William Alwyn was far better known as a composer from the concert hall than in films, despite his having scored close to 200 movies across a four-decade period that included the Golden Age of British cinema, from the early '40s to the start of the '50s.
Born in Chicago in 1949, Gil Scott-Heron became one of the inspirators of Rap Music. With very much of a political viewpoint, Gil became a mouthpiece for the Black Person in America during the Seventies and Eighties. Gil was the son of a Jamaican professional soccer player and a college graduate mother who worked as a librarian. His father played for the Scottish football side, Celtic. Both parents divorced whilst Gil was still a child and he was despatched off to his grandmother in Lincoln, Tennessee. His grandmother helped Gil musically, however, early racial tensions at school, in Jackson, led him to relocate again to the Bronx during his adolescent years to live with his mother and he later moved again to the Spanish neighbourhood of Chelsea.
At the age of 13, Gil had already written a book of poetry. Gil attended college in Pennsylvania and then left to concentrate on writing his first novel entitled 'The Vulture' in 1968. It was at college he met Brian Jackson, who was later to be a long time musical collaborator.
He released his debut album, 'New Black Poet: Small Talk at 125th and Lennox', in 1970, the title of which was influenced by a piece of poetry written by his mentor, Bob Thiele. The album contained the powerful 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', a damning political attack on the media and the treatment of Black People in the U.S.
For a long time, Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) kept the two main fields of his compositional activity neatly separated. First, there was film music: this was undoubtedly the best known and also the most abundant of the two. His artistic partnerships with directors such as Sergio Leone, Giuseppe Tornatore, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuliano Montaldo, Elio Petri, and Gillo Pontecorvo marked the history of film music. However, the directors with whom he cooperated, also on the international stage, are very numerous, including Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino. His film music comprises nearly 500 scores: a record quantity, reached over the course of more than five decades, and crowned by three Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, five BAFTAs, a Grammy and countless other awards.
"The road was our school. It gave us a sense of survival; it taught us everything we know and out of respect, we don't want to drive it into the ground…or maybe it's just superstition but the road has taken a lot of the great ones. It's a goddam impossible way of life" - Robbie Robertson, from the movie The Last Waltz, quoted in the box set…