Buy it... if you can never get enough of the culturally diverse combinations of Eastern and Western sounds, spanning the ages and leading you on an unpredictable ride.

Avoid it... if within that emerging genre of music you expect a compelling thematic and stylistic journey rather than a clinical and often sterile treatment of a historical epic.

Umebayashi

Jet Li's Fearless: (Shigeru Umebayashi) Announced as Jet Li's final martial arts film, Fearless was an ambitious project untaken by some of Hong Kong's most veteran film industry specialists. Director Ronny Yu and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping teamed with the 43-year-old Wushu (martial arts) expert Li to tell a fictionalized story about the founder of the Wushu arts early in the 20th Century. While the film was conceived of as a tribute to the master (and to the aging Li, for that matter), and it successfully portrays the pride that Huo Yuanjia gave China in his innovative and controversial style, it has been diluted by claims of historical inaccuracy and underachievement in an artistic sense. Much like many Western equivalents in storyline, the famed fighter disgraces himself by allowing his own arrogance to cause death and shame to his loved ones, and the film's ultimate, anti-violence undertones allow for an examination of how a great fighter's most daunting battle is with his own inner demons. While Li's acting has gotten better throughout the years, Wo Ping's choreography puts him in a difficult position, and his performance, like the film overall, has been criticized for handling its story in too clinical a fashion. People who are basically fans of seeing Wushu fighting on screen will have enough to be entertained by, however, with the usual battle between Li and a huge, Caucasian brute providing some cheap satisfaction. The orchestral film music for these massive Mandarin-language productions was introduced to Western audiences by Tan Dun in the early 2000's, with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero both remaining critically acclaimed. Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi was hired for the subsequent House of Flying Daggers in 2004, however, bringing an interesting new cultural twist on the already wide-ranging sound of the genre. Originally a rock musician two decades prior, Umebayashi has since become a prolific composer in Asia, with several hit scores among his 60 projects.

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The sound that Umebayashi has created for these projects is a cultural mix of all the style of the old world and current orchestral standards, spanning both Chinese and Japanese worlds while catering to the ears of Western viewers who are an extended audience through which the filmmakers hoped to succeed. His music follows most of the normal trends of such cross-over scores, but with the additional touch of Japanese instrumentation for a certain amount of individual flair. The sound of Jet Li's Fearless is distinctly Chinese, despite the international nature of the solo instruments, with the dizi bamboo flutes and erhu violins sharing time with a dominant percussion array and more Westernized elements like a solo strings and female voice. The interesting aspect of Umebayashi's score here is that he successfully conveys the intended epic nature of the film's scope, just as he would six months later with Curse of the Golden Flower, but without a truly convincing sense of direction or power. Several of the heavy drum rhythms recorded for the film were actually used to pace some of the fighting as it was being shot, and while these performances are very plentiful in the score, they alone don't float that epic feel. Umebayashi relies on the Western elements to provide the melodrama, with both orchestral ensembles in China and Japan contributing. But these attempts to use the orchestras to accentuate the emotions of the film are betrayed by the static and sterile nature of the themes for the film. The sound of Jet Li's Fearless ranges wildly, from the xylophone solos of the "Kid" tracks to the forced chopping string (and almost keyboarded effect) over relentless percussion during the many fight sequences. Electronic manipulation in the fight cues, as in the sudden volume drop-off and resumption in "Tanaka Fight," are extremely distracting. For such a storied journey on screen, Umebayashi's score is sloppy in delivering you from point A to point B, though he does leave you with an outstanding representation of that point B at the end. The final two cues, amounting to seven minutes, are the saving grace of an otherwise tiring album, and they save the overall listening experience with two very satisfying combinations of all the cultures and ages depicted throughout the score. It takes a long time to get to those two tracks, however, and before you get there, Umebayashi's score seems lost in translation. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download