The Hurricane

When it's time for the Academy Award, studios often produce promotional CD's of scores they feel the Academy should consider nominating. These releases often include more music than the commercial release, if it exists, and usually have the line "for your consideration", or similiar, printed on them. The quite rare Apollo 13, Mulan and Good Will Hunting promos are both promotional releases of that kind, as is this CD, featuring Christopher Young's dramatic score for The Hurricane, as well as the song "So Amazing" by Clark and Summer Anderson. As we all know, The Hurricane wasn't nominated in the Original Score or Original Song categories, so the effort unfortunately didn't pay off.

The Hurricane is one of those scores that is easier to enjoy while doing something else, like studying or reading a book. I find it hard to really pay attention to the music for a longer period of time. Mostly due to the quiet and slow nature of the score. Some parts are pure underscore with not much interesting going on, to be honest, even if these are in minority. The jazz portions of the score are quite entertaining and can be described as "late night" jazz, with the standard muted trumpets, acoustic bass and percussion. Further, Young makes use of wordless vocal "hummings" - both male and female. It's very effective and creates a dark film noir sound. Although the vocals mostly are used in the jazz parts, there are some use of them together with the traditional orchestral music as well.

The orchestrations (by Pete Anthony and John Kull) tend to favour the strings, especially the lower ones, with some good cello solos, and it gives the score a very mournful, dark and brooding sound. The sad main theme makes the score even darker, and it is not until the last cue, "Hate Put Me In Prison, Love's Gonna Bust Me Out" - one of the CD's highlights - that the music gets more optimistic, with a victorious rendition of the main theme.

That this score isn't available as a commercial release is of course a big shame - there is a soundtrack available, but it only includes a short suite of the score. Luckily a score release is planned and I'm guessing that the contents will be the same as on this promotional release, give or take a couple of cues. It's worth waiting for, anyway.