HERBIE HANCOCK — Blow-Up (OST) (review)

HERBIE HANCOCK — Blow-Up (OST) album cover Album · 1966 · Jazz Related Soundtracks Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Sean Trane
When all of the focus of the jazz purists’ hatred was focusing on Miles Davis, it seems that most of those “specialists” couldn’t have cared less of what Hancock was doing. Already with Watermelon Man in the early 60’s, then the present soundtrack of Antonioni’s mega-important and seminal movie Blow-UP, a sort of testimony of the Swinging London’s revolution

Much of the (sometimes very short) tracks are pulled from moments where there were images that needed sound illustrations, like the main theme opening up the soundtrack. There are some fairly standard jazz like Verushka, Jane’s Theme (although electric guitar and organs are used, it’s standard jazz), The Kiss, Curiosity or The Bed and more. Other tracks are avant-garde like the tremendous Naked Camera and its poignant piano/sax interplay. Some more tracks are much less “jazz” like the R’nB Bring Down The Birds and The Thief.

Not of Herbie’s doing are three tracks from then-young artistes, like The Yardbirds with Stroll On, (you can see the group in the movie playing, with both Beck and Page) which resembles Train Kept a Rollin All Night Long, with screaming buzzing guitars, but also Steve Howe’s then group Tomorrow (not seen or heard in the movie, but commissioned for it) with two closing tracks.: Am I glad To See You and the Blow-Up “title track, tat was not to be”.

A very important and somehow often overlooked Hancock album (although this soundtrack holds three tracks from different artistes, it is just as essential to progheads as the movie is. Indeed, Antonioni’s movie is one of counter-culture most important statement to movie-making as well, following on the French “Nouvelle Vague” and preceding many more films about drugs and hippydom, including Antonioni’s next movie Zabriskie Point, holding music from Floyd and The Dead. If you’re looking at more names of such type of movies, you’ll have Barbet Shroeder’s More and La Vallée (both holding Floyd music as soundtrack and respective albums, but Peter Fonda’s The Trip and Easy Rider, and some years later Nicholson’s Cuckoo’s Nest.. In the meantime, Hancock’s Blow-Up soundtrack is excellent.
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