    Episode 3: The Devil’s Children

  8. The Bad Wires (0:58)
  9. The Barns (1:36)
  10. Life On The Farm (1:45)
  11. The Devil’s Children (2:17)
  12. The Village Court (0:56)

    Episode 4: Hostages!

  13. The Forge (1:34)
  14. Hostages! (4:48)
  15. Rescue (5:43)
  16. The Changes Closing Titles (67″ Version) (1:10)

    17. Episode 5: Witchcraft

  17. The End Of The Rescue (0:30)
  18. A Farewell (0:43)
  19. A Journey, And Arrival at Henley Farm (3:21)

    Episode 6: A Pile Of Stones

  20. Sentence Of Death (3:07)
  21. Leaving Shipton (3:09)

    Episode 7: Heartsease

  22. Heartsease (4:09)
  23. At Purton Bridge (1:10)
  24. The Changes Closing Titles (63″ Version) (1:07)

    Episode 8: Lightning!

  25. After The Bridge (1:59)
  26. Michael And Mary (2:09)

    Episode 9: The Quarry

  27. Necromancer’s Weather (3:19)
  28. The Quarry (2:46)
  29. Mr Furbelow (0:59)
  30. Qui Me Tangit, Turbat Mundum (2:39)
  31. The Changes Closing Titles (48″ Version) (0:53)

    Episode 10: The Cavern

  32. Into The Rock (2:59)
  33. The Cavern (1:53)
  34. Merlinus Sum (0:19)
  35. It’s All Over (1:40)
  36. Everything’s Alright Again (End Titles) (0:49)

    Bonus Tracks

  37. Nicky’s Theme (Stereo Demo) (1:35)
  38. Theme 2 Demo (1:47)
  39. The Noise (3:10)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: April 20, 2018
Total running time: 1:17:47

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Categories
2021 B Battlestar Galactica Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Tribute / Reinterpretation Year

So Say We All: Battlestar Galactica Live

3 min read

Order this CDWe’re now 20 years out from the launch of Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, and us old salts are having to remind people that such was the allure of Bear McCreary’s music for this series that he actually took a combined orchestra and band on the road, and played concert dates of nothing but Battlestar Galactica soundtrack music, and people ate that up. McCreary’s genre-bending Celtic-but-also-Middle-Eastern musical melting pot encompassed everything from the straightforward orchestral treatment expected of the genre to heavy metal to multi-ethnic-flavored covers of Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”. It was dizzying, bordering on intoxicating. And the good news is that it’s finally been captured in recorded form.

It’s important to note that this is real deal: many of the performers head in the recordings were the same musicians who played on the original studio recordings, and it’s not a small ensemble, nor is the music scaled down. There’s a lot of thunder and immediacy captured from the stage performances here, with enough electricity in the air to fry the nearest Toaster. Even pieces that I didn’t care much for in the show itself are given new life here. Things are rearranged and moved around, disparate pieces are glued together, but not reduced in power or volume. The only thing better would be to have seen one of the live shows in person, but this is a great consolation prize for those of us who couldn’t make it to those shows, captured in wonderfully crisp recordings best played loud. (Major rock acts could learn a lot from how these recordings were engineered before releasing their own live albums.)

“Something Dark Is Coming” is expanded into a hard rock epic, while “Apocalypse” (a brutally hard-rocking expansion of the series theme tune from the TV movie The Plan) is blown up as big as the ensemble can make it. Quieter pieces such as “Roslin and Adama” and “Wander My Friends” are given no less attention, though, and are played beautifully – it’s not all eardrum-splitting maximum volume. Other pieces, such as “Lords of Kobol” and “Fight Night” (the latter hailing from, admittedly, one of my least favorite hours of the show), strike a good middle ground and made me worry less about the heart rates of the percussionists.

