RIP Ennio Morricone

[invisible man]

The maestro has bowed out

[MayTheFuzzBeWithYou]

A true genius!
He will be missed but never forgotten!
I always got highest respect for his work (since teenage days - which is almost more than half my life now) - which was always highly influential on my playing or at least on my understanding of music!

[marqueemoon]

He made whistling cool before it was ruined by commercial music with ukuleles.

[Singlebladepickup]

He made whistling cool before it was ruined by commercial music with ukuleles.

He made harmonica cool by not using it for blues

[shadowplay]

I grew up in a non music house and Ennio Morricone was literally the first music that wasn't Glam Rock I liked. i got a compilation album of the Leone material in 1975 when I was 8 after watching the Good the Bad and the Ugly with my babysitter cousin, my parents would never have bought me it but my bad babysitter with her boyfriend in the shower bought me it. Anyway it's a cliche but when Ecstacy of Gold played I near saw god, never in my life that had music moved me like that, my heart sang and I don't think I'd be sitting on thousands of records now if I hadn't seen that film and been bought that record. Weirdly that's the only record I ever owned that my dad listened to, he'd not play it but he'd come and sit through it, at least until my fucking sister destroyed it. I think it was on K-tel or something and probably not the actual versions but it was close enough until I found the real deal many years later and fell down the rabbithole getting into Bruno Nicolai and Stelvio Cipriani .

i found the obits frustrating, OK I'm invested and collect a lot of this shit but they were all just phoned in and failed to really get the importance of this man as an influence and cultural signifier. Even if you ignore his music you can't ignore all the great music that is influenced by him, it is near without parallel.

Not many folk ever mention the pop songs Ennio was involved in from films so I'm weighing in with two favourites.

Ennio Morricone -Dies Irae Psichedelico If you're ever struggling for a swinging soundtrack for your grand entrance to your occult orgies then well..bobs yer uncle. KILLER drums, I mean KILLER, fully in the HaHa sounds zone. SO far ahead of the pack. One of my daughters did her dance recital to this dressed as a pagan goddess.

Trio Junior and Ennio Morricone - Fruscio Di Foglie Verdi again great drums and slow it down and you've a Broadcast origin story.

I also rate Ennio's 70's scores which never get quoted, even ones for total pish like Exorcist 2. Ennio Morricone - Magic and Ecstasy


Btw there was an old OST thread for anyone new and interested.

D

[PorkyPrimeCut]

Trio Junior and Ennio Morricone - Fruscio Di Foglie Verdi again great drums and slow it down and you've a Broadcast origin story.

I'd forgotten all about this track!

[Maggieo]

I grew up in a non music house and Ennio Morricone was literally the first music that wasn't Glam Rock I liked. i got a compilation album of the Leone material in 1975 when I was 8 after watching the Good the Bad and the Ugly with my babysitter cousin, my parents would never have bought me it but my bad babysitter with her boyfriend in the shower bought me it. Anyway it's a cliche but when Ecstacy of Gold played I near saw god, never in my life that had music moved me like that, my heart sang and I don't think I'd be sitting on thousands of records now if I hadn't seen that film and been bought that record. Weirdly that's the only record I ever owned that my dad listened to, he'd not play it but he'd come and sit through it, at least until my fucking sister destroyed it. I think it was on K-tel or something and probably not the actual versions but it was close enough until I found the real deal many years later and fell down the rabbithole getting into Bruno Nicolai and Stelvio Cipriani .

i found the obits frustrating, OK I'm invested and collect a lot of this shit but they were all just phoned in and failed to really get the importance of this man as an influence and cultural signifier. Even if you ignore his music you can't ignore all the great music that is influenced by him, it is near without parallel.

...


Btw there was an old OST thread for anyone new and interested.

D

D, your experience mirrors mine so closely. I'm not surprised. Anyway, I'll just add that the music from The Mission is some of the most beautiful and affecting program music I've ever heard.

[invisible man]

I made this playlist a while ago, pretty proud of the title as it applies to the concept.

Man-With-No-Name-‘Splainers: main title songs with lyrics describing the characters and plots of the spaghetti western movies they are featured in. Feel free to add some more. Includes Ennio and composers under his influence

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4GSs ... a0Wire1rQA

One tiny subset of his vast wide-ranging output.

[windmill]

And there is this



surf guitar style

[mackerelmint]

I grew up in a non music house and Ennio Morricone was literally the first music that wasn't Glam Rock I liked. i got a compilation album of the Leone material in 1975 when I was 8 after watching the Good the Bad and the Ugly with my babysitter cousin, my parents would never have bought me it but my bad babysitter with her boyfriend in the shower bought me it. Anyway it's a cliche but when Ecstacy of Gold played I near saw god, never in my life that had music moved me like that, my heart sang and I don't think I'd be sitting on thousands of records now if I hadn't seen that film and been bought that record. Weirdly that's the only record I ever owned that my dad listened to, he'd not play it but he'd come and sit through it, at least until my fucking sister destroyed it. I think it was on K-tel or something and probably not the actual versions but it was close enough until I found the real deal many years later and fell down the rabbithole getting into Bruno Nicolai and Stelvio Cipriani .

i found the obits frustrating, OK I'm invested and collect a lot of this shit but they were all just phoned in and failed to really get the importance of this man as an influence and cultural signifier. Even if you ignore his music you can't ignore all the great music that is influenced by him, it is near without parallel.

