Throwback Thursday is a forum for discussing past or present films we've paid to see, whether they contain score music that's currently in rotation on AFOS or don't, but it's a forum not just for myself. Hardeep Aujla--my homie from the U.K.-based international hip-hop site Word Is Bond, as well as an Asian action cinema devotee who introduced me to the batshit brilliance of The Man from Nowhere, while I hipped him to my favorite Johnnie To films--is someone whose writing we'll be seeing a lot of in this space later this year. He didn't see the 2014 thriller The Signal in the theater--where all previous Throwback Thursday subjects were watched, as shown by a movie ticket photo that usually opens each post--but he has a lot to say about this low-budget thriller he caught online. It features a nifty original score by both Nima Fakhrara, who scored the 2013 live-action version of Gatchaman, and, towards the end of the film, instrumental hip-hop artist Chris Alfaro, who records under the name Free the Robots. This is Hardeep's first Throwback Thursday piece. No British punctuation styles were harmed during the posting of this piece.
Spoilers for The Signal begin in 41... 5... 3... 2...
The Signal (2014) By Hardeep Aujla
Once upon a rainy Switzerland weekend, Lord Byron threw a party. Probably something like Puffy would do in our times: lots of famous people in attendance. Mary Shelley was there, had a nightmare after a night of horror-story-hot-potato and penned Frankenstein for the remainder of her stay. Nearly 200 years pass and we cite it as the first piece of science-fiction. Its philosophical discourse on man's folly of playing God by creating "artificial" life would inspire artists for generations and provide the genre with one of its most endearing pre-occupations. Technology advances and the stories keep up, or sometimes already had the lead. We get a broad spectrum of mechano-stuff from the "housewives' dream" Robby The Robot, to Sarah Connor's worst nightmare, the Terminator. Isaac Asimov lays down some fundamental, human-protecting laws, anticipating an emergent property which begins to rouse between the circuit boards and soldered wires. Johnny Five says he "is alive", Pris quotes Descartes, "I think, Sebastian... therefore I am", echoing an automaton that's been sitting in the town hall at Neuchatel since the 1700's writing that exact same phrase over and over again. Today, angst around AI research is manifested in cinema with a noticeable surge in recent years. Her (2013), Chappie (2015) and Ex Machina (2015) (which I've not seen but looks to be pretty similar to 2013's The Machine, right down to the fembot's name of Ava) all compute the dilemma of nuts and bolts and code gaining sentience. Then Automata (2014) straight passes forward the baton of life to them, because how else are we gonna survive the interstellar getaway with our squishy, frail and generally not-space-friendly bodies when we eventually wreck this rock?
The death of legendary hard bop trumpeter and composer Donald Byrd last Monday has got me revisiting some of my favorite Byrd tunes, which either have been sampled by hip-hop artists or were collabos with the late Guru as part of the rapper's Jazzmatazz series. Heads like myself are more familiar with Byrd's jazz-funk/Mizell Brothers/Blackbyrds period than his hard bop period because the former was what beatmakers often loved to shape their tunes from. According to the liner notes of Blue Note's '90s Blue Break Beats series (a bunch of compilations that are a great introduction to the sounds of Byrd and other jazz legends), "The Byrd man is the most sampled of all Blue Note artists."
Producer J-Swift memorably sampled Byrd's 1967 track "Beale Street" in the Pharcyde's "Oh Shit," which kicks off one of my all-time favorite hip-hop albums from start to finish, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, an enjoyable (and self-deprecating, which was rare in hip-hop back then) masterwork that celebrated the 20th anniversary of its release late last year. But the Byrd track I'm fondest of is the gorgeous tune "Think Twice."
Basketball fans are currently swept up in NBA Finals Fever, so it's the perfect time to look back at how film and TV composers have musically interpreted the game in three of the best basketball movie scores.
Hoosiers (Jerry Goldsmith)
I'm waiting for Superbad soundtrack musicians Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Clyde Stubblefield, John "Jab'o" Starks and Phelps "Catfish" Collins to reunite for that great funktastic basketball comedy score that hasn't been written yet. I doubt the funk legends will collaborate again for a movie score, but if this dream team did so for my dream basketball flick score, the result would probably end up going neck-and-neck with Jerry Goldsmith's beloved work from 1986's Hoosiers for the spot of greatest b'ball score.
