Stanley Tucci in Italien

Chronological treatments of the early part of Mozart's career have mostly focused on his tours as a child prodigy, his eventful trip to Paris and back, and his rebel years in Salzburg. The two years he spent in Italy in his early teens, traveling and studying with counterpoint teacher Padre Martini, get overlooked. Yet this was the period in which Mozart became Mozart, in which, to use computer parlance, the "defaults" for much of his structural thinking were set in place.

Albums came less frequently from Stanley Clarke in the 1990s as film scores took up more and more of his time. Not only that, the ideas and functions of film music play a large role in East River Drive, where selections come as often as not in the form of cue-like vamps, as well as two actual themes from Clarke's scores for the films Poetic Justice and Boyz N the Hood. Oddly enough, Clarke's music benefits from his film immersion, for his compositional ideas are sharper and more sophisticated here, and he applies them to a range of electric music idioms.