...


Btw there was an old OST thread for anyone new and interested.

D

D, your experience mirrors mine so closely. I'm not surprised. Anyway, I'll just add that the music from The Mission is some of the most beautiful and affecting program music I've ever heard.

The Mission was my introduction to his work, as my parents had that soundtrack and would play it constantly. It's actually the one piece of music of his that I'm aware of that I really dislilke. In part it's because of associations I have with it, and the way it sucks the energy out of me when I hear it, but it's also in part because of the very conventional way he uses themes, and how heavily he leans on them in that soundtrack. It is also bereft of clever arrangement. Yes, that fits the movie. But this is the guy who could fit kooky noises into anything and more than make it work, here. It feels to me like he was at work, rather than enjoying himself on that one. I could well be wrong. To me it feels like he wrote a couple of riffs, then did some stuff to dress them up in different ways, and called it a day to move on to the next project.

My next acquaintance with the Maestro was his score for "When women had tails", which I saw for the first time at 13, and then I grasped what a genius he was. By that time I was already a Hugo Montenegro fan, but Morricone dethroned him. I watched the spaghetti westerns and that was it. Back in the MySpace days, I friended him and even though it was clear he friended everyone, I actually took some real enjoyment in it.

[shadowplay]

I grew up in a non music house and Ennio Morricone was literally the first music that wasn't Glam Rock I liked. i got a compilation album of the Leone material in 1975 when I was 8 after watching the Good the Bad and the Ugly with my babysitter cousin, my parents would never have bought me it but my bad babysitter with her boyfriend in the shower bought me it. Anyway it's a cliche but when Ecstacy of Gold played I near saw god, never in my life that had music moved me like that, my heart sang and I don't think I'd be sitting on thousands of records now if I hadn't seen that film and been bought that record. Weirdly that's the only record I ever owned that my dad listened to, he'd not play it but he'd come and sit through it, at least until my fucking sister destroyed it. I think it was on K-tel or something and probably not the actual versions but it was close enough until I found the real deal many years later and fell down the rabbithole getting into Bruno Nicolai and Stelvio Cipriani .

i found the obits frustrating, OK I'm invested and collect a lot of this shit but they were all just phoned in and failed to really get the importance of this man as an influence and cultural signifier. Even if you ignore his music you can't ignore all the great music that is influenced by him, it is near without parallel.

...


Btw there was an old OST thread for anyone new and interested.

D

D, your experience mirrors mine so closely. I'm not surprised.

I think today's lot fail to appreciate how hard it was to get into music for our generation. Sure there was radio but there was almost nothing on TV outside top 40 or light entertainment horrors. When I look back I had an almost Soviet upbringing, we had a b&x tv until maybe 83's, it blew my mind a few years ago when I got DVD's of young adult occult TV shows like Children of the Stones (theme by the Ambrosia singers that Morricone used) and saw them in colour. I had a cousin (my bad babysitter) who played me Roxy Music and Bowie (who I'll admit was always more interesting as an influence) but after that punk happened and I was already on my own telling her what she should be into. It's crazy in the age of Spotify (or Spitify as I call it) that to hear something you more often than not had to blind buy it or more likely blind order it in.

Anyway back to Ennio, I think my Ecstasy of Gold experience explains my antipathy to the pop video, once you've seen that scene ALL music set to images pales in comparison. It would have been like young me losing my virginity to Lynda Carter era Wonder Woman, I'd just have joined the priesthood because it's all downhill from there.

D

[PorkyPrimeCut]

...once you've seen that scene ALL music set to images pales in comparison....

Absolutely! The same has to be said for the following scores. I challenge anybody to find one (never mind two!) others that match the same audio visual intensity! For decades I've tried to decide which of them come out on top...

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly - Il Triello
For A Few Dollars More - La Resa Dei Conti / Carillon

...and have come to realise it's a question that will never get a definitive answer, rather the same, I imagine, as it is for those of you with more than one kid.
Each time I watch them (and hear them) I remember why I love them so much individually. The shrill pocket watch VS the battered Spanish guitar, the brass section/choir combo of one VS the brass section/choir combo of the other...not to mention Gian Maria Volonté* VS Eli Wallach.



* As close as I'll ever get to having a bad man crush!!

[Maggieo]

The thing about The Mission is that the melodies are astonishingly beautiful and simple. Nothing is there that doesn't need to be there. And the voices of the child choir, well, that brought me to tears of joy.

[Scout]

He made whistling cool before it was ruined by commercial music with ukuleles.

He made harmonica cool by not using it for blues

My dad was my first influence, he whistled melodically and played chromatic harmonica regularly throughout my youth.
Since then I’m drawn to any music with those elements, saw Toots Theilemans with my brother in the early nineties at a small club in Manhattan and we had a nice chat with him after the set, great memory.

[mackerelmint]

The thing about The Mission is that the melodies are astonishingly beautiful and simple. Nothing is there that doesn't need to be there. And the voices of the child choir, well, that brought me to tears of joy.

If you say so. It always made me lethargic and grouchy, which is why I have such bad memories of it.