Amistad (John Williams)

(1997)

I don’t think I’ve ever brought the subject of liner notes into a review before, but I’m going to here, because they’re a source of extreme annoyance.  The insert of the soundtrack album of Amistad includes the usual note from director Steven Spielberg, who, whilst not only managing to incorrectly spell the names of film music giants Dimitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann, also says that they, along with Alex North, “were so defined by their musical habits that you could clearly imagine the films they wrote for”.  He then goes on to say “John Williams has the gift to become any character necessary to retell with music the story of the film he is working on.”  Now whilst it’s impossible to disagree that Williams has that ability, it’s not at all difficult to reel off the names of two dozen composers working in film today that don’t also, and to imply that such masters of film scoring as Herrmann, Tiomkin and North did not is bordering on idiotic.

Anyway, moving on.  Amistad is one of those scores by Williams that has a wonderful main theme, but little beyond.  The theme opens and closes the album, and really is a superb piece of music.  Featuring lyrics from the 1967 poem “Dry Your Tears, Afrika” by Bernard Dadie, the piece makes use of heroic horns, ethnic percussion and an African chorus to a glorious effect, and is probably amongst the best pieces Williams has ever written for film.  The only complaint is that it doesn’t start or end too well, but that is partly rectified in the “reprise” of the piece that closes the album.

“Cinque’s Theme” is probably the next best piece on the album.  Based on the same thematic material, it’s a lovely piece performed by flute and strings.  A wordless choir performs the theme again in the latter half of “Middle Passage”, to great effect, and again with the full force of the vocals in “The Liberation of Lomboko”.

Somewhat unusually for Williams, Amistad contains several distinct references to other scores both by him and by other composers.  Several motifs are strikingly similar to other Williams scores such as Jurassic Park and Star Wars, whilst the main theme bears strong resemblance to Ennio Morricone’s score for The Mission, and the trumpet themes in “Mr Adams Takes the Case” are similar to themes from James Horner’s Apollo 13.

In sum, Amistad is a fine score and is easy to recommend as an addition to a collection of Williams music, though, with reservations, since whilst the main theme is one of his best, the score as a whole is rather bland.  Regardless, it would still have been my choice to win the Oscar instead of Titanic.

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Track Listing

1. Dry Your Tears, Afrika (4:18)

2. Sierra Leone, 1839 / The Capture of Cinque (3:39)

3. Crossing the Atlantic (3:21)

4. Cinque’s Theme (4:12)

5. Cinque’s Memories of Home (2:35)

6. Middle Passage (5:18)

7. The Long Road to Justice (3:16)

8. July 4, 1839 (4:01)

9. Mr Adams Takes the Case (7:15)

10. La Amistad Remembered (5:08)

11. The Liberation of Lomboko (4:09)

12. Adams’s Summation (2:55)

13. Going Home (2:02)

14. Dry Your Tears, Afrika (reprise) (3:37)

Total Time: 55:51

Credits

Music Composed, Conducted & Produced by John Williams

Orchestrations by John Neufeld & Conrad Pope

Recorded at Sony Pictures Scoring Stage

Awards

Academy Award for Best Original Score (nominated)

Grammy Award (nominated)

Insert Notes

The liner notes contain the usual note from Steven Spielberg.  It doesn’t reveal much, other than the facts that he can’t spell and doesn’t consider such composers as Alex North, Dimitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann to be genre-versatile.

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