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| Barry |
Jagged Edge: (John Barry) In a highly predictable
but well executed courtroom thriller, Glenn Close is a haunted attorney
hired to defend a man from charges that he gruesomely killed his wife.
That defendant is Jeff Bridges in one of his many roles as a person more
complicated than they need to be. The 1985 movie,
Jagged Edge,
wrestles with the attorney's own career issues and her poor decision to
copulate with her client, but she manages to get him acquitted. Of
course, she would have been better off otherwise, because then she
wouldn't have to be bothered with riddling the man with bullets when he
comes to kill her next. The story is certainly not all that complicated
in the world of plot twists, but it was successful enough to long
inspire talk of a sequel and later a remake. Given the blend of suspense
and sexuality in
Jagged Edge it's no surprise that the task of
writing its music fell to veteran British composer John Barry, who
handled a variety of such assignments in the 1980's amongst his broader
epics and James Bond entries. Barry had collaborated with director
Richard Marquand on
Until September the year before, and some of
the same personality persists. What's most interesting about
Jagged
Edge is the composer's shift to the electronic realm for the
assignment. To supply a restrained, budget score for an intimate
courtroom thriller, Barry went almost mostly synthetic, with only a
piano and flute as live performers. The mix of those two acoustic
contributors is often wet and dynamic, countering the duller edge of the
Moog synthesizers employed for the remainder. The electronics were
programmed by composer Jonathan Elias, who trained Barry in their use.
(Barry had applied synths to his scores for years but was no expert in
their programming.) The composer asked for the synths to be set to
emulate strings and brass, providing a few unique effects for suspense
along the way as well. Sometimes these tones are engaging, as in the
nicely breathy vocal-like sounds in "Jack and Teddy at Murder Scene,"
but the fake brass tones in "Teddy's Betrayal" aren't very convincing
and the tend to date the recording. The score's stingers ("shock
chords," as Barry termed them) are effective but not remarkable,
especially in their Barry-like tendency to simply repeat themselves as
often as necessary to get the point across. Low piano thumping sometimes
combines with the synths for outright horror, as in "Main Title," but
several of the more atmospheric cues access the electronics alone and
offer little to remember, even in such a short score.
As expected, Barry doesn't approach
Jagged Edge
without a melancholy love theme, in this case a pretty and simple piano
and/or flute identity in usual Barry fashion with very slow tempos.
Notably punctuated by a single minor note in its secondary phrasing that
entails bluesy style, there is a sense of tragedy inherent in this
theme. It's sometimes presented against an undercurrent of rumbling
dissonance in the low and high ranges. The theme opens on the piano with
flute counterpoint over synth haze in "Main Title." Different, stunted
phrasing occupies the flute against troubled synths in "Burial at Sea,"
but the original idea fully develops in "Love Theme," first over the
dissonant atmospheres and then uninhibited. The flute and piano
renditions in this cue are pure Barry in their tone. Opening "Teddy's
Betrayal" tentatively on flute, the idea slows even further for the
piano and flute in the somber "[Unused]" and applies very faint
fragments during the quietly distraught "Bobby Slade Confrontation."
It's a little warmer at the start of "Freedom and Typewriter" but
returns to the "Main Title" dread on synths for the revelation scene,
that mode continuing in "Jack Calls" and "Bye Sam." Finally, the love
theme provides some comfort to the first half of "End Credits," where
secondary sequences are explored further, but it would have been nice
for the bluesy note to resolve to the major mode here. The rest of
Jagged Edge balances two secondary motifs, one for killing and
the other for fear, sometimes overlapping. The killing motif consists of
stabbing keyboarded pulses at 1:21 into "Main Title" with prominent drum
kit hits and opens "Jack and Teddy at Murder Scene" with a straight
reprise. It's keenly reduced to a tingling rhythm in "Waiting for the
Verdict" and thumps its way back into "Bye Sam" at lesser intensities.
The fear motif uses cyclical bass phrasing of inevitability at 2:16 into
"Main Title" on very low piano under the killing motif and returns to
that instrument at 0:55 into "Jack and Teddy at Murder Scene." Shifting
into something of a melody in "Teddy's Betrayal" on synth brass, this
idea accompanies the killing motif at the height of "Bye Sam" and
interrupts the love theme in "End Credits" with more synth vocals in
tow. Overall, Barry's work for the film is very brief and highlighted by
the love theme's four most prominent performances. The synthetic half of
the work, while moderately interesting, doesn't sustain an album
experience for very long. The same 28 minutes of music was released
twice by Varèse Sarabande, once as an entry in their original CD
Club series and then re-issued in 2016 for another very limited run.
Barry completists will appreciate the disturbed romanticism of the
score, but the suspense and killing portions are best forgotten.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.65
(in 37 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.37
(in 30,347 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The inserts of both Varèse Sarabande albums include
information about the score and film.
