While Jerry Goldsmith’s vast filmography has been pretty well-served by album releases over the years, there are still various scores that have not seen the light of day – in particular from his work in television. And while some of these have been lost to the ages, hope is not in fact lost, because of projects such as these – a Kickstarter project arranged by Leigh Phillips, who reconstructed the scores and produced the release for what turned out to be three (and a bit) television scores by the great composer from the late 60s / early 70s, the project having reached its stretch goals.
Phillips has proven himself to be a master at this sort of thing, and in particular he has an uncanny ability to reproduce the very distinctive Goldsmith sound – it’s one thing doing it for traditional symphonic music, but Goldsmith was – famously – a great fan of including unusual sounds, including electronics, alongside his orchestra and capturing that particular lightning in a bottle must be very difficult – but Leigh Phillips has actually managed to do it time and again.
The first of the scores on the set is Pursuit, a 1972 political thriller about an agent trying to prevent a domestic terrorist from releasing nerve gas during the Republican National Convention. Notably, the project was the first collaboration between the composer and his good friend Michael Crichton, making his directorial debut (an adaptation of his own novel Binary) – while he remained best-known for his writing, his occasional forays into directing showed he had real chops at that too. I have never seen this film (nor indeed either of the others included on this album) but Jon Burlingame describes it in his notes as one of the finest tv thrillers of the early 70s, and he has some authority on the topic…
Some of the composer’s tv scores of the era are pretty tense, taut affairs and on occasion don’t make the best album listening experiences – but Pursuit is a very entertaining affair even in its most serious moments. It’s largely based around a single theme, and Goldsmith shows his brilliance by using it in such different guises – the first time we hear it, in “Meet Mr Wright”, it plays as a breezy, at times even funky piece, the small orchestra including Hammond organ and vibes – and extraordinarily, it’s the very same theme that we hear in the score’s action centrepiece “Breakout”, this time in dynamic, pulsating fashion.
The score runs through all sorts of feelings as it goes – there’s a bit of a European influence on it (some of those Morricone thriller scores of the same period were perhaps in Goldsmith’s consciousness at the time), a fascinating feel of instrumental pop at times not too far away (the gorgeous finale “The Aftermath” the finest example, but not the only one). Great stuff.
The second offering – the “stretch target” one – is from 1968, the year of Planet of the Apes, and is The People Next Door, which was at the time quite a provocative film about the 16-year-old daughter of a typical American couple who ends up hospitalised following a bad LSD trip. Goldsmith provides a main theme which clearly presages one of his most famous – Chinatown – a lonely trumpet (and in the end title version, also flute) above keyboard and strings, whose melancholy feel is a delight. Parts of the brief underscore are closely related to his Apes music – avant-garde touches mixing with ethereal sounds, perhaps the composer providing the listeners with a bit of a trip of their own. It’s a fascinating little score blending together sounds that the composer would exploit much more famously elsewhere – how remarkable that he was as dedicated to this long-forgotten tv movie of the week as he was to the much more illustrious cinematic projects where he would explore similar musical material.
The third score is Crawlspace, released in 1972 (remarkably, Burlingame informs us, shown on tv around six weeks after having been shot). This one is a tense affair about a middle-aged couple who find that a drifter who fixed their furnace is living in the crawlspace under their house. It opens with a gentle theme over the main titles, imbued with a pastoral beauty but with just the slightest off-kilter twists telling us that something isn’t quite right.
The second cue, “Uninvited Guest”, has much the same feel about it (albeit with a different melody) – and then right at the end, very briefly, we hear (for the first of several appearances in the score) a little suspense motif that will be very familiar to all fans of the composer – from a score written twenty years down the line (I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you that it’s Basic Instinct). Another very familiar Goldsmith technique – accentuating tension in thrillers through using very low-end piano – is also on display, to great effect – “Bumper to Bumper” in particular is a great action/suspense piece.
There’s so much emotion on display in the 41-second “Return Home” – it perhaps seems silly saying this about a composer who was (and still is) so heavily-lauded, but one thing about Jerry Goldsmith I’m not entirely sure gets quite enough credit is just how good he was at crafting genuinely brilliant melodies – this seemingly-simple piano piece has so much to say in its brief running time, it’s a great example of his stellar technique at writing music which can so confidently stand on its own as well as providing the perfect dramatic accompaniment to the picture.
Leigh Phillips has done a remarkable job here – under the baton of Adam Klemens, the City of Prague Philharmonic sounds essentially as I imagine the Hollywood studio musicians sounded over half a century earlier – and of course, with the added benefit of a crystal-clear modern recording. As well as Burlingame’s notes, Goldsmith expert Yavar Moradi provides cue-by-cue analysis of all of the scores – and as perhaps the best bonus of all, we get an unbilled extra track at the end – a recording of the composer’s magnificent theme from The Waltons, a slice of americana so warm and inviting – and so extremely catchy. This is a great album – what a treat for fans of this much-loved composer to get to hear music that I imagine most of us have never heard before, and in truth would never have expected to hear – and it’s such good music, too. I referred earlier to “the Goldsmith sound” – perhaps the most remarkable thing about this particular composer is just how broad that sound was – because these three scores are really nothing like each other, and yet are all unmistakably, distinctively Jerry Goldsmith. What a composer he was.
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