Friday, August 17, 2018

The Good, The Bad and the Amazing Danish Symphony Orchestra



I went to see my first spaghetti western in my teens. Me and my buddy, Richard Hutchins went to see it at the Esquire in Cleburne, Texas one Saturday night after which we cruised up and down Main Street in a VW micro-bus between the Sonic Drive-In and City Park. While doing so we discussed and solved most of the burning issues of the day all the while wondering why no girls would jump in the V-dub with us. We were not great romancers of women in those halcyon days of our youth, but we knew good music when we heard it (Ennio Morricone for instance) and good movies (Clint Eastwood in practically anything he ever did) when we saw them. I like to think we were saving ourselves for the very special women we wound up with.

After seeing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Morricone's iconic Western theme song got stuck in my head big time.  I found myself running around randomly going, "Ah-eee-ah-eee-aaaaah!" when I thought no one was listening. Couldn't get that danged song out of my head for years.

Seeing the good folks from the Danish Symphony Orchestra take a run at this massively complex song using instruments ranging from recorders and ocarinas to trumpets and glockenspiels to choirs and soloists. It's no wonder that not a lot of high school bands ever attempt this music.

It's really amazing to watch and it makes you appreciate what a lot of talent someone like Ennio Morricone brings to his music.  I'd be doing good to figure out the recorder part, myself, but I'd like to think that in heaven and the new Earth, after several thousand (or perhaps million) years of practice, I might be able to crank out a reasonable facsimile of such a tune.

Enjoy.

Tom





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2 comments:

  1. Mark MilliornAugust 18, 2018 at 10:28 AM

    The enduring love of Westerns by Europeans must, in part, stem from living in an overly structured and controlled culture. The allure of a free individual, completely unfettered by societal rules must be intoxicating.

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  2. Tom KingAugust 18, 2018 at 11:43 AM

    The Italians certainly warmed to the genre, though some of the entries in the spaghetti Western genre were kind of bizarre. The appalling "Sabata" in which one character named "Banjo" had a gun built into his musical instrument. The late 60s/early 70s must have been tough times for actors in that they managed to get Lee Van Cleef and Yul Brynner to do episodes of the series. Some great movies did come out of the genre - The Fistful of Dollars films, Trinity and others actually were pretty good and the music, most of which came from Morricone was terrific. Without spaghetti Westerns, Lee Van Cleef would have died a much poorer man. Clint Eastwood's career got a serious kick in the pants from his Italian Westerns in the late 60s'.

    The European "Westerns" did have a certain anarchy to them, probably garnering a devoted audience among all the ADHD Europeans who had not yet emigrated to the United States.

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