[Eirik Myhr]

you know the style… and that included most of Mancini’s soundtrack albums of the day and what not. When I seriously started listening to music as a teenager, you could give me Stravinsky, Ligeti, Boulez, Schnitte, anything with thorns and spikes, but if you gave me “easy listening”, and you ensured my disdain.

The label “Easy listening” IS kind of an insult to the music, as it implies a “hollow” kind of nonsense music that anyone could make. In later years, I’ve come to see this very particular kind of old vintage “library music” as sort of a lost art form. You now have a small wave of artists from the alternative/indie scene who have embraced this strange old genre, and are creating some really cool new stuff inspired by it.

Having said that, I still find it a bit too harsh to label Mancini as “easy listening”. Some of Mancini’s lounge-cocktail-pop-jazz tunes from his 60s and 70s scores simply has so much CLASS and complexity. Just listen to those intricate thick jazz chords from the string section in the original opening to the first Pink Panther movie, for instance. It is art. In his later years, he manages to take traces of those cocktail jazz-pop melodies and turn it into something hauntingly beautiful, like my personal Mancini favourite, MOMMIE DEAREST (never seen the film, but MAN, what a score).