Tonight’s the Night
This film wins the award for bending me most out of my comfort zone. The project is very much a blast from the past - I spent two months on it last year, we recorded in early December, but the film itself only recently got completely finished - mixes, color correction, conversions and all. It’s about a young girl who enlists in the army and is about to be deployed into combat and who wants to lose her virginity before she goes overseas “just in case…”
This was one of those crazy situations where I agreed to do the music without really knowing what I was getting myself into. It turned out that director Sati Kaur was not only looking for score but source music as well (source music is the stuff that plays in the background that the characters themselves can hear, as opposed to score music which only the audience hears but the characters don’t for obvious reasons). So in my first meeting with Sati, I watched the film and found out a big part of my task for the project would also be writing and recording Latin songs to play in the background of some party scenes.
Sati and I decided to take the source cues in a Latin jazz plus dance direction, but with jazz being my mortal enemy and Latin music being fairly alien to me as well, I was, frankly, terrified (not to mention recording all the pieces would be a fairly huge undertaking as well). On top of that, she also needed a rap track for a breakdancing scene, and not just any rap: 90s style funky rap. Why the classically trained orchestral composer didn’t say, “I’m out of my element. You should find someone who knows that they’re doing,” is still beyond me. But since I committed to the gig, the only thing I could do was listen voraciously and try to absorb the styles as much as I could.
Then there was also the issue that I don’t write lyrics, so I turned to two very talented friends, Kaitlynn McRae and Carl Oser, and coordinated with them over giving the music some words. Carl was also invaluable in helping me find the astonishingly talented Rozzi Crane for vocals and the mind-blowingly sharp and hilarious Harry Mac for some good old-fashioned freestyle rapping and drumming. For both of these guys, you have to see it to believe it.
(Harry Mac - drums and rapping)
(left: Kaitlynn, back: Carl, center: Bill Rahko - crazy enough an engineer to put up with me, and right: yours truly)
For the accompanying musicians, Bill likes to say we “layer-fested” it, which is to say, we recorded all of the elements separately rather than all at once, something I’ve always preferred because of the quality control I’d have when it came time to edit and mix. Like our solo vocalists, the jazz instrumental guys are phenomenal. While a good portion of the music I wrote for them was to be played as notated, a very large chunk was also left for them to improvise, and I have to say, improvisation is just one of those magical things that will never get old.
(Peter Cho the workhorse - acoustic and electric, rhythm and solo guitar)
(Nathan Light - bass guitar)
(Theo Meneau - trumpet)
(Carlo Kretzschmar - saxophone)
In the grand scheme of things, the score itself almost felt like an afterthought - compared to the dense and complicated recording and layering of so many elements, the score was a piece of cake. Sati and I knew it had to be quiet, atmospheric, personal, and unobtrusive, so we settled in atmospherics electronics with solo guitar, for which I invited good friend Jack Cimo over to my home studio to record.
For scores like this, it was very refreshing to not worry about sync and hit points for a change since the primary goal was mood-setting rather than following any specific actions. I wrote a simple melody for the guitar, part saccharine, part melancholy, and let the pads do the work of giving it a cushion to sit on. It’s nice not having taiko drums and other massive percussion eating up all the sonic space for once.
(With Kenny Hall, Jerry Goldsmith’s longtime friend and music editor)
And finally, a big thank you to Harmonica Partner for putting up with having to listen to all of this music over and over again for days…weeks on end.
