Junk Box Jury

Taken from the LP ‘Film Blockbusters’ (Polydor 2310-290) 1973

John Scott‘s musical training began at the age of 14 when he joined the Woolwich Royal Artillery as a boy musician. His early career was that of an instrumentalist; he played with the Ted Heath Band, his instruments being saxophone, clarinet, harp and flute.

He developed into one of the leading jazz flautists and eventually formed his own quintet, but his growing interest in composition soon lead to involvement in TV and film work and a falling-off in his activities as a performer.

Films on which he has worked include THE JERUSALEM FILE and ENGLAND MADE ME, and his finest score to date is surely for Charlton Heston’s screen adaptation of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

John Scott & His Orchestra | “Blowin’ Your Mind” | Polydor

This album, however, gives us a sample of John Scott’s skill as an arranger rather than as a composer – though perhaps the term ‘arrangement’ is rather misleading in this particular context.

For what Scott has done is to recreate a selection of popular film themes ranging over the past year or so in terms of his own distinctive musical personality – even in the case of those items whose original ‘sound’ had necessarily to be reproduced (CABARET and DELIVERANCE).

Listening to the results we can understand what Stravinsky meant when he said that in Hollywood Haydn would be credited as the composer of the ST. ANTHONY VARIATIONS and Brahms as their ‘arranger’.

LIVE AND LET DIE is a particularly fine piece of pop music, but then Paul McCartney was always noted for the high quality of his musical invention.

There’s piquant contrast here between the almost Rachmaninov-like lusciousness of the opening theme played by cellos (‘when you were young and your heart was an open book’) and the explosive, dynamic impetus of ‘Live and let die’ which brings 007 to life for the eighth time.

John Scott & His Orchestra | “Blowin’ Your Mind” | Polydor

THE VALACHI PAPERS is one of a number of tracks which betray John Scott’s feeling for the expressive power of solo line (his own themes are frequently conceived in these terms, e.g. the ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA love-theme, the ENGLAND MADE ME main theme).

Here a solo sax proves a persuasive advocate for Riz Ortolani’s hauntingly melancholic tune. So too in LAST TANGO IN PARIS – a blubbering trumpet, the bejewelled glint of the oboe, strings soaring up into the stratosphere – and an unusually poetic ending.

Richard Rodney Bennett’s LADY CAROLINE LAMB calls forth solos of affecting eloquence from clarinet (Alan Hacker) and ‘cello (Alexander Kok) – it’s a melody curiously compounded of classical and romantic elements and so reflects the conflict in the film between ‘classical’ self-discipline and ‘romantic’ self-indulgence.

A tawdry Berlin of the early 1930’s is the setting for CABARET, and the M.C.’s famous `Willkommen’ is heard here in all its expertly-contrived seediness; Scott’s soloists later indulge in some free improvisation in the jazz style of the period.

A Clockwork Orange

The treatment to which the ‘Ode to joy’ from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is here subjected (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) underlines the quasi-surrealistic contrast between the decadence and turmoil of the not-too-distant-future envisioned by Stanley Kubrick and the heroic spirit and nobility of Beethoven’s music.

The stereo antiphony in DELIVERANCE brings back the moment when, in a tumbledown mountain shack in the Appalachian mountains, one of the protagonists plays on his guitar and finds himself being drawn into a strange complicity with a deformed Albino child who echoes every note on his banjo. Reminiscences of ‘Yankee Doodle’ infiltrate what develops into a virtuoso display.

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE contained a song called ‘The Morning After’ which is becoming an international hit. This version has a rather Bacharach-like quality, emphasised by the prominently featured horn solo (Alan Civil) and the flutes.

After the electronic pyrotechnics of SHAFT’S BIG SCORE (Gordon Parks, who directed, also produced the songs on which the score is based) LADY SINGS THE BLUES is another of those laments for a lost Eden, patently by the composer of LES PARAPLUIES DE CHERBOURG, Michel Legrand.

The Godfather

Nino Rota’s GODFATHER theme sounds a note of tragic nobility as a trumpet solo; it develops into an astringently lyrical waltz, one with an underlying bleakness well brought out in this arrangement.

The tempo gradually quickens, as for a danse macabre, but suddenly subsides. Lady Jenny Churchill’s theme from YOUNG WINSTON, original Alfred Ralston in a score otherwise based almost entirely on music of Elgar, has a quality of sweet, sad all-pervasiveness entirely appropriate to character and situation, whereas the SLEUTH main theme and Milo’s theme have the clean-cut, drily witty sound utterly typical of the composer, John Addison.

Finally a moment of sheer musical happiness-everybody comes in on ‘The world is a circle’ from LOST HORIZON, playing with an exquisite dippy rapture. (Christopher Palmer)

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cost of record: £1
from: charity shop