Intrada Soundtrack Forum

I was thinking about this and which score I prefer and frankly I couldn't make the call. If you look at STAR WARS as one of the dividing lines in Williams' career, JAWS falls to the left of it. With shades of where he was going as a composer, it was still firmly rooted in that gritty, 70s-era style he and other composers used at the time. JAWS 2 is clearly to the right, offering up his more polished, fantasy/adventure scoring that became his hallmark with the later RAIDERS and ET and beyond.

Given how different they are, I cheated and decided I couldn't choose...they were just too different, perfectly reflecting two different eras of Williams' scoring.

While both are superb scores for their respective films, I believe Jaws 2 makes for a more enthralling listening experience in album form for the reasons you mentioned. It has a grandiose quality that is far more accessible to my ears.

I generally like effective minimalism, but the original film's score has the kind of minimalism that I don't think translates that well as an album.

Yes, Jaws 2 is i.m.o the album I enjoy listen to more, mostly for the EPIC Orca theme as that starts the movie (and CD) with a bang and i.m.o is Williams at his best...
The first Jaws is an instant classic and I grade it up there with Herrmanns Psycho as one of the best thrill-rides in genre music, but as a stand alone listen on CD, I acctually prefer Jaws 2...

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I like Jaws 2 better, if only for the somewhat maturity Williams expressed in that project. Metaphorically, I consider Jaws an early rehearsal - albeit one born of complete genius - of what became brilliantly absolute by the time Jaws 2 concluded. In my view, Jaws was primarily an accident, one of which came from a talented craftsman who knew what to do with accidental motifs.

Funny. This topic comes up in our mailroom all the time between Jeff and George. Jeff: JAWS. George: JAWS 2. Me? Well, I'll freely admit the end title for JAWS is one of the all time greats. With all the terror and violence now under control, Williams wraps not with his famous two-note shark motif but a quiet, thoughtful variant of his seafaring melody. And when this gentle cue itself comes to a close, much of the orchestra tacets (drops out) leaving the music to subtly coda in a quiet unison... meaning the handful of string players left are all simply fading out on the same note. Sublime! Nothing in the second score compares to this moment for me.

That said... JAWS 2 is a much more rousing score with a perfect balance of outright horror and rowdy adventure, tension and release. It may be the "better" album experience.

I guess I'm not able to choose between the two. Sure glad I don't have to.
--Doug

Jaws is the more adventurous score, but Jaws 2 is to me the more emotional score. There's a youthful exuberance in Williams' Jaws 2 music ("The Catamaran Race") which isn't found in the first Jaws.

The music in the first film is definitely suspenseful, as it underscores three men hunting for a monstrous fish, but Jaws 2 follows several young, defenseless kids who encounter the shark by accident. Williams' music bursts with sympathy for their plight, and expresses their terror -- a terror which is different from that of Brody, Hooper and Quint in the first film. Those characters knew what they were getting into (and were armed), but the kids in Jaws 2 are helpless, innocent victims. There's a tenderness and confused despair in cues like "Sean's Rescue" and "Toward Cable Junction" unlike anything in the original Jaws score.

Both Scores are Masterpieces!

JAWS' music is so scary, that it makes you want to get out of the water!,
whereas as JAWS 2, with its sweeping, seafaring music, makes you want to jump into a boat, and get out onto the water!!

The best of both worlds!

I wasnt lucky enough to add Jaws 2 to my collection
Unless you guys at Intrada would like to make that happen sometime soon
So therfore i will have to go with Jaws (the expanded version of course)

This has to be the only score, literally the only score, in which I prefer the soundtrack version to the film score. Williams' music in the movie was chopped up pretty badly.

What a great topic. I think about this a lot, actually, and I think Roger's analogy with STAR WARS is right on the money. In fact, I consider THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK to be a much better, richer and deeper score than A NEW HOPE, and yet the earlier film has such scrappy ebullience that I can never quite come down on either side. Whichever I am listening to at the moment is always the one that I love more.

Similar but not quite the same with the Jaws films. I actually got into soundtracks in the late 70's when I was in my teens, and so even though I saw both films in the order they were released, I bought the JAWS 2 LP when it came out, only later to go back and get JAWS. Coming at it backwards like that as I did, JAWS 2 has always been the baseline for me. Like a lot of people who saw the first movie when I was a kid, I didn't even realize how much music there was in the film, apart from the shark theme. I was kind of surprised later on, after I had JAWS 2 firmly embedded in my mind, when the first film came on TV and I kept thinking, I do *not* remember this much incredible music in the first movie.

A long-winded answer here but I think it comes down, for me, to the way in which I was initially exposed to the two scores. I still consider JAWS to be the more gutsy, raw and revolutionary piece. As used in the film, it can still get a bit muddy and confused, but the re-recorded LP is a masterpiece. But I listen to JAWS 2 at least once a month, as I have now for the last thirty-four years, and so I've probably heard it many hundreds of times. It's the one I go back to with pleasure again and again, even though every bloody note of it is ingrained in my memory.

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Randy Wilson
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"Jaws [1]" by a mile. Saw the second fil, hoping both would be near as great as the first.

Well, the second film was "okay" for what it was, but poor in direct comparrison to the preceeding effort. In the grand scheme of things, it could have been worse -- it could have been "Men In Black II".

The score, well, nothing grabbed me, nothing left an impression, can't recall a lick of it, unlike the first time I saw the first film.

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I love both, but I prefer the first score for being much more effective in the film (the 1st film being much better also helps).
I also love all that chase "pirate" music in Jaws (the catamaran theme in part 2 is great also).

But the main aspect of Jaws 1 that I like more is the way the shark theme is used, specifically that suspense section which is used in the part in which Brody is looking at the shark book (the pier incident) and on the "night search". That portion of the theme is much less proeminent in Jaws 2 (it is used very effectively when the shark fin reapears just before the end of the movie (in a portion of "the big jolt" not included in the album...)

Both scores deserve to be rereleased, Jaws in better sound (film score and album recording) and Jaws 2 complete score!