"Sweeney" is to die for

By Tony Buchsbaum

Movie musicals are back, and for a while there it looked like they wouldn't be. A few years ago there was Chicago, which took in buckets of dough and snagged a Best Picture Oscar. And then last year there was the amazing Dreamgirls, for which Jennifer Hudson snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. And now comes one of Stephen Sondheim's most popular, and most often mounted, musicals, Sweeney Todd, for which the advance word is nothing short of spectacular, with notable huzzahs for Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and director Tim Burton.

But my mission here isn't to tell you how great the film is (I haven't seen it). Rather, I'm here to tell you how great the soundtrack is.

This, of course, is not the first time Sweeney has been recorded. There's the original 1979 Broadway Cast Recording, which was fairly recently remastered and reissued, there was a highly-regarded concert version recorded in 2000 at Lincoln Center, and there was a 2005 Broadway revival in which the actors all played musical instruments in addition to acting. (Sounds strange, though the reviews were great.)

This Sweeney, though, is different. Stephen Sondheim himself has stepped up to sort of reimagine his own musical, not changing it so much as allowing it to live as a film animal rather than a stage animal. He deserves a big standing O for doing so. Whole songs have been cut--including what is essentially the title song, "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd"--and others have been trimmed (if not, somewhat appropriately, chopped). What remains is a streamlined Sweeney recrafted for the screen. Burton's vision is not what has ever appeared on Broadway; it is not simply a filmed stage show. Rather, he has Burton-ized it, inserted his fave actor in the title role, and gone to town.

The music is sometimes heart-stopping, and not just because the orchestra is a big one. This is big, important music, and it comes across loud and clear on CD. From the opening credits music (an adaptation of "Ballad"), you know this is a movie of power, of dark themes. The music almost sounds vengeful.

But then the singing starts, with all its references to blood and slaying and revenge and death. There's lighter fare, love songs and funny songs, but this ain't no vapid musical. Nor is it a message piece. This is love and death (especially death), through and through.

The soundtrack features just about everything. In "No Place Like London," Sweeney and his friend Anthony muse about the city: Anthony's vision is lovely, Sweeney's version is bleak and black. In "Worst Pies in London," Mrs. Lovett works too hard to make meat pies that are nothing short of a health hazard. "My Friends" finds Sweeney rediscovering his barber's knives, grooming tools he will turn into weapons. My favorite song, "A Little Priest," finds Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett musing about the taste of pies made from the men whose throats Sweeney cuts in the barber's chair. (Did I mention there's a cannibalistic throughline here?)

My only complaint is Bonham Carter. She's been a dependable, sometimes brilliant actress, but in recent years she's pretty much remained a Burton staple. Here, though charming, she shows a weakness: her singing voice. Can she hit Sondheim's notoriously difficult notes? Yes? But her voice is thin, her delivery a bot forced and breathy. Her Mrs. Lovett may be acted well, but her gusto, her robustness as a character, is missing in the music. You want someone, I think, whose passion matches Sweeney's own: unbridled, unrepentant, unpleasant. As it is, this Mrs. Lovett sounds more like sweetness gone evil in the name of love.

But then, maybe she's a metaphor for the whole bloody musical.

Maria Schneider Orchestra and Sky Blue

If you’ve listened to enough big band jazz, you recognize the pattern easily enough. After the tempo is counted off, the trumpets often roar in with the straight melody, establishing authority and expectations. The theme is handed off, quite frequently to the reed section, who takes the ball and runs with it, generally with a solo taken from within its ranks, only to be answered with a brass solo, followed by a headlong rush with sections trading off eight bar riffs, the rhythm section churning away, concluding with the return of the melody at full blast, and stopping on a dime. In the hands of a gifted composer/arranger like Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Billy Strayhorn, or even the more recent examples of Carla Bley and Toshiko Akiyoshi, the result can be thrilling. But Maria Schneider is in a different game altogether. Her most recent release, Sky Blue, is the culmination of a career dedicated to making a big band sound symphonic and evocative.

Schneider, an admitted protégé of the legendary Gil Evans, who made his arrangements of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess sound like a string of jazz concertos for band and trumpet (the horn belonging to his partner Miles Davis) has been quietly building an impressive catalog over 20 years. Her music may be challenging to the musician, but it sounds effortless and natural to the listener.

Sky Blue starts simply enough with a pop-like tribute to her home town in rural Minnesota. “The Pretty Road” is a showcase for trumpet soloist Ingrid Jensen, who soars above the band trilling and darting in and out of registers like a kite against a Minnesota sky. Lyric-less vocals from Luciana Souza add an other-worldly air to the piece, which concludes almost abruptly, not unlike passing the Minnesota town of Windom where Schneider grew up on an adjacent interstate.

