Inercine/Foxbat/Something To Hide

The three films scores here, Foxbat, The Internecine Project, and Something to Hide, were all journeyman works for the late British film composer and jazz pianist Roy Budd (best known for his minimalist jazz score for Get Carter). Foxbat is a classic spy film soundtrack. Full orchestras a la Henry Mancini are employed against single instruments -- usually a trombone or an electric guitar -- and percussive realism to forward an ever-tenser plot. Elements of jazz, pop, classical, and funk are interwoven to widen the palette of the film's color and make each cue stick memorably to the celluloid. He achieves this seamlessly and without any corny pastiche of pseudo-Americana themes. The Internecine Project is known primarily for its use of exotic percussion and string instruments and its textured ambience. When the pitch finally rises, it's toward fever. There is so much white-knuckle grooving in this score, it's almost impossible not to be exhausted by its end. The crowing jewel in this trilogy is the "Concerto for Harry" from Something to Hide. Budd was a child prodigy as a pianist, and here he shows why. This score has all the glory of classical music's late romantic period packed into less than nine minutes. A full orchestra accompanies Budd as he cascades through hope, promise, failure, despair, and destruction. It may be a concerto, but it is an elegy for the film's character played so honestly and brutally by Peter Finch. Where the orchestra states its theme in a languid, lilting way, with strings and oboe carrying the harmonies into the bras sections approximation of the melody that gets filled in by Budd later, there shouldn't be a dry eye in the house. Because for all this score's processional beauty as witnessed by the orchestra, and all its spring-like arias, courtesy of Budd's piano, this is a deeply tragic score, as beautifully played as it was carefully written. The CD's last track, the theme song from Something to Hide, is "How Can We Run Away," which carries within it the very theme that "Concerto From Harry" will explicate to wondrously. It's a fitting end to a major collection of supposedly minor scores. ~ Thom Jurek|