Interesting, huh?

It's easy to be a snob about pop musicians trying to broaden their styles, but music, at the end of the day, is still always music. Hey, Hans Zimmer comes from a pop background (a big part of what helped him redefine the sound of action scores in the nineties -- it had never occurred to anyone else to approach it that way.) Howard Shore started out as a bandleader. If Tom Scofield were here (WHERE ARE YOU, THOMAS), he could explain about John Williams playing in Les Baxter's old band.

Some of the great melodies of all time belong to pop songs. I'd be genuinely interested to hear what he comes up with.

Am I remembering this right, or didn't Scott Joplin once write an opera?

I haven't heard McCartney's twidlings!....Any good?

It'll be interesting to see if Joel's music is received well!

another CD of McCartney's classical music exists, called "Working Classical." It's nade up of a bunch of short pieces: I guess, the Beatles for orchestra. It's not too bad.

Well guess what? Elizabeth turned out to be a piranha in regard to Billy Joel's money. Elizabeth & her brother screwed the pants off Billy Joel. Billy ended up suing them.

Now... it's time to go to bed.

Billy Joel is getting older and wants to try another gig, fine. Somehow I think I might prefer this to more songs about how he's the wise man looking in on how screwed up people are.

Other rockers have gone classical with mixed results--Zappa was mentioned. Joe Jackson wrote pieces including a symphony and a couple film scores. Trevor Rabin, Zimmer, Yared, Revell, and Sakamoto all come from pop backgrounds and now they're scoring films.

As for Joel, we'll just have to see.....

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Originally posted by H Rocco:
Andre, please explain how such a great composer managed to be a "mediocre" bongo player? Well, you know more about him than I do, perhaps it was just his earlier, struggling years.

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Rocco, the truth is: no one knows!
Aparently Colesterol hated the Bongo (Colesterol's experts affirm that's why you'll never find a Bongo on any of his works) and was forced to play it on the Tião Carreiro e Pardinho Big Band by Roberval Taylor himself back in the 30's.

Anyway, I think Colesterol's case is just like many others like:
- Elfman: mediocre guitar player/singer turned film music composer
- Zimmer: mediocre synthesizer programmer etc...

I think it's not impossible for someone from a pop background to be an excellent dramatist. Ry Cooder, mentioned by Thor above, is probably my favorite example. PARIS, TEXAS is, to me, one of the great scores of the 1980s. Or perhaps I should say "great albums" -- I've never seen the movies. To paraphrase a Japanese friend of mine, word for word, "I don't like movies of Vim Venders" (that's what it sounds like in Japanese alphabet), "but that is good music." He also adored Goldsmith's original STAR TREK -- I sent him a copy of the first version of the soundtrack years ago, he couldn't find it in Japan, bizarrely enough. I wonder if he has the expanded version by now. I also gave him my double CD of Cooder's collected film works -- a hodgepodge of his earlier albums for the most part, no reason to have it except for a handful of cues, which I will get through other means.

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Originally posted by H Rocco:
You mean YOU know, brother ...

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