Diamonds

For veteran actor Kirk Douglas' return to the silver screen, director John Asher tapped Joel Goldsmith, son of venerable composer Jerry Goldsmith, for the job. Joel makes his father proud with an appropriate and heart-warming score. The music is charming without being overly sappy, uplifting without being manipulative. Granted, Joel hasn't been the workaholic like his father, but his recent works, such as Shiloh & Stargate SG-1, show evidence of quality and true craftsmanship.

The score, as released, is a typical short Varese Sarabande CD but it covers most of the high points in the score in the short twenty-four cues. It is light dramatic fare with a more than typical sprinkling of peppy woodwinds and wistful strings occasionally accompanied by a simple piano melody. My only real beef with the score comes back to the cue lengths, with tracks nearing one to one and half minutes in length. This is one of those scores that could have benefited from an extended and comprehensive suite of source music. The cues are so short that it is hard to get into Goldsmith's work before you're forwarded to onto another passage. Goldsmith's jazzy "Las Vegas" music is excellent, demonstrating his ability to easily switch genres and styles, but disappears too quickly for the listener to appreciate it. A nice slap to the face of James Horner is Goldsmith's piano glissando (almost orchestrated verbatim) that has appeared in Horner's work on Apollo 13 and Field of Dreams. A poke at the old Horner and Goldsmith family relationship if you happen to know the history. For the last track, Peter Noone, lead singer of 60's band Herman's Hermits, provides a rather pompous end credits song. This, along with the short tracks, throws off what could have been a great album.

I would marginally recommend picking up this album. Joel Goldsmith shows promise, I just whish his material would get better backing. Similar circumstances took the air out of 1997's Stargate SG-1 (on Milan) as well as last year's Shiloh (on Varese Sarabande). I would think that for the film music community, Mr. Goldsmith would best be re-introduced to it via a comprehensive promotional album from Super Tracks or Intrada. This would be recommended only to show off his burgeoning talents, and get some better respect when dealing with record company releases.