AUDIO WATCHDOG
By Douglas E. Winter
My father died in March 2016, at age 95. William E. Winter was a self-made man who lived something of a MAD MEN life (but without as much liquor). He worked his way from loading bottles onto his father’s 7-Up truck to becoming the CEO and chairman of the 7-Up Company— and, along the way, directing the famous “Uncola” advertising campaign. His influence on my life was profound, but only when I wrote his obituary did I realize the impact he’d had on me musically. He bought my first phonograph and helped me parse lyrics to songs by The Animals and The Yardbirds. He bought my first set of drums— Ludwig champagne sparkle, with the best cym- bals in the world (Avedis Zildjian, formulated by an alchemist)—and he let me play for money in a rock-and-roll band when I was only 15. Thanks to him, I had front-row tickets to the Beatles’ concert at Busch Stadium on August 21, 1966, despite John Lennon’s pronouncement weeks earlier that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” (They were.) And, with him, I saw Sinatra live in Las Vegas.
After my mother died, he kept her Lowrey Organ, and I taught myself to play keyboards, painstakingly transcribing the likes of Tony Banks’ introduction to “Watcher of the Skies.” He brought back, from business trips to England and France, progressive rock on vinyl that was nowhere to be found in the Midwest: Barclay James Harvest’s early LPs, with Woolly Wolstenholme’s
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distinctive Mellotron M300; David Bowie’s Ger- man 45rpm single “Helden”; albums by French proggers Carpe Diem and Wappasou, among others. He also brought curious musical instru- ments—a kalimba, temple blocks, crotales—that no doubt fueled my passion for such obscurities and oddities. And he loaned me money to buy my first keyboard, an Elka Rhapsody String En- semble (which I promptly ran through a flanger, shades of Tangerine Dream).
A week after he died, I sat at my keyboards and tried to play. I couldn’t. I listened instead to a looped recording I’d made a few weeks before, af- ter Keith Emerson’s death. I’d called it “Lament.” And that is what it was.
From Alejandro To Alejandro
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s THE REVENANT marked Ryuichi Sakamoto’s triumphant return to film music, and his first original score since Takashi Miike’s HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMU- RAI (2011). The former Yellow Magic Orchestra member, who made his scoring (and acting) debut in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR LAWRENCE (1983), had been sidelined with oropharyngeal cancer. Due to health concerns and the scope of Iñárritu’s vision, Sakamoto brought in collabo- rator Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) and The National’s Bryce Dessner to fulfill his plan for an epic electronically processed orchestral score. The result is a series of glacial, menacing, and yet at times heroic soundscapes, including “Out
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