Goldsmith preferred to approach period pieces like Hoosiers (known as Best Shot outside America), Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as if they were contemporary. On paper, a partially synthesized, anachronistic score for a movie set in the early '50s reads like an epic fail. Somehow, Goldsmith made it work. His musical vision of basketball-as-Americana, which combined a full orchestra with drum machines, doesn't sound dated.
(On the other hand, the completely synthesized "Theme from Hoosiers" concert arrangement that Goldsmith and his son Joel created specially for the soundtrack album is on the dated side. When I first heard that track several years ago, I thought it sounded like theme music for a huffing and puffing T.J. Hooker in an LCPD gym, attempting to block a shot with his beer gut.)
I always dug how Goldsmith's percussion, like in "The Coach Stays" and the Aaron Copland-esque "The Pivot," imitated the sound of a basketball being dribbled.
Goldsmith and Hoosiers director David Anspaugh later reteamed for Rudy, another rousing sports flick that turns grown men into teary-eyed Oprah's Favorite Things audience members. The Goldsmith/Anspaugh partnership produced two powerful and rich scores that even someone who's not a sports fan can appreciate.
Back to that unwritten funkdafied basketball flick score. If I composed it, it would probably sound like "Sportscaster," which Freaks and Geeks and Donnie Darko composer Michael Andrews (a.k.a. Elgin Park) wrote for his band, the Greyboy Allstars.
Cornbread, Earl and Me (Donald Byrd)
Below CBSSports.com's Movie Madness list of Top 10 Basketball Movies, a commenter says the early Laurence Fishburne movie Cornbread, Earl and Me belongs on the list simply because of the Blackbyrds theme song ("He's a man with the plan/He's got a basketball in his hand!").
Cornbread contains the only film score written by jazz-funk legend Donald Byrd. The Blaxploitation.com review of the Cornbread soundtrack says "it's not up to the standard of their early studio LPs," but I'll take the Byrd & the Blackbyrds sound any day over a James Horner interpretation of the drama both on and off the court.
Glory Road (Trevor Rabin featuring Alicia Keys)
The only Bruckheimer movie scores I've liked are from Beverly Hills Cop (Harold Faltermeyer), Bad Boys (Mark Mancina), Crimson Tide (Hans Zimmer), The Rock (the Media Ventures Mafia) and Remember the Titans (Trevor Rabin). The score from Bruckheimer's basketball flick about the first integrated NCAA team, the 1965-66 Texas Western Miners, which unites Titans' Rabin with Alicia Keys, isn't too shabby either.
The former Yes-man was no stranger to the sport. He wrote both the NBA on TNT theme and the Coach Carter score.
Other noteworthy basketball movie scores:Hoop Dreams (Ben Sidran), White Men Can't Jump (Bennie Wallace), Love & Basketball (Terence Blanchard), Coach Carter (Rabin), Inside Moves (John Barry), The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (Thom Bell) and Fast Break (David Shire and James Di Pasquale).
He Got Game doesn't count because other than a theme tune performed by Public Enemy, there's no original music during the movie. Spike Lee used Copland pieces for the score to reflect his Goldsmith-like vision of hoops-as-Americana.
(Is Theodore Shapiro's Semi-Pro score any good? I haven't watched Semi-Pro yet.)
On the small screen, inner-city high school basketball served as the backdrop for The White Shadow, which featured a theme from Rockford Files and A-Team composers Mike Post and Pete Carpenter at the height of their partnership.
No discussion of basketball-related original score music would be complete without the most famous tune of them all, "Roundball Rock," the now-retired NBA on NBC theme. Forget the Gatorade "Be Like Mike" jingle that's synonymous with Michael Jordan. "Roundball Rock" is the theme for His Airness. It was composed by New Age musician and frequent Late Night with Conan O'Brien punching bag John Tesh, who didn't have access to a piano at the time he wrote it, so he had to sing it into his own answering machine.
This is the first in a series of posts I'm calling "Lacuna Matata," in which I attempt to preserve the fading memory of TV shows (or in some cases, comic books) that no one except me remembers watching because the networks somehow Lacuna'd these things from everyone's noggins.
