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Review of Six Degrees of Separation (Jerry Goldsmith)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you're depressingly curious about a confusing commercial album
that ranks among the worst ever produced for a soundtrack by a major composer.
Avoid it... if you expect to hear either the best quotes from the film (despite the plethora of spoken word slammed onto this product) or more than ten truly unique minutes of Jerry Goldsmith's uninspiring and blatantly snobby music.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
6 Degrees of Separation: (Jerry Goldsmith) For Fred Schiepsi's
film adaptation of the Broadway play of the same title, a talented cast of actors
was assembled to portray this intelligent culture comment piece. The film's drama
and comedy are carried solely by its dialogue, and the role presented Will Smith in
an unusually smart and sophisticated light. Generally well received critically,
6 Degrees of Separation still managed, despite several solid performances,
to bore audiences with its endless pondering of abstract concepts. The score by
Jerry Goldsmith was destined to mirror all of the snobby, elitist attitudes that
the film presents at its core, extending the cultural statement into its
complimentary musical form. Goldsmith responded by composing a short, though snazzy
tango and sparingly intermingling it with urban jazz throughout the film. In the
finished product, the music suffices to create the atmosphere of the upper-class
environment (and some have argued that it did so brilliantly), but in the same way
that Fierce Creatures would function a few years later, the score for 6
Degrees of Separation is a piece that nearly gets lost in the mix when compared
to the dialogue in the film. It's one of the most blatantly trite and understated
small-ensemble works Goldsmith had produced since the 1960's. Consisting of the
expected tango essentials, as well as a few extra strings and woodwinds, the
performing group makes its mark through its sharp, distasteful, and edgy style
rather than its sheer volume. Lengthy scenes of dialogue (typically consisting of
intellectual conversations of an inconsequential nature) are bracketed by short
snippets of Goldsmith's score, and occasionally a somber, minimalistic jazz
accompanies a few of these scenes as well. All in all, there is only about ten
minutes of Goldsmith's material actually featured up front and center in the film.
The composer is successful in his task of creating an unlikable score for an
unlikable film, though this presents obvious problems for the listening experience
on album, where the music is perhaps the last interesting of Goldsmith's work in
the entire decade.
It has been written by more than one film music critic that the album for 6 Degrees of Separation is the worst example of a soundtrack product in the history of such commercialization. The packaging is so badly mislabeled that it can make a person weep when trying to determine the author of a particular piece, or if the track actually contains any music at all. The tracks are poorly sequenced, with roughly 15 minutes of Jerry Goldsmith score mixed with 20 minutes of quotes and unrelated musical source material. Since every Goldsmith track is separated (no, not by six degrees) by a quote, and often presented at a difficult volume from those pieces of dialogue, it's very tough to listen to for the score alone. Goldsmith, as he would do in Fierce Creatures and other scores that depended on short bursts of style rather than significant substance, recorded a suite of the material from 6 Degrees of Separation specifically for the end of the album. The recording quality is decent, though the ensemble Goldsmith employs is recorded at an ultra-close range, giving the intimate sound of a quartet performance in a tight room. Never are the soloists allowed to unleash any of the attractive jazz styles of Goldsmith's more significant works. Rather, for the two-dimensional characters in the film, it's equally two-dimensional, stuffy, uppity, and arrogant music. That may work with the plethora of quotes on the album, if not for their own mismanagement. Of all the quotes that the album producers chose to include on the CD (and the film had its share of decent pokes), they declined to include the only really enjoyable ones, such as the scene in which Paul, played by Will Smith, describes how to pronounce words properly to impress the wealthy (as in "bottel" instead of "bottle"). Aside from the packaging's poorly labeled design, it completely forgets to mention the 24th track, an unknown Goldsmith cue (presumably) in its listings. An extra jazz piece by Paul Grabowsky, as well as short inclusions of Cole Porter and Claude Debussy, extend the suffering caused by this disjointed album. Whether or not you can tolerate the ten minutes of Goldsmith music in the film is one thing, but you can't deny that this is one of the worst albums of all time.
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 34:12
Tracks in white are quotes from the film, written by John Guare * Music composed by Jerry Goldsmith *# Mystery Goldsmith track missing from track listings ** Music/words composed by Cole Porter *** Music composed by Paul Grabowsky # Music composed by Claude Debussy
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
The packaging is very confusing, making it difficult to tell which tracks are
score tracks and which are dialogue tracks.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Six Degrees of Separation are Copyright © 1994, Elektra Entertainment and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 7/11/98 and last updated 9/10/08. |
