Pizer. Charlie Pizer.

Oh rapturous day! iTunes has added the score to The Black Hole by John Barry! Zounds! I checked Amazon: No CD. Just iTunes. Truly, brave new world that has such soundtracks in it. I wonder what the licensing deal with this is.

An my gosh is it a John Barry score. I mean, this is almost definitive Barry. Translation? It's James Bond in space! Ok, Moonraker is James Bond in space, which came out the same year, but this may be more so. That's the amazing thing. We played this record into the ground when I was ten. I'm trying to think of an analogy that isn't John Williams. But Williams will do. It would be like kids listening to Harry Potter and then finding out that a long time ago- er, a while back Williams had written this Star Wars and Superman stuff. Which sounds just a LITTLE bit like John Williams, right? Now I go back and listen to this and wonder at the idea that it could have been anybody EXCEPT John Barry. It's got the low brooding strings, the muted horns, the light pensive snare drums, it's all dark and foreboding and terribly mysterious. Set lush factor twelve. Oh, and then there's this fanfare because it was 1979 and space needed fanfares. Unless you were making Alien. But this was adventure. Even though it was mostly "haunted house in space" adventure. There are two amazingly awesome things that keep this from being a totally awful movie: The art design (Mary Poppins in space!) and the score. (Almost anything gets better with "in space!" Western? In space! You can't take the sky from ME!)

When I was a kid I listened to the fanfare, and the title (swirly music!), and maybe one or two tracks that were "tuney-er". I have a lot of scores from that time like that. Then I grew up (stop laughing) and realized that Star Trek: The Motion Picture has NO bad notes. Neither (obviously) does Star Wars. This isn't boring, it's just not fast. Learn the difference, skinny boy. (Bernard Hermmann would have left me lost back then. Maybe not, I was quite taken with Journey to the Center of the Earth.) Now the robot funeral may be one of my favorite tracks. It's gorgeous! Oh, and it sounds more than a little bit like James sneaking around Istanbul in From Russia with Love. But I heard it first with Ernie Borgnine and Slim Pickens the Robot.

Also on soundtrack news I got a suite from Grand Prix by Maurice Jarre. Not terribly well recorded, alas. This was my first film score ever. My Dad had the album and the beginning sounds like race cars, so that was exciting to a small child. Got played a lot when I was, oh, two? Again, years later I'd hear Firefox or Laurence of Arabia and realize what a recognizably Jarre score this was.

I'm trying to think what other Holy Grail scores I have left. Other than a few Star Trek episodes ("RISK is our BUSINESS!") I think I'm done! Wow....