Jazz review: Richard Baratta, “Music in Film: The Reel Deal”
There are way more entries for Richard Baratta in IMDb than on Allmusic. Baratta has been executive producer on eight films (including Joker and The Wolf of Wall Street) and production manager on 23 others (including five Spiderman movies). But like many other people with day jobs, from Hollywood producers to grocery baggers, Baratta is also a musician with serious jazz chops. He plays drums on Music in Film: The Reel Deal (Savant), a salute to some film music favorites worked up with straight-ahead acoustic jazz arrangements by pianist Bill O’Connell.
The album features the great alto saxophonist Vincent Herring, who can sound so much like Cannonball Adderley that Nat Adderley had him in his band for nine years. This was a journeyman gig for Herring, but he brings energy and a vibrant creativity to this collection of 12 standards, could-be standards, and let’s-hope-not standards.
The album opens with “Everybody’s Talkin’,” a song used in Midnight Cowboy. The loping rhythm of Harry Nilsson’s original is exchanged for up-tempo swing, asserting Baratta’s jazz drummer credentials in the Art Blakey lineage. Another hard swinger is “Peter Gunn,” which lacks the twangy menace of Henry Mancini’s original — it sounds more like a Herbie Hancock session on Blue Note.
There are some fun discoveries, thanks to O’Connell’s creative arrangements. Nino Rota’s “Theme from The Godfather” is played as a waltz, and the minor turns in the melody and unusual chord changes provoke an imaginative solo from Herring. It’s certainly not very Godfathery, but it’s a jazz offer you can’t refuse.
Other tracks could have stayed on the cutting room floor. “Chopsticks” is here, I suppose, because of a memorable scene in the Tom Hanks movie Big. It’s an up-tempo samba here, and while O’Connell provides bright piano work, it’s a multicultural misfire. It’s even more disingenuous to include the Beatles’ “Come Together,” which isn’t a film song at all. O’Conner gives it a fast Latin arrangement, and the band finds a salsa groove hiding in there, lyrics be damned. Herring takes it like a pro, but there isn’t much to work with here outside of the rhythm. The same goes for “Let the River Run” from Working Girl. There’s not much to the melody, and all O’Connell is left with for his solo is some scales, patterns, and vamps. “The Sound of Music” stubbornly refuses to be jazz, because of its indelible pastoral associations as well as its lack of interesting changes. But students should check out how well Herring and O’Connell improvise strong melodic lines regardless of the source material.
Here’s hoping Baratta gets out of California and hits the live circuit after the final credits roll on this weird David Lynch movie we’re living in right now.
