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Black Hawk Down |
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TRACKLISTING 
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ABOUT THE FILM The chaos of battle and the bond of men in arms is the subject of Hans Zimmer’s music for Black Hawk Down, a score that marks his fifth collaboration with director Ridley Scott. Their partnership began with 1989’s Black Rain, a crime thriller that showed Zimmer’s ability to create a unique fusion of sounds. Since then, the German-born Zimmer has become one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed composers, working with Scott on Thelma and Louise and Hannibal, winning an Academy Award® for The Lion King and receiving six Oscar® nominations. The most recent, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, was a score in which Zimmer played the Roman Empire with a combination of world music and Wagnerian pomp. Now Black Hawk Down continues this exploration into the timeless rhythms of African music, as filtered through the intense combat between American soldiers and the Somali militia. It was a battle in which 18 US soldiers would die, yet all would return home. “I wanted the music to portray two tribes,” Zimmer says. “One was a techno tribe, which is America. They have all of the technology. The other tribe is ethnic instruments, which is the Somali world. These two tribes collide, and music is what shows the gulf between the two cultures. It’s also a way of turning the myth of the universal soldier into flesh and blood, because this is a story that could take place during any war, at any time.” To capture the unbearable tension that the soldiers went through in Mogadishu, Zimmer approached the scoring of Black Hawk Down as if he was going into battle, bringing together a regiment of elite musicians who wouldn’t be afraid to collaborate under enormous pressure. The main Black Hawk Down band would be comprised of guitarists Michael Brook and Heitor Pereira, violinist Craig Eastman, cellist Martin Tillman, and Hans Zimmer on keyboards. Ambient soundscapes were provided by Mel Wesson. Their field of operations would be Media Ventures, a sprawling complex of music studios that Zimmer had built in Los Angeles as a gathering place where skilled and upcoming composers would inspire each other’s best work. In Media Ventures’ “war room,” the Black Hawk Down band would have a virtual bazaar of instruments at their disposal, including the Gimbre (North Africa), a Cumbus Guitar (Morocco), Taiko Drums (Japan) and the Hurdy Gurdy, a fiddle-like instrument that dates to Medieval times. The orchestra would overlap with these ethnic sounds, playing a somber main theme, then move on to avant-garde gestures under the guidance of Bruce Fowler, an orchestrator who had worked with the legendary Frank Zappa. To capture the American soldiers who were fueled by rock and roll, Zimmer had his guitarists blast their strings in rapid-fire bursts. “We’d go in there and play really fast and really loud,” he says. “The adrenaline is pumping, but you have to have precision as well. And I think that’s the way these guys survived. They have an inbred sense of precision and capability.” Not only would the tight post-production schedule of Black Hawk Down tax the players’ mental capabilities, but their enthusiasm would also take its toll. At one session, Sam Maloney played drums so hard that her hands bled. In the end, Zimmer’s team would record over five hours of material. This CD is a synthesis of these improvisations and written music, as arranged by Zimmer’s long-time mixer Big Al Clay. “All of us here have the ambition to play music no one’s heard before, and to use instruments in a way that they’ve never been performed before,” the composer remarks. “I didn’t want the music to solely come from my point of view, but from the soldiers’. One thing I wanted from the score was unpredictability. I wanted us to feel like the soldiers in the field, who never knew where the next bullet was going to come from. So we would just watch the film and play up against it. There are unconscious turns that we all make as musicians. But here, I didn’t want people to know what was coming. In the end, I have a sense that no one’s ever done a score like Black Hawk Down.” The result of these efforts is an innovative combination of symphonic music, electronic ambience, military percussion and hard-edged rock music that is at once nightmarish, energizing and mournfully beautiful as it flows with the sounds of the North African world and the relentless music of war. But perhaps the score’s most emotional moments come from Senegalese vocalist Baaba Maal. As Black Hawk Down opens with images of starvation and warfare, Baaba Maal provides an anguished lament for the Somali people. “I needed an African point of view, because the film is mostly seen from the side of the American soldiers,” Zimmer says. “For me, Baaba embodies everything that is good about the spirit of Africa. He could be a cantor in a synagogue or a priest in a church. Baaba is a great storyteller. His family has been doing it for 2,000 years, and he reflects the voice of the Somali people. They’ve struggled with famine, poverty and death.” Black Hawk Down concludes with “Minstrel Boy,” Irishman Thomas Moore’s classic poem about a musician-warrior gone to fight, and destined never to return. To perform this song about a soldier’s undying spirit, Zimmer sought out Joe Strummer, the former lead singer of The Clash. “I’ve always wanted to work with Joe on this film, because I think there’s an intelligence to his music,” Zimmer says. “There’s nothing false about it, which made him the ideal choice to sing for the working soldier.” Once the exhausting task of scoring Black Hawk Down was over, Zimmer made sure to play its music for John Collett, an Army Ranger who survived the Mogadishu conflict. When he returned home, the first thing Collett did was to blast his stereo. “We all had CD players. Music kept us going,” Collett recalls. “I think musicians should keep doing their jobs, because it made it easier for me and my brothers to do our jobs at the end of the day. The music of Black Hawk Down represents what we went through.” Black Hawk Down is not a score about the patriotism of war or its bloodshed. It is about the bond that war creates in the men who are swept up in it. For a pacifist composer who’s scored more than his share of war films, the music of Black Hawk Down makes a hard statement. “I have a fascination about why we fight each other,” Zimmer says. “I don’t want my children to live in a world like that, because this is a very small one. We’d better start paying attention to that and taking care of each other before it’s too late. That’s the point of this movie, and I’ve sought to re-invent the action score as something that’s uncompromising and agonizing, more expressionistic than anything I’ve done before. Black Hawk Down is not an emotional score. It’s what’s real.” “I feel that my music shows respect for the young soldiers who went out there,” Zimmer concludes. “They were given a plan that was supposed to be perfect. Ultimately what survived was their courage to watch each other’s backs, and not to leave anyone behind.” Black Hawk Down’s music is about that feeling of duty. Daniel Schweiger www.spe.sony.com/movies/blackhawkdown |
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