“Aires de Lando,” despite the Peruvian title, almost sounds like Klezmer waltz at the beginning, thanks to the prominent clarinet of Scott Robinson. Written in 12/8, the trombones provide a pulsing foundation to the tune, as slowly the meter becomes more complex and colorful. Listening to it, I could picture in my mind’s eye an elderly couple sliding across a dance floor in an elegant tango.

The showcase of this CD is “Cerulean Skies,” Schneider’s mediation on birds, and in particular the cerulean warbler, whose recorded call makes an appearance at the end of the piece (other birdcalls are courtesy of the musicians including Jensen, Rich Perry and Schneider herself). Schneider writes extensively in her liner notes about the joys of being a bird enthusiast in New York City. She tells us that in Central Park, not far from her home, “you can easily be transported to a forest far from humanity.” “Cerulean Skies” is definitely a piece about flight, and at over 20 minutes, is a piece that requires a listener’s full attention. Donny McCaslin’s tenor sax brings the listener in mind of a bird circling over a landscape, incessantly calling to its companions (or its mate?) while engaging in aerial gymnastics that a lesser creature attached to the land would envy. Gary Versace’s solo on accordion brings a new dimension to an instrument that is usually relegated to polka bands and novelty acts. The shrill tones, which fade in and out and held a beat longer than you’re prepared for, provide not only some level of tension, but are creatively resolved when chords provide the notion of a squadron of birds singing together.

Schneider’s previous album, Concert in the Garden, received widespread attention when it became the first CD sold exclusively on the Internet to win a Grammy Award. Sky Blue received considerable attention in the jazz press, owing to the sponsorships that Schneider solicited to assist in the cost of producing the finished product. Schneider sells her work through her Web site, which connects to ArtistShare, which is slowly picking up steam in the world of music commerce. While the business model remains intriguing, it has, unfortunately, overshadowed the resulting music. Coming off a Grammy-winning album can’t be easy, but the musical depth of Sky Blue easily surpasses the excellent Concert in the Garden. It is glorious.

Bringing History to Life

By Tony Buchsbaum


If I think back -- way back -- I can sort of remember first hearing the work of composer Mark Isham in his score for Mrs. Soffel, whose soundtrack was released on the Windham Hill label back when Windham Hill released pretty much just New Age music. That was the time of George Winston and his "Autumn" CD...or, rather, LP. Anyway, Mark Isham's score for Mrs. Soffel was a quiet, brooding affair--a far cry from the work of John Williams and John Barry, which I loved--and I loved it just as much.

Since then, Isham has made a career of film scoring, and he's proven again and again just how great he is, in film after film.

To me, though, his pinnacle (so far?) is his music for Bobby, the 2006 film written and directed by Emilio Estevez. If you didn't see it in theaters, see it now. Rent it. Buy it. Just see it. It's a spectacular montage of stories that take place on the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Estevez managed to get permission to film at the hotel just days before its demolition, which makes the movie a fascinating postcard. But even more, it's just a great thing to see. Several stories unfold at the same time, with liberal intercutting from one to another, but somehow Estevez captures just the right moments, the perfect details that bring these characters to life. The husband and wife aching to be happy in their May-December marriage. The Kennedy pollsters who spend the afternoon on an LSD trip. The busboy forced to give up historic Dodgers tickets when he's handed a double shift in the hotel's kitchen. The bored, boozy lounge singer. The aging hotel doorman who can't seem to say gooodbye to the old place. The woman who works in the salon. The hotel manager who's screwing one of the switchboard operators. The young woman who's marrying a classmate just to keep him from having to go to Vietnam.

And the cast? Breathtaking. Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Shia LaBoef, Laurence Fishburn, Helen Hunt, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Freddy Rodriguez, Elijah Wood. Like their director, each one finds the telltale nuggets that make their characters human, only to see them experience, first-hand, the assassination of RFK.

Just as critical to the actors, the script, and Estevez's deft direction is Mark Isham's score. It's both heroic and heraldic, a deeply moving series of cues that enliven the greater story. Certain characters get their own themes, but the score's primary driver is a grand theme that drapes a musical fabric of shattered dreams, of a lost Americana, over these stories. Blending acoustic and electronic colors, Isham delivers music that works on personal and national levels, if you will, for so many of these short stories are about loss and sacrifice and redemption. They are enduring on this day what the country has been enduring since the murder of JFK, and now, just when the nation has caught its breath after the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK is taken down. National tragedy mirrored by personal betrayal and disappointment. Somehow, Isham captures all of this. It's miraculous.

At the time of the film's release there was a CD of songs for the film, including the spectacular "Never Gonna Break My Faith." (In addition to the score, the movie is a jukebox of period hits.) But in recent weeks the complete score was released--and it's cause for celebration. It's one of the standout compositions of 2006, and it now brings 2007 to a close, into the 40th anniversary year of the assassination itself.

If Estevez's Bobby is an indelible film, the music Mark Isham made for it is unforgettable. Occasionally light-hearted and tinged throughout with a devastating truth, it is always insightful, bringing new layers to an already multi-layered story.