Last Tango in Paris

How do you judge a person's life? Do you look at what they were at the end of it or at their greatest? The typical answer is to say it is something in-between depending on the person and what they did. For Marlon Brando, I remember the middle of his career where he recovered from his fading star status of the 1960's and became a real actor again. In 1972 he pulled the greatest acting double punch in film history with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. Both are amazing tour-de-forces of acting. Brando proved himself both by his passion and his diversity. Though Godfather is the more renowned of the two, Last Tango is the zenith of Brando's work.



It is also the career best of director Bernardo Bertolucci, a controversial mixture of sex, identity and death and how they mix together in a single unfurnished apartment. Though he would do plenty of Italian scores before and afterwards, this would be the most popular soundtrack of Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri that would get attention in the United States (he won a Grammy for it). Barbieri uses Jazz fusion to combine outside elements of Tango and Latin jazz into a moody, sexy undercurrent for the doomed relationship in the film. The music's tone shifts back and forth between the "lightness" of Maria Schneider's youthful excitement (represented in "French" sounding tracks with amble use of an accordion with light string and piano) and the "weight" of Brando's pain (brooding Latin percussion and quivering strings). The shifts jerk you violently back and forth as Barbieri's masterful alto-sax work centers the compositions.



This new album is twice the length of the original release but is virtually identical to the already solid 1998 RykoDisc release. Like the previous release, the bulk of the album is devoted to the fragmented film suite, which contains 28 untitled tracks of the source cues. Most of the tracks are brief flashes of musical punctuation, barely 30 seconds or so. While the choice of including all the tracks for the completist is the appropriate one, the album gets very repetitive. This is one of those situations where having everything can be a little bit dull as a listening experience. The best way to take in this album would be to listen to the first twelve tracks or the suite by themselves.