4 out of 4My favorite track, however, may be an obvious case of saving the best for last: the rocked-out rendition of Stu Phillips’ original 1970s that segues into a piece of music that was already a favorite in its studio incarnation. The double-whammy of “Heeding The Call” and “All Along The Watchtower” runs a very close second, almost a tie for my favorite on the album. Your favorites will probably skew heavily in favor of favorite episodes or soundtrack cuts, but it’s lovely to have this little flashback to a time when there were sold-out dates for live concerts of soundtrack music from one series/franchise. It’s wonderful, and in places almost indescribably cathartic, to hear these pieces jammed out properly.

  1. A Distant Sadness (3:59)
  2. Prelude To War (8:10)
  3. Baltar’s Dream (6:02)
  4. Roslin And Adama (2:59)
  5. Apocalypse (5:34)
  6. Fight Night (4:04)
  7. Something Dark Is Coming (6:16)
  8. Wander My Friends (5:43)
  9. Lords Of Kobol (3:55)
  10. Storming New Caprica (8:02)
  11. Heeding The Call (2:45)
  12. All Along The Watchtower (4:22)
  13. Colonial Anthem / Black Market (7:30)

Released by: Sparks & Shadows
Release date: June 4, 2021
Total running time: 1:09:16

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Categories
1968 1972 K Music Reviews N Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Nightwatch / Killer By Night

4 min read

Order this CDAn oddball pairing of two very different scores for two very different TV pilots, by – you guessed it – two very different composers. One of the final titles issued by the much-missed Film Score Monthly label, the obscurity of the scores presented probably kept this release obscure as well, but it’s very much worth a listen.

Still in his “Johnny Williams” days prior to shedding his jazz musician moniker, John Williams turns in a fascinating score to an unsold 1966 series pilot that didn’t get an airing in a TV movie slot until 1968. The main theme from Nightwatch has hallmarks of Williams’ past – there’s a strong rythmic influence from his Lost In Space theme – and his future, namely in an echoing brass motif that would later find use, in a slightly slower form, aboard the Death Star. But put those two elements together and the result is almost, at the risk of committing sacrelige, Goldsmithian. And that’s a description that applies to parts of Williams’ score for the Robert Altman-directed pilot, while just as many parts are unmistakably Williams. It’s a fascinating selection of music from a period when Williams’ playbook wasn’t set firmly in Star Wars/Jaws/Superman/Indiana Jones mode. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those, but the Nightwatch score is a bit more experimental – and the fact that elements of it show up in his later work speaks to the fact that not only did Williams deem his experiments to be of value, but he also probably never expected this material to resurface again.

Aired in 1972 as another unsold pilot, Killer By Night starred Greg Morris, fresh off of Mission: Impossible, in a gritty crime drama about trying to track down a disease carrier trying to remain at large in a heavily populated area. None other than Quincy Jones scored this project, which, like Nightwatch, vanished into obscurity after its premiere. (I don’t know if it’s amusing or sad that it’s now easier to hear the music from either of these shows than it is to see the shows themselves.) Jones’ score fits somewhat into the expected jazz category for an early ’70s crime noir, but the somewhat scientific element of the storyline gives Jones a good excuse to get spooky with it too, adding some weird synthesizer to the lineup and letting the listener know this isn’t just going to be car chases and gunfire. Some tracks do fit right into the early ’70s TV jazz pigeonhole; the end credit theme gets wonderfully funky, and still other tracks pour on the weird. It’s as different as you can get from Nightwatch, but both are equally welcome.

4 out of 4That either of these scores exist, and can be listened to, at all is a real treat. (The Altman pilot scored by John Williams is so obscure it doesn’t even appear in Altman’s IMDb listing.) There was a time when the boutique soundtrack labels could drop real surprises in our laps like this one and curious soundtrack fans were up for the discovery. These days, out-of-left-field releases like this are more rare – the soundtrack labels have to line up titles that they’re certain will sell, not just titles that will spark mere window-shopping curiosity. That’s a loss for us all. Because this kind of music, dusted off after a long rest in the vault, tended to be the most wonderfully surprising stuff.

