Work From Home With Ennio Morricone

BBC Four's celebration of film music begins with Sound Of Cinema: The Music That Made The Movies, a three-part documentary presented by writer, composer and film music aficionado Neil Brand. Neil tells his alternative history of cinema, putting the soundtrack centre stage. The series features some of the biggest directors of past and present, including Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, alongside film scores of cult and blockbuster movies like Star Wars, Inception, Hitchcock's Psycho, and Gladiator.

This story from Alexander Dumas is updated to modern times and tinged with graphic nudity and eroticism. Marguerite (Daniele Gaubert) is the tart who sleeps her way up the social ladder to help Armand Duval (Nino Castelnuevo), a commoner who happens to be her boyfriend. The original story has Camille dying from tuberculosis, but in this version she suffers from an unknown ailment. She takes a variety of drugs and becomes a walking zombie (when she can stand up) in this expertly photographed sexploitation feature.

From longtime Chicago blues sidemen comes a session of mostly instrumental Americana that runs the gamut from Blues and R&B, to Soul Jazz, Western and Surf music! Guitarist John Edelmann has performed and recorded with a host of blues and rock legends, but is best known for his critically acclaimed work with Chicago Blues shouter Little Al Thomas. Hammond B3 player Rob Waters, a long time member of the Lonnie Brooks Blues Band, also boasts a who's who type resume. Bassist Mike Scharf and drummer Marty Binder are first call rhythm section members whose credits include Albert Collins and Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials. Special guests on the session are Denver area Soul and Blues singer extraordinaire Rex Peoples and saxophone master Steve Eisen. From the Booker T and the MG's meets Ennio Morricone of "Shootout at Castle Rock," to the Blue Note tinged "Rowdy Doody" and the surf of "Samurai," together these stalwart musicians come together on an eclectic mix of roots music played with a whole lotta soul.

For whatever reason, Willie Nelson's Teatro like Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball seems to exist in a vacuum, completely set apart from his other recordings. It's untrue in either case, but especially in Nelson's. A scant year or so before Teatro was released and its recording sessions filmed in an old movie theater in Mexico Nelson issued his most brilliant album of the 1990s, Spirit. Island's publicists had no idea what to do with Spirit's subtle, unsentimental, moody, and sparsely arranged and performed songs, but the roots of Teatro lie firmly planted there on its opening instrumental, "Matador."

In the early 1970s, the great Italian poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini brought to the screen a trio of masterpieces of medieval literature—Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and The Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights)—and in doing so created his most uninhibited and extravagant work. In this brazen and bawdy triptych, the director set out to challenge modern consumer culture and celebrate the uncorrupted human body, while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies. Filled with scatological humor and a rough-hewn sensuality that leave all modern standards of decency behind, these are carnal, provocative, and wildly entertaining films, all extraordinarily designed by Dante Ferretti and featuring evocative music by Ennio Morricone.