Buried somewhere in my old VHS collection at my parents' house is a tape in shabby condition that contains the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode that guest-starred Harrison Ford and the first two episodes of Tribeca, a pretty good, rarely seen 1993 anthology series that was filmed on location in New York and lasted only seven weeks on Fox.
A decade before Robert De Niro and his Tribeca Productions business partner Jane Rosenthal co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival, the two producers used the Lower Manhattan neighborhood as the setting for what was essentially a throwback to the highbrow '50s and '60s TV dramas that were made during "a time when socially-conscious New Yorkers ruled the airwaves," as Maclean's' Jaime J. Weinman describes the New York-centric early years of scripted TV. That somber, East Side/West Side-esque approach meant this anthology drama, which focused on a different Tribeca resident or two each week, fit right in on the Simpsons and Married... with Children network's schedule about as well as Carrie Prejean at an opposite couples pride parade.
There are two things I saw while growing up that made me think to myself, "Wow, despite the cockroaches and occasional muggers, New York ain't such a bad place after all and I want to move there someday": Ghostbusters and Fox's Tribeca. The show also gave me my first glimpse of Kevin Spacey, who guest-starred as a suicidal singer/songwriter--and got to show off his singing voice--in an episode that reunited him with Tribeca showrunner David J. Burke, who previously co-created the classic Wiseguy arc that gave Spacey his big break. Burke's taste for downbeat, untidy endings--a frequent element of his writing on Wiseguy--also gave Tribeca at the time a certain edge over network dramas not called Homicide.
Though it was an anthology show, Tribeca had a two-man regular cast (Philip Bosco as a kindly coffeehouse owner and Joe Morton as an equally kindly patrolman who looked like he came from Law & Order: Mounted Police Unit) and some nice bits of continuity (a character like a homeless war vet played by Stephen Lang would briefly appear one week and then turn up as the main character the following week). Like many other anthologies, Tribeca didn't always hit one out the park, but when it did, it was network TV at its best. The series' strongest episode was the first one, "The Box," which featured a standout Emmy-winning performance by a fresh-off-Boyz N the Hood Laurence Fishburne as a plainclothes cop who's obsessed with both finding the mugger who killed his stockbroker brother (Carl Lumbly) and opening a puzzle box that his brother gave to him before he died.
With its all-black guest cast, "The Box" is also a great 45-minute argument for the need for more network drama series with casts that consist mostly of actors of color. It's a shame that the five networks have been willing to take a chance on all-black sitcoms but not all-black dramas, possibly because of the low ratings of past dramas like Avery Brooks' A Man Called Hawk, James Earl Jones' Under One Roof and Blair Underwood's City of Angels. Sixteen years after its initial broadcast, "The Box" is sadly, still a rarity rather than the norm.
I remember seeing the reclusive De Niro make a surprise appearance in a Fox promo a la John Wayne's 1955 Gunsmoke series premiere intro to get Fox viewers to tune in to his show. No such luck. One other thing I remember about Tribeca was its cool opening and closing theme, an instrumental version of "Keep It Goin'," a James Brown-sampling 1992 track by largely forgotten alt-rap artist and A.V. Club "Least Essential Albums of the '90s" nominee Me Phi Me.
Tribeca is such an obscure series that there are no YouTube clips or .jpgs from the series online (the only pictures that turn up in Google image searches for Tribeca are pics of either De Niro or the neighborhood skyline). So as you listen to the Me Phi Me tune (that is if you can find it online), just stare at the photo of the Tribeca skyline at the top of this post, and you'll get a pretty accurate recreation of the Tribeca opening titles, which consisted of nothing but whip pans across the Tribeca streets and skyline. If you want to see whip pans, just hit yourself in the head with a skillet.
Because this is episode WEB99, the show will consist of selections from scores to the most noteworthy and inventive films of the year 1999, including Office Space, Election, Fight Club and a film I like a little less than the other three but Laurence Fishburne was such a badass in it: The Matrix. John Frizzell's score for Office Space was never released, so Office Space will be represented here by Canibus and Biz Markie's closing credits shout-out to Johnny Paycheck, "Shove This Jay-Oh-Bee."
"Spirit of '99" begins streaming tonight at midnight and repeats tomorrow and Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, Wednesday at midnight, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.
