If the lure of a haunting score by The Talented Mr. Gabriel
Yared, striking recordings by The Talented Mr. Guy Baker’s
International Quintet and an assemblage of jazz gems from The
Talented Messrs. Parker, Davis and Gillespie aren’t enough
to entice you into procuring this soundtrack, than buy it simply
for the wonderful and generous four-page long liner notes of the
film’s director, The Talented Mr. Anthony Minghella.
In these, Minghella explains that the soundtrack, rather than
merely embellishing the movie’s visual richness, interweaves
profoundly with the very fabric of the story. He reveals that he
decided to use sound in place of the painting motif of Patricia
Highsmith’s novel and how the contrasts of musical style
have been employed to reflect the film’s underlying
psychological themes.
And what music it is that he has chosen, compiled and produced
to this end! From the joyfully chaotic be-bop of Charlie
"Yardbird" Parker’s Ko-Ko and Dizzy
Gillespie’s The Champ, to Miles Davis’s silky yet
strident trumpet on his faithful rendition of Nature Boy, to the
tight contemporary arrangements of Guy Baker, to Sinead
O’Connor’s deeply lyrical lilt against a sparse
ethereal piano in Lullaby for Cain, all punctuated by slices of
Yared’s thrillingly unsettling and mesmeric string pulse
overlaid with exotic Arabian phrases; this is music of intricacy
and subtlety, at once intellectual and emotionally visceral.
If such disparate styles on the one CD suggest a certain
schizophrenia, well that’s the point, but it’s also
much more than that; as Minghella states: "… this
movie’s music is used in the faith that the audience
can… extrapolate from what it hears." Buy this
soundtrack, rejoice in its complexities and nuances, but also lie
back and let your imagination, like Bird’s saxophone, soar
beyond boundaries.
Brad Green
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