When you watched Charlie Daniels with that fiddle, the dust was flying off the strings. He would flip that bow around like it was freaking Harry Potter’s wand. He was going into battle when he played and you would follow him anywhere. He was like a general up there. | | | | Ennio Morricone in Rome, July 3, 2017.
(Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “When you watched Charlie Daniels with that fiddle, the dust was flying off the strings. He would flip that bow around like it was freaking Harry Potter’s wand. He was going into battle when he played and you would follow him anywhere. He was like a general up there.”
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| | rantnrave:// Traditionally, the music is the last major element completed for a film, written and recorded, more often than not, after everyone else has finished shooting and editing. The picture dictates the score: the emotions, the rhythms, the milliseconds of timing, etc. The great Italian composer ENNIO MORRICONE was fond of working the other way, especially in his legendary collaborations with director SERGIO LEONE, who sometimes didn't start writing his scripts until Morricone handed over the music, as if he were writing video treatments for Morricone's strange symphonies, which he sort of was. "I’ve always felt that music is more expressive than dialogue," the director once said. "My best dialogue and screenwriter is Ennio Morricone." There could hardly be a more fitting epitaph for Morricone, who died Monday at age 91, leaving behind more than 500 film and TV scores. The music in those spaghetti westerns in which he first made his name is loud, memorably melodic, unusually (and beautifully) orchestrated with such instruments as guitars, whistles, flutes and ocarinas, and evocative of frontier landscapes that may not have existed until Morricone and Leone invented them. It's also evocative of the stories that take place there; you might well be able to follow the story of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY simply by sitting in darkness and listening to the music. His scores were not the type to slink into the background. "The best film music," he told the BBC in 1995, "is music that you can hear. Music you can’t hear, no matter how good, is bad film music." The spaghetti westerns established a particular reputation that followed Morricone for the rest of his career, straight through to QUENTIN TARANTINO's western THE HATEFUL EIGHT, for which he won his only competitive ACADEMY AWARD when he was well into his 80s—he had been handed his lifetime achievement Oscar a decade earlier, which is the reverse of how it usually works, but, again, he was fond of working the wrong way. But the hundreds of scores he wrote in between encompassed a classically broad range of styles, from the nostalgic CINEMA PARADISO to the Europeans-in-South-America culture clash of THE MISSION (considered by many to be his masterpiece) to the epic romantic sweep of Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. From jazz to pop to "one of the best albums of 1971." And so.much.more [<--this link is a treasure trove] music that, no matter where you are and no matter where it is, whether opening a METALLICA concert of sitting inside a JAY-Z song, you can most definitely hear. RIP... As a fiddler, CHARLIE DANIELS could outplay the devil, as he may have mentioned once or twice. As a session guitarist, he was in great demand by the likes of BOB DYLAN, LEONARD COHEN and RINGO STARR in the late '60s and early '70s. He played his way onto the GRAND OLE OPRY and into the COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME with a long career that bridged the worlds of country, country-rock, Southern rock, bluegrass, longhaired hippiedom and longbearded far-right conservatism, often in the course of a single night. He wrote "(WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS IS) A FEW MORE REDNECKS" and covered Dylan's "THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'" and was, by all appearances, sincere in both. "All these things, they're just all part of my life," he said. He was a hell of player. He used TWITTER for strange, perhaps indefensible, purposes. He was, to quote someone else on Twitter, "a complicated guy." RIP... RIP also MICKEY DIAGE—an advertising and marketing executive who spent her entire 40-year career at the CAPITOL RECORDS tower in Hollywood, working with the likes of FRANK SINATRA, the BEATLES and RADIOHEAD—NICK CORDERO, LOUIE PATTON, J. MARVIN BROWN, SHARON PAIGE and BILL FIELD. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | | | Ennio Morricone conducing the Munich Radio Orchestra |
| | Composed for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966). |
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