    Nightwatch – music by Johnny Williams
  1. Nightwatch Main Title (1:01)
  2. Bertil’s Bomb (0:49)
  3. Lund’s Problem (2:14)
  4. Lund’s Leap (1:59)
  5. The Cradle Might Rock (0:46)
  6. Granstrom’s Headache (1:01)
  7. A Child’s Fear (1:57)
  8. Kathryn Flees (0:36)
  9. The Run (0:50)
  10. By the Fence (1:29)
  11. Stumbling Around (1:01)
  12. Entering the Hospital (0:32)
  13. Inside the Hospital / The Final Dash (3:07)
  14. The Waiting Room (1:04)
  15. End Title (1:20)
  16. Nightwatch End Title (0:51)
  17. Chicago Group (source) (3:12)
  18. Bumper #1 / Bumper #2 (0:19)
  19. Promo (0:40)

    Killer By Night – music by Quincy Jones

  20. Main Title / Opening Hold-Up (4:23)
  21. Dead Dip Bird (1:44)
  22. High Rent District (0:51)
  23. Doctor, Come Home / Girl Died (1:44)
  24. Point One (0:47)
  25. Somethin’ Def (0:43)
  26. Oxygen Tent / 22 Possibles / His Room (1:26)
  27. Sweaty Meeting (0:36)
  28. No Title (2:12)
  29. Doctor, Wife & Supermart (0:49)
  30. 4th Cut to Hood / Wait (1:06)
  31. Microscope / Let’s Get Him (3:11)
  32. Cut To Cops (2:25)
  33. Police (2:00)
  34. Door Up the Ladder (2:01)
  35. End Title (3:32)
  36. Tracey Source (3:13)

Released by: Film Score Monthly
Release date: November 3, 2011
Total running time: 59:20

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2004 2020 D Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Don Davis Collection, Volume 1

4 min read

Order this CDIn 2004, the BBC aired an ambitious miniseries combining a little bit of “hard” sci-fi with an attempt to impart information to and educate the audience, framing it as a reality-TV-tinged mockumentary about a fictional crewed mission through the solar system. Keeping in mind that this was a year before the launch of 21st century Doctor Who, the resulting two-night event, Voyage To The Planets, was quite possibly the BBC’s most impressive sci-fi effort to that date (and thanks to a co-production deal with the Discovery Channel in the U.S., it was retitled Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets and shown Stateside as well). The mention of Doctor Who is not accidental; quite a few personnel associated with Voyage To The Planets, up to and including writer/director Joe Ahearne, played major roles early in the revival of Russell T. Davies’ version of Doctor Who.

And somehow – in between sequels to The Matrix, when his visibility was at a career high – Voyage To The Planets landed American composer Don Davis, and gave him enough resources to have at least a few live players, which he used to maximum advantage to keep an otherwise synthesized score from having too much of an icy, electronic sheen. The result is a score – unreleased for 16 years – that does have some hints of Davis’ Matrix stylings, but leans much more heavily on the kind of noble, give-the-French-horns-lots-of-whole-notes-in-major-keys feel that has powered many a space exploration epic. With Davis having to work to disguise just how small his ensemble of live players is, there are few opportunities for Voyage To The Planets to be as “big” as, say, James Horner’s Apollo 13 score, but it still successfully conveys the nobility and sense of wonder that the show’s fictional space mission demands.

The “Walking With Spacemen Theme” that kicks off the album is the backbone of the score, returning as a motif throughout (and giving a nod to the early working title of the project, which was initiated by the producers of Walking With Dinosaurs). Various locales visited by the crew of the Pegasus – Venus, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and beyond – receive their own thematic treatments, tipping their hand as to the relative degrees of how inhospitable they are to human life. These tend to be the passages that get the closest to the dissonance of Davis’ scores for the Matrix trilogy, but the material in between returns to a more heroic default setting. (One of the most spectacular examples of Davis more dissonant “we’re in trouble” music arrives in “Forbidden Rays and Asteroid”, which may also be the peak of his skillful arrangements successfully disguising the live-player-to-synth ratio.)

