I spent ages tracking down this album in the late eighties: even attempts to order it from Record Collector failed after several weeks when the distributor was out of stock. Ten or twelve years later, there were racks full of this CD in Fopp for £5 each. Grrrr!
The truth is I didn't feel the album lived up to expectations. Maybe the expectations were unrealistic, because, with hindsight, it's clear that you can't improve on the original of Once Upon a Time in the West. I'm not saying that Zorn's version doesn't have panache and wit; but these qualities are all there in spades in Morricone's original recordings (warning: link contains more grumbling about falling prices; how tiresome I'm becoming).
Reading the sleeve notes, I see this was actually recorded before Zorn's contribution to the Godard tribute album. The one Zorn composition on this album, Tre Nel 5000, features the game-theory-inspired jump-cut transitions that were his trademark around this period.
MusicBrainz entry for this album |
Comments