Maurice Jarre (1924-2009)

The composer of rich and powerful scores for epics like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Grand Prix(*), the Jesus of Nazareth miniseries and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome has died. Jarre was 84. When he accepted an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival in February, he was confined to a wheelchair and looked very frail.

(*) Besides the awesome racing sequences and Jarre's energetic, if a bit repetitive, score, another highlight of Grand Prix is the eye candy--Françoise Hardy and Jessica Walter. Lucille Bluth was quite a hottie back then.

Though he dabbled in the small screen (Nazareth, Shogun), Jarre told interviewer James Fitzpatrick he didn't enjoy writing TV scores because "everything is too hurried with poor sound and nobody caring about wrong notes." Monsieur Jarre, if only you were still alive because I would have liked you to meet Michael Giacchino, Bear McCreary and Jeff Richmond.

Jarre's most lasting collaborations were with David Lean (Arabia, Zhivago), Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society) and John Frankenheimer (Grand Prix, The Train). The father of New Age musician Jean Michel Jarre and Glory screenwriter Kevin Jarre told Film Score Monthly he admired Mozart and his music because "The harmony is so perfect, and the orchestration is so simple and natural. You listen to Mozart and you get a great lesson in humility. To me his music is perfect."

So were many of Jarre's film scores.

The Black List: Neal Evans ought to do more scores

While checking out Vol. 2 of the excellent Elvis Mitchell/Timothy Greenfield-Sanders documentary series The Black List, which premiered on HBO last night, I really dug the wall-to-wall yet laid-back and pitch-perfect score by Soulive keyboardist and first-time scorer Neal Evans. The series' cool main/end title theme can be streamed on Evans' MySpace. (There was a lot of terrific original scoring on the tube last night. Besides Evans' Black List score--which is as multifaceted as the range of different black experiences that are captured in the doc--I also enjoyed Jeff Richmond's tinkly "hunting for Liz's boobies picture" theme for piano and flute during the latest 30 Rock.)

Former UC Santa Cruz students like myself will get a kick out of The Black List: Vol. 2 because two of the interviewees are from UCSC's past (Angela Davis was a longtime History of Consciousness professor there, and ex-SNLer Maya Rudolph graduated from the Porter part of campus and majored in photography). Also, there are a couple of film music-related bits in Vol. 2 that are noteworthy (no pun intended). Melvin Van Peebles briefly recalls working on the Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song soundtrack with a then-unknown-and-starving band--Earth, Wind & Fire--and in my favorite Vol. 2 segment, Ghost Dog and Afro Samurai composer RZA discusses how he found empowerment through chess tournaments, martial arts flicks like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin ("The Asian history was remarkable and special... That brotherhood right there helped me spawn the brotherhood of the Wu-Tang Clan") and Silver Surfer comics.

Rizz's admiration of Norrin Radd is similar to how many of us Asian American writers and artists have felt empowered through the comics medium, whether it's reading comics about heroes with AA-like experiences and identifying with those characters--even though they're of a different color--or creating comics with actual AA characters like the tales in the Secret Identities anthology (see how I tied it back to Secret Identities? April 14 in stores everywhere). His story about Wu-Tang fans who have asked him during his college lectures why he's not keeping it real and why he's trying to ditch the hood is heartbreaking. Who'd have thought RZA's segment would be the most introspective and moving part of the doc?