The Evan Parker

VA - The Talented Mr. Ripley OST
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 320 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Sony Classical # SK 51337 | Country/Year: Germany 1999
Genre: Jazz, Classical | Style: Neo-Classical, Swing

…it captures perfectly both the sunlit Italian glamour and the muscle-tensing intrigue that characterize the film. Yared also wrote the music for the quietly disturbing Sinead O'Connor ballad, "Lullaby for Cain," that is played over the opening credits. The song, which features lyrics by Minghella himself, sets an appropriately ominous tone that effectively foreshadows the gruesome direction the film will eventually take. It is a solid contribution to a soundtrack album that is as carefully and thoughtfully constructed as the movie itself.

Pairing poet Terry Durham with talents including avant-garde saxophonist Evan Parker and veteran arranger John Coleman, Crystal Telephone remains one of the singular records of the late '60s, a lush and funky word-jazz fantasia shrouded in cigarette smoke and drunk on language. Durham's crushed-velvet voice recalls John Cale's spoken word recitation of "The Gift" on the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat, albeit couched in Coleman's cinematic, thickly rhythmic jazz-rock settings. His vividly perverse song-poems capture the romantic allure of fatalism (or is that the fatal allure of romance?), and his attempts at crooning, especially Crystal Telephone's transcendent title cut, are particularly effective. A masterpiece of decadence and indulgence. Jason Ankeny AMG

Bassist, composer, and bandleader Graham Collier may have gotten the short shrift early in his career for not taking the same iconoclastic position Evan Parker and Derek Bailey did: "Forget American jazz, let's forge something uniquely British" (their pretensions were European though they weren't). His contributions to the jazz canon are finally being seen in light of what they actually are: very forward-looking works that extend the jazz boundary into new chromatic and harmonic regions and have an identity that is distinctly non-American. Collier's modalism is so far outside the norms as to speak an entirely different architectural language. Songs for My Father featured a Collier septet with Harry Beckett on trumpet, pianist John Taylor, saxophonists Alan Wakeman and Bob Sydor, and drummer John Webb…

The music of percussionist, composer, and bandleader Gregg Bendian reflects his diverse interests in free jazz, contemporary classical music, and even progressive rock. One of Bendian's first major areas of interest was the music of Varese and Webern, which he investigated during his advanced studies at William Paterson College while still a high school student in New Jersey.