4 out of 4It’s a wonderful score overall, and an unexpected surprise so many years after the fact. (This is also a testament to the lovely niche material that can be unearthed by niche and boutique labels like Dragon’s Domain, balancing out the much more mainstream selections offered by the larger soundtrack labels.) Voyage To The Planets is seriously obscure stuff by U.S. standards – following its one-and-done airing on Discovery, the premise of a mockumentary-with-flashbacks mission through the solar system was sold to ABC, where it was expanded with more fiction than science and became a bit of a soap opera in the 2009-2010 season, a time when ABC was trying to pattern nearly everything on its schedule after Lost. (For what it’s worth, Dragon’s Domain, Defying Gravity had an interesting score too, even though the show itself was a big letdown.) To get Voyage’s full, wonderful soundtrack after all this time was a true treat – it’s very much worth a listen, whether you’re familiar with the miniseries or not.

  1. Walking With Spacemen Theme (2:22)
  2. Main Titles and Apollo (2:38)
  3. Take Off and Venus (5:25)
  4. Hot Planet Venus (4:15)
  5. Time and Space (2:04)
  6. Mars (3:30)
  7. Flare and Storm Patrol (3:43)
  8. Forbidden Rays and Asteroid (4:14)
  9. Dispatching and Jupiter Turn (2:09)
  10. G-Force (2:46)
  11. Moons of Jupiter (3:08)
  12. Zoe’s Trouble (5:15)
  13. Europa (1:52)
  14. Pearson’s Peek (3:19)
  15. Deep Space Despair (4:26)
  16. Burial and Resuming Work (1:40)
  17. The Planet of Peace (2:18)
  18. Pluto People (5:06)
  19. The Comet (2:55)
  20. Comet Stroll and Danger (2:55)
  21. The Calamity on the Comet (4:06)
  22. Happy Homecoming and Finale (3:43)

Released by: Dragon’s Domain Records
Release date: September 17, 2020
Total running time: 1:13:49

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1968 2018 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: The Invasion – music by Don Harper

5 min read

Order this CDThe scores for Doctor Who‘s 20th century Cybermen episodes seem to have a habit of taking a torturous route to being released in their original form. A bit of clarification is in order: this release contains the original recordings from 1968 by Don Harper (whose handful of other scoring credits include an episode of the BBC2 sci-fi anthology Out Of The Unknown, and stock music used in George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead), the only music he ever composed for Doctor Who. Better known as a jazz musician, Harper’s services were engaged due to director Douglas Camfield’s curious habit of actively avoiding using Doctor Who’s “house composer” at the time, Dudley Simpson. Though many composers contributed to the 20th century series, there’s not another score quite like this one in the series’ history. Harper’s jazz leanings are on display, along with a very good dramatic instinct for the uniquely eerie music heard throughout The Invasion‘s eight episodes.

Why the clarification? Because Harper also re-recorded this music for the De Wolfe production music library under the title New Decades, which itself was later re-released as Cold Worlds, whereas this release has the original 1968 recordings. (The stories behind Doctor Who’s music can be just as strange-but-true as the rest of its behind-the-scenes lore.) On the one hand, The Invasion’s score sticks out quite noticeably from what came before and after it (the following story, The Krotons, has also been the subject of its own soundtrack release). But Harper has a very good sense of what the show’s “feel” is, and unnervingly dissonant tracks such as “International Electromatics Headquarters”, “The Cyber Director”, “The Cybermen, My Allies”, and “Plans For Invasion”, though brief, make the case that Harper would’ve made a fine addition to the rotation of the series’ musical talent if he had been hired to do so again. A much chirpier tone – almost “smurfy” in a way, and yet very, very 1968 in its feel – takes hold in the track “Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart”, giving the newly-promoted future series regular his own theme music in only his second appearance.

But the story doesn’t end there. Harper recorded a total of barely 20 minutes of music, intended to be used and re-used to track eight 25-minute episodes, and then, somewhat confoundingly, Camfield didn’t even use everything that was recorded. (One almost gets the feeling at times that Camfield would have preferred to skip musical underscores altogether but was coerced into including incidental music by the producers.) Also included are several tracks of effects and sound-design-bordering-on-music by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, intended to provide additional musical options; tracks 15-34 are Harper’s unused score cues. Also tracked into the episode is a track by John Baker of the Radiophonic Workshop, “Time In Advance” (simply titled “Muzak” here), originally composed for an Out Of The Unknown episode of the same name. Baker’s work – with a lovely jazzy piano overdub sitting on top of an abstract yet tuneful radiophonic backing – sits nicely alongside Harper’s own jazz influences and doesn’t seem out of place. (I’ve never made a secret of the fact that “Time In Advance” is one of my all-time favorite pieces of classic Doctor Who music, so consider this reviewer’s biases fully on display here.)

