Remember when a soundtrack album was merely a compilation of a film’s background music, with dialogue excerpts thrown in? Today’s soundtracks are thinly-disguised old/new commercial hits packages, containing tunes that may or may not exist in the films they are derived from. For his latest directorial effort, Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Clint Eastwood has flipped the script by using current musicians to record jazz versions of standards. Based on a real-life high society gay murder in Savannah, GA, the film’s kinky noir is cleverly intensified by the music’s wishful romanticism. While the soundtrack works for the movie, as a jazz record it is just OK. Save for k.d. lang’s lush “Skylark,” Brad Mehldau’s “Dream,” movie lead Kevin Spacey’s pleasurably corny “That Old Black Magic” and Tony Bennett’s timeless “I Wanna Be Around,” one wonders why Eastwood bothered to book the studio time. If you dug the film, buy the soundtrack; otherwise, pass.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time