Film Music of Akira Kurosawa: The Complete Edition
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A Kurosawa retrospective at the Music Box, continuing through November 14, covers the director’s richest period, from 1948 to 1965. The sound tracks of eight of the eleven films being shown are included in the first two installments of the ambitious multibox release Film Music of Akira Kurosawa: The Complete Edition. The two boxes, consisting of six discs each, showcase the work of Kurosawa’s most accomplished composers: Satoh and his mentor, Fumio Hayasaka, who died of tuberculosis in 1955. Together, the festival and the compilations provide an ideal opportunity for studying the director’s distinctive notion that the key to film music is “hidden in the difficulty of appropriately distancing” music from performance.
Kurosawa and Hayasaka’s first collaboration, Drunken Angel (1948), was a revelation for the director. In his production notes to that film, Kurosawa writes, “I couldn’t feel that I had been anything but easy on film music up until now. This time I want to try to use music with a definite intention.” For Hayasaka, and later for Satoh, this meant combining Western instruments with Japanese idioms, and scoring this cultural dissonance to register not only on the sound track but as part of the story.
But though Kurosawa had a better working relationship with Hayasaka, his collaborations with Satoh were more successful. Satoh composed his jazziest score for High and Low (1963), an adaptation of an Ed McBain novel. It opens with a trumpet motif that could have sprung from Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, then features surf guitar, barrelhouse piano, a warbled English-language torch song, and an instrumental version of “This Magic Moment.” The score is heavily influenced by Henry Mancini’s music for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. As detectives track a fleeing kidnapper, the jaunty horns and aggressive drum attack of a 12-bar blues drive them on. It’s as if the music becomes a character in the story.
