![]() It's played by Ellington in the movie in his role as Pie Eye, the leader of a roadhouse band who is joined at the piano by James Stewart's jazz-loving lawyer. 'I mean it was a thing with her eyes and she absolutely appeared to be, you know, sort of flirting all the time.'įor Eve Arden's no-nonsense secretary Maida Rutledge there's 'Happy Anatomy', a clarinet theme that's similar to 'Flirtibird' but more laidback. For instance, the slow, sultry 'Flirtibird' is fashioned to represent Lee Remick's hip-swinging femme fatale via Johnny Hodges' sinuous alto saxophone solo. Duke refined his harmonic language to a very high point'.Īnd rather than just using music to create a general jazzy atmosphere, Ellington and his longtime co-writer Billy Strayhorn composed pieces to complement both the moods and motives of the film's principal characters. 'They made music to represent an adults-only movie… There are very advanced harmonic conceptions present. 'Anatomy Of A Murder is music made when Duke and the band were very mature', wrote renowned trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in his essay for the 1999 soundtrack reissue. A fantastic cubist bluesy piece, it's the perfect accompaniment to the title credits, a miasma of disembodied limbs created by the maestro of movie intros, Saul Bass (also known for his work on Psycho, Goodfellas and North By Northwest, to name a few).Įllington was 60 years young when he took on the score, with literally thousands of concerts and 35 years of records on multiple labels behind him. Tension and release, danger and safety, movement and stillness, darkness and light the textural palette that was Ellington's signature was always compellingly cinematic'.Īnatomy Of A Murder's soundtrack begins with 'The Main Theme'. As the AllMusic website so aptly puts it: 'Ellington was a natural choice to convey the rich and varied emotional moods of this drama. When asked why he chose Ellington to soundtrack his movie, Preminger replied he felt the great band leader would 'produce a freshness which an experienced film composer might no longer possess'. Voelker, who was also a novelist and fly fisherman, went on to write a book about it under his pen name Robert Traver, and this became the basis for Anatomy Of A Murder.Īmong the film's cast was big band jazz supremo Duke Ellington, who was commissioned to write the score – the first time an African-American had done so for a major studio. Voelker's only payment was the murder weapon. The jury reached their verdict after four hours: not guilty by reason of insanity. John D Voelker was engaged as his attorney and he invoked a very rare version of insanity defence called 'irresistible impulse', which had not been used in Michigan courts since 1886. In July 1952, war veteran Coleman A Peterson shot dead a Big Bay, Michigan bar owner called Maurice Chenoweth, thinking that Chenoweth had raped his wife. He was quite the actor too, and played the part of Judge Weaver alongside more famous thespian luminaries – such as James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara and George C Scott – in Anatomy Of A Murder, the 1959 courtroom crime film whose soundtrack – now on 180g vinyl – we're celebrating.ĭirected by Otto Preminger and described as 'probably the finest pure trial movie ever made', this Oscar-nominated star-studded drama was based on real life events. But why are we mentioning all this? Because Joseph Nye Welch wasn't only an accomplished lawyer. Welch's now famous retort – 'Have you no sense of decency, sir?' – resulted in applause from the galleries, but further to that, the hearings were being screened on TV and his performance is said to have irrevocably turned the tide of public and press opinion against Senator McCarthy.ĭuke Ellington at KFG Radio Studio in 1954 McCarthy's response? That if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his own law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organisation accused of being 'the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party'. ![]() ![]() ![]() A partner in a Boston law firm called Hale and Dorr, on the 9th of June 1954 he found himself in court challenging Senator McCarthy to provide 'before sundown' the list of 130 Communists posing a so-called subversive threat in defence plants across the US. Whether life was imitating art or vice versa is a moot point, but whichever way you look at it Joseph Nye Welch was one extraordinary geezer. The band leader was an unusual but inspired choice for the soundtrack of Otto Preminger's courtroom drama, says Steve Sutherland, as he considers the 180g reissue
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