INTRADA Announces:
COHEN & TATE
Composed and Conducted by BILL CONTI
INTRADA Special Collection Volume 139
The 1988 feature Cohen & Tate, about a boy abducted by two hitman and driven across Texas at night, attracted composer Bill Conti due to its unrelenting darkness, giving Conti the opportunity to compose his darkest, most serious work. Conti was best known for brightly triumphant scores ranging from Rocky to The Right Stuff. Thrillers weren't new to Conti, though, as he had made inroads to scoring thrillers in the late 1980s, among them the supernatural Nomads and the suspenseful F/X. The Cohen & Tate score would be a markedly different challenge for Conti, as the film plays like a chamber piece for three characters, all bent on destroying the other as they drive in a vehicle that doubles as an emotional pressure cooker. Conti deliberately avoided the overtly thematic scoring he was best known for, instead sublimating his character motifs into the music’s turbulent, and oftentimes explosive atmosphere of dread. Travis’s tender youth becomes the sound of piano, tossed against the hitmen’s brooding strings, the chords’ bright sounds almost lost in a sea of menacing low tones. Yet, the piano’s hopeful sound always manages to rise again, no matter what’s thrown at it. Conti’s use of the piano also gives the score a subtle, classical feeling, one that becomes more overt as the film progresses. But in this unforgiving world, Conti’s love of Baroque melody mostly stands in for two professionals who are bluntly elegant in their work. Conti also focuses on French horn at the request of director Eric Red (The Hitcher) "...
because it’s somber, muted and heroic There’s a power to it which embodies Cohen, especially as he bonds with Travis against Tate."
Cohen & Tate offers a disturbing thriller on the two-lane blacktop, as a nine-year old boy (Harley Cross) engages in a psychological battle of wits with
two steely hitmen (Roy Scheider, Adam Baldwin). The film would litter the middle-of-the-night road to Houston with the bodies of innocents, and mature the boy into a lethal match for his tormentors. And riding shotgun, so to speak, would be one of the most ominous and unrelenting scores ever to be found in the otherwise upbeat musical canon of Bill Conti.
This release is limited to 1200 units.
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 139
Retail Price: $19.99
AVAILABLE 8/17/2010
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.6660/.f
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