Customer Reviews

Anatomy of a Murder - O.S.T.

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Like Leonard Bernstein (not Elmer), the Ellington/Strayhorn team composed essentially only one "pure" film score (though "Paris Blues" has its moments). It's a good one, not only deserving its Grammy Award but contributing immensely to the characterizations and drama of a film Jimmy Stewart cited as one of his two favorites (how he could omit "Vertigo" defies human comprehension). Immediately the listener is apt to be struck by a "different-sounding" Ellington. It's as though he's taken the characteristic sounds of the "jungle music" from his Cotton Club days and inflected them with sufficient dissonance and thick orchestral textures to suggest a more contemporary jungle: that of the human psyche in mid-20th-century America or, to be more specific, the world of "film noir."

All the same, it won't take long for even the casual Ellington fan to recognize the stamp of the Maestro and his "instrument"--from Duke's downward arpeggios to the inimitable tonal "voices" of Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Jimmy Hamilton, and Cat Anderson (doing for this film what Bernard Hermann's famously screeching violins do for the unforgettable shower scene in "Psycho").

Sony (Columbia) has obviously spent money on this budget-priced digital restoration--from the research to the program notes to the out-takes and interviews as well as the digital processing itself. I listened to the album during a long car trip, and from the number of times I was forced to adjust the volume, it would appear that Sony's engineers decided to do without "dynamics compression," or "normalization." Audio, or frequency, compression in the form of smaller-bit files would be unthinkable for a full-fidelity album, but dynamics compression, which amounts to "lessening" the distance between the extremely pianissimo passages and the ultra fortissimo ones, is a common practice to assure the listener's being able to hear everything without strain (in the case of the most nuanced measures) or discomfort (during the full-blown, brassy interludes). Whether the decision to take this route was the better one waits to be decided, at least in my case (when I'm in a quiet room without an adjacent passenger sensitive to the extremes of an undeniably intrusive loudness if not stridency).

Besides comparing the memory of the film score or the LP version with this restored digital version, the listener might also compare a track like "Pie Eye's Blues" with Ellington's reprising of the same number for his under-appreciated "Blues in Orbit." If the latter example seems preferable, the engineers of the latest edition of "Anatomy of a Murder" may indeed have exercised well-intended but less than stellar judgment.

Saw movie years ago. Empire Jazz Orchestra played some of the music at a concert. Ordered soundtrack. Great music stands the test of time.