Pop Records

"Movie music," said Sir Thomas Beecham, "is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica." For years, audiences approached screen music with what the industry regards as a more eupeptic attitude: they ignored it. Although isolated scores such as Max Steiner's music for Gone With the Wind caught the public fancy, Hollywood's rule-of-baton used-to be that a good score is one the audience does not hear.* Now film scores have become big sellers on the pop market. The change was foreshadowed by The Third Man theme and by Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon; both tunes were dramatically part of the movies whose titles they bore, but also became huge independent hits. Nowadays a producer may assign a composer to do a title tune even before he casts the leading roles or raises all his money. Even mere accompaniment scores without notable single tunes are selling on LPs. Currently there are more than 200 movie LPs, and record men are unreeling more as fast as they can tape them.

The current boom started when Decca taped the palpitating score by Elmer Bernstein (no kin to Leonard) for The Man With the Golden Arm found itself with an unexpected hit on its hands. Decca is now high on the charts with the soundtrack music of Around the World in 80 Days by Victor Young. Other companies have rushed into vinyl with the sound tracks of such uncertain musical bets as Mogambo, The Pride and the Passion, Hot Rod Rumble. By and large, present-day studio composers seem a trifle more sophisticated than the practitioners of "Micky Mouse" music in the '30s, when whole orchestras simply hurtled into the bass clef when a character tumbled downstairs. Columbia's The Bridge on the River Kwai, by British Composer Malcolm Arnold, skillfully melds its bellowing brasses and shivering strings with such traditional military airs as the Colonel Bogey March in a score long on pomp, short on circumstance. RCA Victor's Bonjour Tristesse, by French Composer Georges Auric--member of the sometime modernist group known as The Six*--offers the listener a deft American Express tour of the French psyche, is at its best when it cuts loose with some lowdown jazz hot.

But even the best screen scores--laden with what the industry calls "the old gutseroo"--suffer from the terrible facelessness that is the bane of most movie music. "We can write symphonic music," a Hollywood composer once boasted, "almost as fast as an orchestra can play it." More often, the scores sound as though the orchestra had started wandering from the mark before the composer finished his job.

Other pop records:

Tonight (Jose Melis, his piano and strings; Seeco). A collection of standards --Love Is a Simple Thing, Harbor Lights, One Morning in May--played by a 40-year-old Cuban supper-club pianist (and member of the Jack Paar TV show). Melis has a nice, unpretentious fancy and an attack as clean as a sea breeze. Particularly pleasant when he cuts loose from all those viscous strings.

Mink in Hi-Fi (Monique Van Vooren; RCA Victor). Belgian-born Show Girl Van Vooren's voice has the tinny resonance of a sound heard through a drainpipe, and her accent in English is an astonishing blend of Gaul and Georgia Cracker: "Laak a queen in the royal foah postah . . . Ah can face zat lovely place called bed." The combination is disastrous in the slow, sexy register, but in such shouting numbers as Le Rififi and My Man Is Good, V.V. carries the show on muscle alone.

A Winter's Tale (Paul Winter; Offbeat Records). These songs "for happy people with happy problems," composed and sung in various dialects by Disk Jockey (and onetime philosophy teacher) Paul Winter, take some savage and often hilarious swipes at diverse targets--among them Schopenhauer, Orval Faubus and the Organization Man ("I am a team man. . . I get my steam, man, from that doll Normie Vincent Peale"). Among Winter's best: a "film clip" from a Brief Encounter-styled British movie entitled The Heart Is a Desperate Delicatessen; a monologue in which Producer "Boris Ishtar" rages at his star, "Rock Quarry," for failing to hit the big scandal magazines with the "slight perversions" suburbia currently demands ("I am spitting my Miltown at you").

The Art of Mabel Mercer (Atlantic; 2 LPs). In a triumph of mind over voice, Songstress Mercer runs through 20-odd songs she made famous in small cafes. Her voice, never sumptuous, wobbles badly in such numbers as Let Me Love You and You Will Wear Velvet, but the phrasing is impeccable, and she can still infuse songs like Some Fine Day and The End of a Love Affair with an emotional charge that other singers never guessed was there.

Local Color (Mose Allison Trio; Prestige). Pianist-Composer Mose Allison grew up in a dusty, crossroads Mississippi town, and this album tells a lot about it. The selections--Carnival, Mojo Woman, Crepuscular Air--have an engaging funky, blues-flavored quality, abetted by some light and witty Allison solo flights on the piano. Among the most successful is a swinging, wryly humorous ballad about a misunderstood wife-slayer at "the Parchman Farm" who passes his time "puttin' that cotton in a 'leven foot sack/With a 12-gauge shotgun at [his] back."

I Got Rhythm (Teddy Wilson; Verve). For those who like their piano well-flavored and with the angularities gone. The slower selections such as All of Me sometimes lose their way, but Pianist Wilson swings through the propulsive numbers--Sweet Georgia Brown, Smile, Limehouse Blues--with fine buoyancy and the amiable air of a man who could not utter a harsh note if he tried.

*Such noted U.S. composers as Aaron Copland (The Heiress) and Leonard Bernstein (On the Waterfront) have written distinguished film music. Some composers have used films as the inspiration for music that has become part of the concert repertory, e.g., Sergei Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kije, Virgil Thomson's Louisiana Story. *The others: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey.

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