3 out of 4With the brevity of the tracks presented, and the brevity of the score overall, it’s something of a minor miracle that this album tops out at just over an hour (thanks in large part to some of the lengthy, looped background sound effects tracks), and it’s a bit mind-boggling that a majority of the tracks presented have no story context, as they were left on the cutting room floor. So very much like the later Revenge Of The Cybermen release (perhaps not coincidentally the next TV outing for the Cybermen), a lot of what’s on the disc was never actually heard in the show itself. Harper achieves a great deal with very limited resources (the liner notes indicate that he never had more than five players, six if he too performed, presumably achieving a denser sound with overdubs), so it’s nice to hear his work free of the context of the show itself. It’s a pity so much of it went unused; some of the material that was left out is some of the most distinctive and enjoyable of the lot. Clearly, the Cybermen can’t have nice things.

  1. Doctor Who (new opening theme, 1967) (0:52)
  2. The Dark Side of the Moon (Music 2 Variation) (0:33)
  3. The Company (Music 7) (1:31)
  4. Hiding (Music 8) (4:54)
  5. International Electromatics Headquarters (Music 3) (0:16)
  6. Muzak (2:46)
  7. The Cyber Director (Music 5) (0:08)
  8. The Cybermen, My Allies (Music 7) (0:27)
  9. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Music 12a) (1:22)
  10. Plans for Invasion (Music 8) (1:25)
  11. Mysteries (Music 12) (1:31)
  12. Fire Escape (Music 11) (1:11)
  13. The Dark Side of the Moon (Reprise) (Music 2) (0:31)
  14. The Cybermen, My Allies (Reprise) (Music 7, looped) (1:07)
  15. Music 4 (Trapped in Gas Chamber – v. 1 & 2) (1:29)
  16. Music 9 (2:20)
  17. Music 10 (2:00)
  18. Music 13 (0:05)
  19. Music 14 (0:15)
  20. Music 15a (0:04)
  21. Music 15b (0:20)
  22. Music 15c (0:04)
  23. Music 15d (0:20)
  24. Music 15e (0:16)
  25. Music 15f (0:04)
  26. Music 15g (0:04)
  27. Music 15h (0:23)
  28. Music 16a (0:04)
  29. Music 16b (0:05)
  30. Music 16c (0:06)
  31. Music 16d (0:07)
  32. Music 16e (0:04)
  33. Music 16f (0:08)
  34. Music 16g (0:05)
  35. Part of TARDIS disappears (0:25)
  36. All of TARDIS disappears (0:24)
  37. TARDIS take off slow and painful (2:13)
  38. International Electromatics Headquarters Exterior (10:33)
  39. International Electromatics Headquarters Interior (6:26)
  40. Computer Background (0:21)
  41. Computer Whirrs (1:01)
  42. Electronic Eye (2:37)
  43. Cyber Director Appears (2:26)
  44. Cyber Director Constant (7:51)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: September 14, 2018
Total running time: 1:01:15

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2023 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Tribute / Reinterpretation Year

Doctor Who: The Survival Mixes – music by Dominic Glynn

2 min read

Order this CDIf the Time And The Rani soundtrack was the alpha of the seventh Doctor’s era on Doctor Who, Survival is its omega, and of course already has its own soundtrack release. But its composer, Dominic Glynn, is back among the cat people, and this time he’s here to get them dancing. The Survival Mixes remixes four key cues from the Survival score, and as with Glynn’s past remixes of his Doctor Who music, we start with the track that changes the least about its source material and the mixes after it gradually make more significant changes to the original tracks.

