Built around the brothers’ excellent vocal harmonizations, this alum was released a little over a decade into their recording career. Love and relationships form the main thematic points of the songs, with slice-of-life stories covering those and other topics. While the backing band gets some spotlighting at times, the vocals are certainly the focus, and despite the simplicity of the arrangements, the brothers make the material compelling through their understated presences and charisma. Charming and evocative, with style and elegance in abundance.
Establishing its Jamaican influence mainly by including (admittedly impressive) hand-drum playing by Candido, this was the only release by the Don Elliott Octet, though other were issued by the Don Elliott Quartet, Quintet, and Sextet incarnations. Things are kept light and fairly unremarkable outside of the percussion solos, with practically no Caribbean flavor to the song-writing, but there’s still some nice mood-building to be found, and the musicians mesh their contributions together without overshadowing any of the contributors, though the fairly simple melodies make that less impressive than it would be for a more lively jazz set.
The exploration of small textures and subtle shadings keeps it from slipping into dullness, but at the same time, there’s little experimentation or improvisational flair to be found. Besides the percussion, the horns get to indulge in the most liveliness, with extended quick-moving runs backed up by reliable bass-lines and supporting brass. Despite the inclusion of some notable names in jazz, including Ernie Furtado on bass and arrangements by Gil Evans (the liner notes omit credits for any other performers besides the band-leader), the restraint of the material leads to an impression of it being too unambitious to really show off their talents to suitable extent. Still, there are some nice moments to enjoy in the simplicity of it all, and the performers at least seem to be enjoying their work.
opens with a bold brass fanfare before slipping in stringed gentility, with the balance and interplay between those two sides shaping most of the score. It’s a natural fit for the wartime romance, but despite the care put into the arrangements, the close adherence to the standard full orchestra war film scoring of the time leaves little room for distinction outside of the infrequent and short passages of low-key moodiness.
The woodwinds are employed to nice effect for those slices, and the playful humor of a few moments bring more life and character to their cues than the stretches of brash trumpeting, heavy melancholy, or lushly-played but fairly stock romance strings. Likewise, while the main themes are well-developed and revisited with attentive reworking, they end up feeling too much in line with the scoring done on other more sober war films of the era to really stand out. Appreciable though the quality of the score-writing is, with
Rózsa managing both large and small-scope direction in good standing, it ends up undone more by its familiar form than anything else.
Scrambled Brains 