|
| |
|
|
A songwriter speaks
|
|
|
|
|
|
The evening was billed as "A Conversation (and a Bit of Music) with Randy Newman," so most of the folks who showed up at Sanders Theatre a week ago last Tuesday probably knew not to expect a concert. Instead, for about an hour and 45 minutes, Harvard Office for the Arts director Jack Megan engaged Newman in insightful, funny conversation and eventually invited questions from the audience. Including film clips that illustrated a couple of Newman’s soundtracks (The Natural and Toy Story 2) and renditions of about 10 songs that he sang and played at a piano, the evening amounted to a concise autobiography of the 60-year-old composer and singer. All the Newman topics were touched upon — his taste for Southern themes (his mother was from Louisiana and he was born in New Orleans), his family’s history in the movies (uncles Lionel and Alfred and cousin Thomas were all composers, though his son, now a producer, "has risen higher in the film business than any Newman has been"), his procrastination ("Interviewers will ask why it took me five years to make an album and I’ll say, ‘It didn’t take five years — I didn’t do anything for five years’ "), the necessity for orchestrators to be properly schooled ("You get to a better place if you follow the rules"). Along the way he expressed admiration for the Hollywood String Quartet, which was part of Uncle Alfred’s screen orchestra (its rendition of the late Beethoven quartets is "the best thing Hollywood ever did") and distaste for directors ("Now because of technology, directors are experts in music — because they have CD players"). And he compared his best soundtrack experience (Toy Story 2) with his worst (Seabiscuit). What was funniest and most touching were the examples he provided at the keyboard: his creation of a "midway Fellini Italian band" sound for "Davy the Fat Boy"; his giving in to director Gary Ross and providing music sufficiently bland for a particular passage in Seabiscuit; the impressionistic harmonies on the bridge of his shuffling love song "I Miss You"; the Stephen Foster piano break in "Rednecks." Funniest and most distressing was the first song he played, "Political Science," from 1972’s Sail Away: for all its comic exaggeration in its dismissal of the rest of the world ("Asia’s crowded, Europe’s too old, Africa’s far too hot, and Canada’s too cold"), it could have been an outline of the Bush Doctrine.
BY JON GARELICK
|