“Catflap” takes an eerie, piano-based cue and gradually builds an insistent, urgent rhythm around that loop, making for a nicely atmospheric track. “Run Doctor, Run!” has a more aggressive, percussion-driven cue from the original soundtrack as its starting point, and adds to that percussion, as well as new bassline layers and samples of dialogue from the show. (While the dialogue is neat, I kind of wish that maybe the tracks with dialogue had been repeated in dialogue-free form as bonus tracks.) “The Dead Valley” takes a quieter piece of the soundtrack and turns it into a mesmerizing, hypnotic loop, again with some show dialogue toward the end. The dialogue starts almost immediately in “Good Hunting, Sister” and quickly becomes the most radically reworked track of the bunch. Those four tracks are followed by “Indefinable Magic: Podcast Theme”, an original commission for a podcast hosted by Toby Hadoke; while not based on anything from Survival, it has a feel that certainly fits in with the other tracks.

4 out of 4If you’re a fan of classic Doctor Who music, and don’t mind mixing things up a bit, this EP is a nice way to spend the better part of a half hour. That it starts out with bits of one of the best scores to grace the Sylvester McCoy era of the show doesn’t hurt (to be fair, McCoy’s entire final season in the role of the Doctor was full of great music).

  1. Catflap (5:15)
  2. Run Doctor, Run! (4:49)
  3. The Dead Valley (5:53)
  4. Good Hunting Sister (4:35)
  5. Bonus track: Indefinable Magic: Podcast Theme (2:30)

Released by: No Bones Records
Release date: November 24, 2023
Total running time: 23:00

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2013 G Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Gatchaman CROWDS, Volume 1 – music by Taku Iwasaki

3 min read

Order this CDWhen Bob Sakuma was asked about the musical influences that shaped his brass-with-funk-backing music for the original 1970s TV iteration of Gatchaman (an early anime the western world knows better from the savagely-edited-down Battle Of The Planets), his answer was simple: the American band Chicago, which was a hugely influential sound circa 1972. This 21st century reboot of Gatchaman, which dispenses with virtually the entire backstory of the original series and retains only some iconography and the “band of super-powered young people protecting the entire world from an alien force” premise, is graced with a soundtrack that pulls from a wider group of influences. It’s still brassy and orchestral in places, but there’s a vast pool of other influences – dubstep, J-pop, trip-hop, house, opera, chiptune…and it’s honestly almost dizzying how incredibly well all of this hangs together. Not one note or beat feels out of place or surplus to requirements.

Where there are vocals, the vast majority of them are sung in English, which I found somewhat surprising. “Gatchaman – In The Name Of Love”, despite not being the theme song for the series, makes a bold opening statement, putting the listener on notice that every possible boundary between musical styles and genres will be breached in short order. And by the way, the orchestral component of all this? It’s live players, not synthesizers or samples. It’s just a luxurious, well-orchestrated sound, no matter how much is going on with the more modern, dance-inspired elements.

Instrumental highlights include the techno pulse of “Milestone”, the breezy-going-on-goofy J-pop interlude “Tutu”, the slowly-intensifying downtempo cool of “Phenex”, the beautiful, contemplative “The Bird Can’t Fly”, the kind of dreamy chiptune-infused “Unbeatable Network”, and the four minutes of unrelenting urgency that is “Are You Gatchaman?” The unmissable vocal highlights are “Gatchaman – In The Name Of Love”, which isn’t shy about what the name of the show is at all, and possibly the highlight of the whole album, “Music Goes On”, with its luxurious all-heands-on-deck, every-style-in-one-song instrumentation and a soaring (if auto-tuned) vocal. It’s like someone said “You know, they have dance parties at sci-fi and anime conventions, and we’re going to come up with an entire album of absolute bangers that are as perfect for those as they are for the show itself.”

4 out of 4I think I’ve actually watched Gatchaman CROWDS all the way through once. I’ve come back to its soundtrack a lot. It fits the show perfectly, and yet it’s an engrossing listen on its own. There’s a school of thought which I’m sure would remind me that the anime itself is not aimed at someone my age. Okay, it probably isn’t. But if I’d taken a hard pass on it, I wouldn’t have been exposed to its frankly magnificent soundtrack. I’m going to make this a prime example of why I do expose myself to new sounds even if they’re not nominally “for me” – the fact is, they’re for anyone who enjoys them. And there’s a lot to enjoy here.

