Etoile De Dakar Once Upon A Time In Senegal

Ennio Morricone’s work on The Hateful Eight aside, most of Quentin Tarantino’s movies famously don’t have much in the way of traditional scores. The songs that have played a starring role in so many of his iconic scenes aren’t original compositions—they’re vintage gems, often dug up from the crates by the director himself. The music from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, captured on this soundtrack, is a prime example. Like the film itself, the songs—from José Feliciano’s cover of “California Dreamin’” to Vanilla Fudge’s take on “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”—are a time capsule of late-’60s Los Angeles, tracks Tarantino himself heard on the radio growing up in the city’s South Bay region (although there are, as usual for the director, lots of deeper cuts, like The Box Tops’ “Choo Choo Train”).

Arguably a milestone for both director Sergio Leone and his musical cohort Ennio Morricone. After deconstructing the classic American western by way of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars, Leone distilled his intentions with 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. For his part, Morricone framed Leone's meditative camerawork and mythic narrative with a mix of hauntingly spacious pieces and reconfigured snatches of old-timey tunes. Just within the stretch of the first four pieces here, Morricone evokes the endless expanse of the West with a Copland-esque aria (the main title theme), weaves some twisted grit into the showdown theme with loads of guitar fuzz ("As a Judgment"), ingeniously combines whistling and a clippity-clop rhythm for a respite piece ("Farewell to Cheyenne"), and conjures the surreal end of the cowboy mythos via a wonderfully disjointed serial-style number ("The Transgression"). And whether sounding upbeat or stark, Morricone informs it all with the dry and windswept vacancy of the West. Beautiful and stunning.