In the Shadow of No One

By Tony Buchsbaum

I am of certain age, an age at which I can remember, with absolutely zero difficulty, childhood days spent assembling model kits of the Saturn V rockets that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. My dad and I did these models together. The rocket stood very tall, and the stages separated perfectly, and the Lunar Landing Module had little hinged legs that unfolded so the thing could land on the surface of my bed -- or rather, the moon.

So it's no surprise that I am a huge fan of the new documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon--and in fact have been since I saw the trailer some months ago. The film is essentially talking heads blended with archival NASA footage of the several Saturn rocket launches and Apollo footage shot on the surface of the moon. Most of this (and maybe all of it) has never been seen before now; the director David Sington somehow got them to open vaults that have been closed for almost 40 years, and the result is breathtaking. The images are as clear as if they were shot yesterday; maybe even clearer. This stuff wasn't shot to glorify the missions, but to document them in all their built-in glory.

There's also footage shot on the floor of the control center, and it's filled, edge to edge, with great human drama, from the elation that mirrored the rocket actually getting off the ground, to the utter amazed disbelief when Neil Armstrong actually stepped onto the moon.

But the film, for all its wide-eyed wonder, doesn't skirt the bad news. Many minutes are spent on the accident that killed the astronauts of Apollo 1, which killed Gus Grissom and two others.

Now, as wonderful as this film is (and you should place it high on your must-see list), it's the music that sends it into the stratosphere. British composer Philip Sheppard has created a score that transcends every possible cliche -- and there were many such opportunities; after all, space and space travel have a sound that we've all learned quite well, thanks to heavy hitters like John Williams (Star Wars) and James Horner (Apollo 13).

Instead of setting the zips and zooms of ships to music, Sheppard has opted to score the raw, unfiltered emotion of the adventure we all shared. There's pure Americana here, the golly-gung-ho-ness of it all, but there are also stunning passages of vast wonder. It's the perfect accompaniment to the talking heads of the astronauts, whose own stories of very human excitement, fear, disappointment, and the elation are the real story of this film.

Though I'm tempted to pick out cues from the CD, it's sort of beside the point. The entire score is a wonder, from the high-pitched strains of the opening titles to the the knocks and fiddles that accompany the building of the rockets, from the angelic choir and soaring violins that follow the rockets into the black of space to the synthesized notes that lift the LLM off the moon to the infectious ripples of piano that telegraph the desolation of Apollo 13, when no one was sure Lovell and the others would make it home.

In recent weeks, I have been immersed in this music, and every time I listen, I find new things to love. This is a soundtrack, but it's so much more than that. It's a symphony for us all, inspiring us to remember what it was like when we -- everyone we knew and everyone we didn't know, all over the world -- had a common goal, to reach space not just as Americans but as people.

This is Philip Sheppard's first feature film score, and it heralds the arrival of a great new talent. I can't wait to hear what he does next. His work here makes me remember model kits, afternoons with dad, the unique smell of glue, and the wonderful idea that I, too, could be an astronaut when I grew up.

West Side Stories

By Tony Buchsbaum


Walk into a crowded room and ask for a show of hands if you love West Side Story, and my hands shoots up. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t like the musical, with Leonard Bernstein’s sharp-edged music and Stephen Sondheim’s sharper-tongued lyrics. I was, in fact, named after the ill-fated hero, and the film, which won 10 Oscars, was released the year I was born. So, not that it matters, but I guess I’ll always have a strong tie to the work.

It’s really the original high school musical, if you think about it. Sure, the conflicts can’t hold a match to the recent Disney Channel movies—racism and homicide vs. jealousy and summer jobs—but still.

All of which is why is pains me to say that the new 50th anniversary recording of West Side Story left me feeling flat. Recorded to commemorate the anniversary of the Broadway version of the musical (the film re-ordered song of the songs, I’d say for the better), the new production features Hayley Westenra as Maria and Vittorio Grigolo as Tony. These two have wondrous voices, but they seem distant here, as if they just couldn’t find a new way (or any way) to connect with the famous and oft-recorded material. They’re two of the most celebrated voices of our time, though, so surely someone thought their marquee value was enough. Pity. The recording could have used actors who understood their roles instead of coasting through them; the music soars, but the performances don’t. Maybe the 51st anniversary will get better treatment.

On the other hand, the second Disney Channel blockbuster, High School Musical 2, is really fun, though totally shallow and predictable. Starring Zac Efron and a cast of teen stars, the music is kicky and fun. Forgettable, sure, but isn’t that the appeal of Britney Spears? (Not that she’s in High School Musical 2. I’m just saying.)

The opening song, “What Time Is It,” performed by the cast, is great fun, sung as the kids break free of the tyranny of high school for the summer, where they’ll all find jobs at the same hoity-toity country club in New Mexico. Course, they bring along all the in-school rivalries and jealousies. (The fact the movie debuted in August, at the end of the summer, makes no sense to me, but whatever. Besides, it was the highest rated cable program of all time, so what do I know?)

