Home on The Range Comic

"Third stream" may have been the bandied term, but this unjustly ignored 1962 duet set, the debut for pianist Blake and singer Lee, who worked up their act while studying at Bard College, plays blissfully free of the lumbering lugubriousness and Big Mac-thick philosophizing that mar so much of that music.

It has been quite a long time since we had any recorded excerpts from Bax's now legendary score for 'Oliver Twist' let alone a complete score. This issue is doubly welcome for this listener whose home country is immortalized in these fine excerpts from 'Malta GC'!

Randy Newman was the nephew of film composers Alfred, Emil, and Lionel Newman, which would suggest at least some familiarity with the field, even though he had only scored one minor movie (Cold Turkey). And in his songs, heard on his series of solo albums, he displayed far more knowledge of popular music styles of the early 20th century than any of his singer/songwriter peers. Listening to his records, you could always tell that he knew his way around Scott Joplin's rags. Who better, therefore, than Newman to make his debut as a big-budget film composer by scoring an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime? So must movie producer Dino DeLaurentiis have reasoned in giving Newman the assignment. And the result worked out quite well. Newman naturally re-created much of the cakewalking Tin Pan Alley style of the turn-of-the-century era depicted in the film, but he actually had a more challenging assignment than might have appeared, since the story moves from one social stratum to another and ranges in tone from the comic to the melodramatic to the tragic.