Buy it... only if you are an avid collector of Alex North's scores and appreciate the distinct style of atonal, instrumental experimentation that often defined his career in the Silver Age.

Avoid it... if a combination of shallow archival sound and atonality that verges on noisy dissonance in parts simply does not compute with your love of the massively lush and romantic music of more modern documentaries for the region.

North

Africa: (Alex North) In an age when there are high definition programs about the planet that exhibit breathtaking beauty in a dazzling format once possible only with special effects, it is perhaps impossible to go back and witness programs like ABC's four-hour documentary about Africa from 1968. The documentary covers the entire history of the continent, with some of the world's best producers and cinematographers sent to the region for a year to collect countess hours of raw footage of every kind of animal and human life. Ultimately, "Africa" was a cross between a National Geographic expedition and an evolutionary science film, and although the depth of the show was impressive for its time, it is the type of television programming that is now mocked by the younger generation of digital viewers. One the reasons archival shows such as "Africa" have aged badly is because of the change in music that has accompanied such productions through the years. The evolution of documentary music in the Digital Age led to scores of extraordinary tonal, massively lush romance by George Fenton and others, leaving music like Alex North's for "Africa" in a difficult and largely unappreciated position. In the late 1960's, North was already facing the challenge of a changing compositional landscape. Even with his distinct record of producing Academy recognized scores for major films, his atonal style of composing was being abandoned by an industry on the verge of another age of orchestral romanticism. In the immediate period, young composers such as Jerry Goldsmith were producing similar music with a more modern edge, and North's career was beginning to spin its wheels. Today, North's unconventional style for "Africa" is a sound easy to appreciate, but extremely difficult to enjoy on its own. Even in context, it feeds stereotypes about old nature documentaries with its inaccessibility. That trait, ironically, is exactly what North was attempting to create.

North's music of this time, elaborated upon for a modern audience by Jerry Goldsmith for Planet of the Apes, is dissonant, treble-dominated and tinny (even without issues of recording quality), atonal, and percussively abrasive. While North remains a composer of interest for some collectors of modern film scores (like Bernard Herrmann, but not to the same extent), his score for "Africa" will likely alienate anyone who is accustomed to the composer's specific style of producing multiple tonal lines of action to produce an overall atonal work that, on the surface, seems to generate into random dissonance. For casual collectors of the Silver Age of film music, you could assemble a full CD of North's most readily listenable music, and not a moment of it would come from "Africa." The percussion section is at the forefront of "Africa," and entire sequences of the score suite and symphony are dominated by the themeless and questionably organized combination of both Western and non-Western percussion, some of which created on the spot. This material culminates into the slightly more upbeat rhythms of "The Joyful Days." Both the string and woodwind sections offer seemingly unorganized collections of progressions that don't develop motifs with any consistency, thrown into the equation almost like another member of the percussion section. References to the title theme of the show are infrequent and often masked. The brass is extraordinarily harsh in its renderings, occasionally used in strikes (or "stingers," as they are technically termed) along with the percussion section to allow for use by editors in accentuating individual moments of transition or surprise. The rhythms used by North are inconsistent for much of the symphony recordings, never sustaining any sense of movement (or, in this case, evolution or progress) for any significant amount of time. The overarching unpredictability is the score's only cohesive element outside of the general instrumentation.

	Learn about supporting Filmtracks

While certainly not being so, North's music for "Africa" sounds, in each of its cues, disorganized. Even the two variations of the title theme feature a jagged edge so brutal that they make Goldsmith's Capricorn One sound like pure romance. Because of a filing mistake, one of the recordings of the theme for "Africa" ended up with the rejected score for 2001: A Space Odyssey and was eventually re-recorded by Goldsmith for an album release. Despite the confusion caused by this mistake, the cue is undoubtedly a part of "Africa" and it is, interestingly, the only truly interesting piece from this television work. On the LP record that was released in 1968, the title theme was often favored, along with the four lengthy "Symphony" recordings that used a larger ensemble (of 100 members), than the music directly composed for specific scenes of the show. The LP, of course, fell out of print and the music was largely forgotten. And with North's style of the era falling out of favor, it's not hard to figure why. A limited Prometheus CD released in 2001 contains slightly more music (roughly five minutes) than the LP, including a slightly longer variation of the main theme. Sound quality is lacking in depth, but is surprisingly intimate in its mix. While the percussion section won't blow you off your feet, you can at least hear each creative element clearly regardless of what the rest of the ensemble is doing. The packaging is less detailed for this 2,000-copy release (which did not quickly sell out, unlike others in the series), with the track-by-track commentary seemingly missing in parts. Overall, it's easy to say that this album is aimed at dedicated Alex North fans. If you've been born and raised in the era of digital recordings of tonal film music, then "Africa" will sound more foreign to your ears than anything you've ever heard. Many collectors regard "Africa" as a classic, but even compared to its peers of the era, it has little cohesive structure and relies too heavily on textural nuance to translate into a satisfying album. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download