Whipped Cream Difficulties

Bad day for music.

Ennio Morricone. Variety.

Imitated, scorned, spoofed, what came to be known as “The Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all released in the United States in 1967 — starred Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” and were enormous hits, with a combined budget of $2 million and gross worldwide receipts of $280 million.
The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the series of spaghetti westerns he scored for Mr. Leone, Mr. Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2007. “It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces.”
Mr. Morricone also scored Mr. Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and his Jewish gangster drama, “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both widely considered masterpieces. But he became most closely identified with “The Dollars Trilogy,” and in time grew weary of answering for their lowbrow sensibilities.
Asked by The Guardian in 2006 why “A Fistful of Dollars” had made such an impact, he said: “I don’t know. It’s the worst film Leone made and the worst score I did.”

“Lowbrow sensibilities”, my Aunt Fannie.

Mr. Morricone looked professorial in bow ties and spectacles, with wisps of flyaway white hair. He sometimes holed up in his palazzo in Rome and wrote music for weeks on end, composing not at a piano but at a desk. He heard the music in his mind, he said, and wrote it in pencil on score paper for all orchestra parts.

…

Mr. Morricone never learned to speak English, never left Rome to compose, and for years refused to fly anywhere, though he eventually flew all over the world to conduct orchestras, sometimes performing his own compositions. While he wrote extensively for Hollywood, he did not visit the United States until 2007, when, at 78, he made a monthlong tour, punctuated by festivals of his films.

…

Talking to Mr. Pareles, Mr. Morricone placed his acclaimed oeuvre in a modest perspective. “The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,” he said. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.”

Edited to add: Just got this: a nice tribute to another aspect of Mr. Morricone’s work that I was unaware of.

Morricone, a man of staunch yet humble faith, was part of a gathering of 60 artists who paid musical tribute to Pope Benedict XVI’s 60th anniversary of his ordination.
The Vatican’s obituary goes on to tell how Morricone was so inspired by Pope Francis’s elevation that he wrote a Mass to celebrate both the new pope and all Jesuits. Titled Missa Papae Francisci, the work was also dedicated to his wife, Maria Travia, who had been encouraging Morricone to write such a sacred work for years. The Mass was premiered on the 200th anniversary of the re-establishment of the Jesuit order.
Morricone went on to work with Pope Francis to organize a concert “with the poor and for the poor” in 2016. The charity concert was performed by the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, the National Academy of St. Cecilia, and Fr. Marco Frisina, raising much needed capital for several charitable projects of the Pontiff. Pope Francis later awarded Ennio the Pontifical Gold Medal, presented by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, on April 15, 2019.

This article also quotes the eloquent and touching statement Mr. Morricone requested be read on his passing.

Charlie Daniels. I loved “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” when I was a kid. Still have a soft spot for that song, even though some people might say I have “lowbrow sensibilities”.

There are many candidates for the libertarian national anthem. I’d argue this is one of the better ones:

A drunkard wants another drink of wine, and a politician wants your vote
I don’t want much of nothing at all, but I will take another toke
‘Cause I ain’t asking nobody for nothin’
If I can’t get it on my own
If you don’t like the way I’m livin’
You just leave this long haired country boy alone

And because it is there:

Richard Penniman, better known as “Little Richard”.

Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” — a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss — in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the pop Top 10, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, and Elvis Presley had been making records for a year.
But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before — something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. As the rock historian Richie Unterberger put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”

…

He was at the height of his fame when he left the United States in late September 1957 to begin a tour in Australia. As he told the story, he was exhausted, under intense pressure from the Internal Revenue Service and furious at the low royalty rate he was receiving from Specialty. Without anyone to advise him, he had signed a contract that gave him half a cent for every record he sold. “Tutti Frutti” had sold half a million copies but had netted him only $25,000.
One night in early October, before 40,000 fans at an outdoor arena in Sydney, he had an epiphany.
“That night Russia sent off that very first Sputnik,” he told Mr. White, referring to the first satellite sent into space. “It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. It shook my mind. It really shook my mind. I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’”
He had one last Top 10 hit: “Good Golly Miss Molly,” recorded in 1956 but not released until early 1958. By then, he had left rock ’n’ roll behind.
He became a traveling evangelist. He entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist school, to study for the ministry. He cut his hair, got married and began recording gospel music.

…

By his own account, alcohol and cocaine began to sap his soul (“I lost my reasoning,” he would later say), and in 1977, he once again turned from rock ’n’ roll to God. He became a Bible salesman, began recording religious songs again and, for the second time, disappeared from the spotlight.
He did not stay away forever. The publication of his biography in 1984 signaled his return to the public eye, and he began performing again.

…

By the time he stopped performing, Little Richard was in both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (he was inducted in the Hall’s first year) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. “Tutti Frutti” was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2010.

The NYT obit for Roy Horn wasn’t up when I was writing last night, but it is now.

We are all mourning the loss of #RoyHorn of #SiegfriedandRoy. S&R invented, created, pioneered the very idea that a magic show could be a full evening in Vegas. If not for S&R there would be no P&T in Vegas. He was so full of life, wild, and unpredictable. We will miss him. pic.twitter.com/sHW5NAyBMu

— Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) May 9, 2020