What A Good Score! – #42: Last Tango in Paris by Gato Barbieri

What A Good Score is a new series here at Off The Tracks – looking at movie soundtracks, the good, the band and the astounding…

The cinematic filth that is Last Tango in Paris somewhat captivated me when I was in my early 20s. And not because of the flagrant fucking. (Okay, okay, not just for the flagrant fucking…)

I was a self-taught, self-described film student, self-prescribed…

I’d had a quick turn at a video store, I’d watched a bunch of films before that, and then I got massively into reading about cinema. In particular the movies of the 1970s have been a huge focus in my life ever since I was about 18 or 19. I guess in part it was checking out Tarantino’s influences, but long before I’d heard of him I was a Scorsese fan, and an Eastwood fan, and many other things.

But one of the things that I absolutely adored — and love to this day — about the cinema of the 70s is its music. So many amazing composers, and a lot of musicians having a cameo hustle as a film composer for some side-quest action.

The first movie from the 70s to really blow me away with its music was Taxi Driver. And when I first watched Last Tango in Paris, Gato Barbieri’s score felt similar/ish to Bernard Herrmann’s sweeping strokes of jazz. I wonder if it was Gato’s collaboration and connection with fellow Argentine composer, Lalo Schifrin (one of my absolute film composer heroes, and another of the towering jazz-influenced/influencing score kings of the 70s) that sent him in the direction of film work.

He was awarded a Grammy for his work on Tango — and he made another couple of scores, but that Grammy set him up with a record deal with Impulse! And John Coltrane was one of his heroes. On the back of enjoying the Tango music I bought a coupe of other Barbieri albums — that funk/fusion-lite of the 70s and early 80s that could now be seen as the elevator version of Yacht Rock; a type of jazz that was, shall we say, nautical by nature…

None of it compares to Tango though — which is schmaltz and class all at once. And that’s a type of music I adore, be it Carpenters, Bob James, the music from The Young And The Restless…

Last Tango is actually quite a punishing film — which is not to say that it isn’t good, but there’d be a different, erm, lens applied to it today by many. Its music is incongruously light, especially when taken away from supporting the images, when listened to on its own the only clue of the brutality it scores is in the intensity of Marlon Brando’s face on the cover. It’s a light, breezy, lovely set of jazz tunes with a Parisian waft.

I bought this album way back on vinyl, having had a cassette tape of it before that. I wasn’t quite the soundtrack collector then that I’ve since become so I sold the record. And then almost instantly regretted it. So, a couple years back, I bought it again at a record fair. I don’t buy back too many records — it’s not best practice. But I’m sure glad I got this one in the fold once again.