Two Miles High Music

GREAT CONDITION, WILL SHIP FAST!

No Description AvailableNo Track Information AvailableMedia Type: CDArtist: FRANKLIN,ARETHATitle: THIS GIRL'S IN LOVE WITH YOUStreet Release Date: 12/14/1993

Funny Girl Soundtrack

With its Depression-era name and penchant for framing arrangements with banjo, clarinet, and fiddle, this Canadian quintet (including Trish Klein of the Be Good Tanyas) specializes in contemporary original material that sounds like public-domain traditional. Some of the anachronistic affections sound like a minstrel show, such as the vocal phrasing on the spiritual "'Til It's Gone," but the jaunty ragtime of "Go On and Pass Me By," the delicate latticework of harmonies on "Home to You," the jazzy reverie of "So Lazy," and the country waltz of "Texas" attest to the music's refusal to be bound by categorical restriction. And there's nothing nostalgic about the social conscience displayed in "To the Angry Evangelist," capped by a furious fiddle coda. --Don McLeese

Steven Spielberg veered from the futuristic sci-fi flirtations of A.I. and Minority Report with this brisk, stylish period take on the career of teen con-man extraordinaire Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his dogged G-man pursuer/de facto extended family member Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). As always, the director's musical collaborator is John Williams, and the scoring legend uses the occasion of their 20th collaboration as a rewarding musical journey back to the days when he was known as Johnny Williams, ambitious young pianist for Henry Mancini on such early jazz scores as Peter Gunn. Informed by a half-century of subsequent achievement, Williams's return to the jazz idiom of his youth yields a smart, nervous score that evokes more than mere nostalgia. But with Dan Higgins's moody sax often leading the way, the veteran composer's work here seems more evocative reinvention than revisitation, yet another tribute to his uncanny ability to make any idiom his own. A handful of pop standards (including Sinatra's "Come Fly with Me," Getz and Gilberto's "Girl from Ipanema," "The Christmas Song" by Nat "King" Cole) deftly color both period and plot, but, as always, it's Williams who provides Spielberg's masterful imagery with its musical life's blood. --Jerry McCulley