"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Adrian Younge, "1969 Organ"

Song: "1969 Organ" by Adrian Younge
Released: 2000
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's my favorite track off Black Dynamite editor/composer Adrian Younge's imaginary soundtrack Venice Dawn, a long-out-of-print homage to '60s and '70s Italian film music from 2000 that Younge and Wax Poetics Records reissued as a free download earlier this week.

"It is well documented that American soul expanded the thresholds of contemporary music and influenced composers around the world. Classically trained European composers, such as Ennio Morricone, loved the sound of soul and synthesized this compositional style with his music," said the self-taught musician, film editor and former hip-hop producer to Wax Poetics. "Ennio Morricone is by far one of my favorite composers."

Younge is also fond of the Italian band Goblin of Suspiria fame and similar-sounding psychedelic soul acts, and their sounds also influenced Venice Dawn (I also detect a little Jerry van Rooyen in the organ riffs in "1969 Organ"). Like Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's Rome project, Venice Dawn is a score written for an old movie that doesn't exist. At the time of Venice Dawn's initial release, Younge pretended Venice Dawn was a real piece of Italian cinema and punked everyone.

That mischievous spirit was carried over by Younge and director Scott Sanders into Black Dynamite. The 2009 blaxploitation homage is one of the funniest and most effective comedy films of the '00s because its approach to spoofing blaxploitation flicks is refreshingly timeless (unlike the lazily written and instantly dated pop-culture references of the Epic Movie/Disaster Movie/Meet the Spartans spoof franchise) and the actors in Black Dynamite play everything straight--just like the Leslie Nielsen who was completely dead-serious and stone-faced during the brilliant and short-lived Police Squad! TV series, not the Leslie Nielsen who went completely broad and resorted to mugging to the camera in the Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! movies.

While we await both Younge's score music for Adult Swim's animated version of Black Dynamite in spring 2012 and his Wax Poetics album Something About April, which is scheduled to drop in September, he's offered us an appetizer to Something About April in the form of the newly unearthed Venice Dawn--an EP that can now be sampled during the "Rome, Italian Style" block of imaginary soundtracks and covers of '60s and '70s score music from Monday to Thursday at 11am on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Party like it's 1969 over at my SwiftFM site.

All the other "Rome, Italian Style" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Count Basie and His Orchestra, "007"
Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, "More [Theme from Mondo Cane]"
Goldfrapp, "Utopia (New Ears Mix)"
Babe Ruth, "The Mexican"

One of my favorite AFOS e-mails: "Film music is fun and vital"

Here's an excerpt from a listener e-mail I was lucky to hold onto before my PC died last year. From August 18, 2005, Vincent Bernard, who sometimes posts comments here and says he prefers A Fistful of Soundtracks over Sirius XM's Cinemagic channel, explained to me why he can't stand most film and TV score music DJs and was spot-on about them:

... all those other film music DJs are the most unhip, unfunny bastards I've ever had the misfortune to hear. They make film music out to be some kind of once-removed relative of classical music, which it isn't! Film music is fun and vital, and not beholden to the rules of classical which is one of the reasons I love it. You make it even more fun with your commentary, giving us a little well-researched history and your opinions of new as well as older music. You've introduced me to CDs full of new music. Artists I've never heard of like Yoko Kanno (I now own all the Bepop albums because of you) Riz Ortolani, Gert Wilden, Jerry van Rooyen (all from your "Sleazy Listening" ep.) You've even rekindled my interest in some of the old masters like Herrmann, Barry, Morricone and Schifrin.

Adrian Younge's recent Black Dynamite score, which I've been praising--and streaming--constantly, would probably never get any airplay on the channels or programs that Vincent finds irritating because it's not classical music. The Black Dynamite score, my favorite score from last year, is film music at its most fun and vital.

Robert Emmett is a great example of a DJ who champions film music without taking it so damn seriously (another example: the Wax Poetics magazine folks, who put together an incredible film music-themed issue at around the time their record label division released the two Black Dynamite soundtrack albums). Emmett hosts The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show (Saturdays 9am-noon on KFJC or at the Los Altos Hills station's spot on the iTunes Radio dial, under Eclectic) and was once one of several guest programmers whom I enlisted to assemble special "Movie Music Mixtape Month" playlists for the college radio incarnation of AFOS. The playlist he submitted to me was as eclectic as his Norman Bates playlists. It ranged from The Misfits to Intinti Ramayanam. Norman Bates, a program I first tuned into when I was in high school, is a must-listen--even though it's often sprinkled with Broadway show tunes, which aren't my cup of tea (the only musicals I can stand are either satirical ones like South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut or musicals that come out of Bollywood).

The Black Dynamite score kung-fus its way onto A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist

I finally got around to buying the Black Dynamite score CD, which Wax Poetics magazine's record label released in October. Every single funkdafied, old-school-style track on the album is a banger. The title theme, one of eight original Black Dynamite tracks I've added to "Assorted Fistful" rotation on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel, contains one of my favorite lyrics that never made it to an actual '70s blaxploitation soundtrack and should have ("This nigga took out Nixon/So you know he's dynamite"). Had I listened to the album sooner, I would have named the score my favorite of 2009.

Black Dynamite score composer Adrian Younge--who, in addition to being the movie's editor, was serving as a law professor when he wasn't toiling over the movie--painstakingly recreated a typical '70s blaxploitation score. All the recording equipment Younge used was analog instead of digital, and all the instruments he and his musicians played were built before 1979. "Our movie takes place between '73 and '74, so I wanted to position myself where I was a composer in 1973," said the Morricone and Goblin-loving L.A. composer and vintage R&B aficionado in Wax Poetics' recent special issue about African American cinema and funky film music.

Enjoy these illustrations of Black Dynamite (which plays briefly here in the Bay Area this week before it drops on DVD and Blu-ray in mid-February) by one of the illest Korean American artists around, David Choe.