  1. Gatchaman – In the Name of Love performed by Yutaka Shinya (3:52)
  2. The Core of Soul (2:52)
  3. Milestone (2:56)
  4. Firebird (3:10)
  5. Tutu (2:18)
  6. Pandaman (2:06)
  7. The Music Goes On (3:39)
  8. Phenex (3:04)
  9. Un Beau Leopard Violet (2:31)
  10. Gatchadance (3:21)
  11. Galax (0:08)
  12. The bird Can’t Fly (3:03)
  13. Are You Gatchaman? (4:07)
  14. Destruction By Rumor (2:54)
  15. Why I Kissed Him? (3:14)
  16. Fat guitar (3:29)
  17. Ziel der Hydra (3:38)
  18. Sacrifice (4:57)
  19. Crowds (3:20)
  20. Unbeatable Network (4:18)
  21. Love (3:28)
  22. Innocent Note performed by Yutaka Shinya and Maaya Uchida (3:53)
  23. Crowds (TV size) performed by White Ash (1:20)
  24. Innocent Note (TV size) performed by Yutaka Shinya and Maaya Uchida (1:22)

Released by: Indie Japan
Release date: July 1, 2013
Total running time: 1:13:00

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2022 2023 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: Legend Of The Sea Devils – music by Segun Akinola

3 min read

Order this CDWhen the modern revival of Doctor Who brought back the Silurians in 2010, their cousins, the raspy-voiced Sea Devils, were nowhere to be found. Like the Silurians, they were creations of the Jon Pertwee era and were last seen in the all-star indigenous-sentient-repitle team-up Warriors Of The Deep in 1984, joining forces against Peter Davison’s Doctor. But while the Silurians got a 21st century makeover, their cousins, the Sea Devils, remained in the show’s past – until they resurfaced, literally, in one of 2022’s run of special episodes. Interestingly, while the Silurians emerged with a very different look from their ’70s/’80s incarnations, the Sea Devils returned looking much the same as before, with obvious improvements in how their aquatic lizard look was achieved.

And they got a marvelous soundtrack too. The story’s setting deals with piracy in Chinese waters in the early 19th century. Segun Akinola, who wowed with his sensitive musical treatment of The Demons Of Punjab in Jodie Whittaker’s first season as the Doctor, deploys a similar musical strategy here: call in real live players for real live ethnic instruments, and save the synths for the purely synthetic elements of the story. The result is, again, a very nice mix with authenticity where it counts the most. The main thematic material for the episode reveals itself fairly quickly, and is repeated and riffed upon throughout, with a percolating synth bassline persisting in many of the tracks, its role in the tension depending on its prominence in the mix rather than in any changes in key or tempo; the pace really doesn’t quicken appreciably until “This Is Gonna Be Tricky”.

4 out of 4Things take a more sensitive turn halfway through “A Good Legend” with the scene that either launched a thousand gleeful fanfics or launched a thousand middle-aged male fan tantrums, as the Doctor and Yaz skip some rocks across the water and discuss whether there’s any “there” there. It’s a nicely understated closer for the show, though I’m still undecided on whether the Doctor somehow being aware of an impending regeneration (something that started with Tom Baker’s exit) becoming a recurring trope of the show (used in the last run of specials for both David Tennant and Jodie Whittaker). Either way, the music for the scene is easily the standout highlight of this soundtrack.

  1. You Have No Idea What You’re Doing (02:48)
  2. Catching A Whopper (03:56)
  3. Pirate Queen (07:33)
  4. Who Wants To Be Next (05:07)
  5. Celestial Navigation (04:00)
  6. Going Up (07:26)
  7. Say Hello To My Crew (05:18)
  8. This Is Gonna Be Tricky (04:49)
  9. A Good Legend (06:07)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: December 9, 2022
Total running time: 46:50

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