“Fabulous,” sung by Disney TV star Ashley Tinsdale, is a tribute to her Royal Shallowness, and it’s so silly it works. But the standout numbers are “Gotta Go My Own Way,” sung by Vanessa Anne Hudgens, and “I Don’t Dance,” which, built on the eternal theater kids vs. sports kids conflict, is about as close to West Side Story as this stuff’s ever gonna get.

For anyone looking for their Zac Efron moment, he has one intriguing song, “Bet On It,” but you’ll have much better luck getting your hands on the Hairspray DVD when it comes out on November 20.

Music of Mass Destruction

By Tony Buchsbaum


During the past couple of years, I’ve sometimes thought about those people who decide at the last minute not to get on a certain airplane, only to see that very flight crash. I’m from New Orleans, and I wasn’t in the city when Katrina struck on that late-August day in 2005. Though I grew up there, my family had already dispersed, to New Jersey and New Mexico. Still, when Katrina was bearing down, when that colorful, animated swirl on TV veered closer and closer to my home, I felt a strange sense of relief, mixed with an even stranger sense of wanting to be there, right in the middle of it. I wanted to share it. I wanted to be back with brothers and sisters whose name I did not know. I wanted to hold their hands and get through it together. My family watched in horror as the city’s seams seemed to burst, letting the water rush in. As it rose, people I knew fled to the Superdome, only to see acts of violence that would never make it to the evening news. In the end, a few people I know lost everything, and everyone I know lost something. Even, I suppose, me.

Now, these two years on, a CD has appeared from Terence Blanchard, a trumpeter who has come to symbolize New Orleans music as much as Wynton Marsalis. I don’t know these men, but we grew up in the city at the same moment, coming of age at the same time, watching the city shift beneath our feet in a tide of cultural change as the children of the sixties awoke to our own adult turmoil, one that seemed so much more immediate than our parents’.

Blanchard has become a prolific film score composer, notably for director Spike Lee. One of Blanchard’s most engrossing scores is for Inside Man, the heist film starring Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster. The music was composed in the period just after Katrina, and you can hear the deep melancholy in the music. A year later, when Lee did an HBO documentary about the flood, When the Levees Broke, Blanchard’s music held the film’s disparate stories together. One of them, in fact, was his own. In a strangely appropriate, yet also deeply sad, episode, Blanchard accompanies his mother to her home, which has been destroyed. They see it for the first time on film, as we do. Watching it, I felt emptied, as if this were the moment, victim and artist now one.

Another year later, and Blanchard’s ode to Katrina has appeared in the form of A Tale of God’s Will, a collection of thirteen musical pieces—tone poems that attempt to put melody to still-unresolved tragedy of Katrina. Much of the new CD is built on themes from When the Levees Broke, although they’ve been fully orchestrated and expanded from their original versions used in the film.

All the music here manages to evoke despair and hope, frustration and desperation. There’s exposition and introspection, both a story and what it means. Many tracks have the flavor of New Orleans, of late French Quarter nights, but some don’t. Mostly, this is music of gentle melody and soaring theme, glorious musical colors that paint a vast and personal landscape of memory.

If a disaster can have a soundtrack, this brilliant set is certainly the one for Katrina.

On the same emotional shelf—and I’m not sure why I feel this way—is Annie Lennox’s new CD, Songs of Mass Destruction. A new Lennox set is something to celebrate. Late of Eurythmics, her solo career has been an astounding display of serious songs, each one built on something personal. Or so it seems.

This CD starts off with the brilliant and solemn “Dark Road,” about a break-up, and it’s followed by “Love is Blind,” much more of a rock song, about a relationship that’s not yet ever. “Smithereens” brings the set back to introspection; this time, it seems to be all about a child. A divorce. But is it about the singer herself? A memory?

From here, the album moves into a harder edge, with “Ghosts in My Machine.” Lennox is having fun with lyrics here, as she did with “Love is Blind,” using a single phrase and milking it every which way to make her point. The former had variations on “tired of…” and the latter has “too much.” Both riffs make living seem like so much repetition, so much accretion of stuff that can just bug the shit out of you, if not drive you completely out of your mind.

Later on the CD, “Lost” comes across like a lullaby, but one about our collective emotional loss, our inability to right the ship we’re in. Lennox’s throaty wail is in full form—as it is on “Big Sky” and so many tracks here—and it’s like a breath of fresh air compared with the high-pitched caterwauling of so many of today’s younger, whiny songstresses.

“Sing” is a choral wonder, featuring backup singers as diverse as Madonna Celine Dion. It’s a terrific song with a memorable groove that’s infectious, dedicated to the plight of infants to whom HIV/AIDS is passed via breastfeeding.

Songs of Mass Destruction is about stuff that’s been destroyed (well, obviously). But it’s more than that: You get the feeling Lennox is just fed up with things as they are, when things as they were could have (should have) been preserved.

I suppose that’s connection I made with A Tale of God’s Will. Taken together, both albums are about the decisions that shatter us, one way or another. Physical, social, emotional—however it happens, however it touches us or those we love, we’re never quite the same again.