TRACKLISTING
1 - Remembering Chet
2 - Playing By Heart
3 - Game of Hide and Seek
4 - Tenderly Chet Baker
5 - I Didn't Love You Less
6 - A Place Inside Alive and Well
7 - Remembering Chet
8 - Scene Unseen
9 - You Go To My Head Chet Baker
10 - I Want To Stay the Night
11 - Goodnight Moon
12 - Mark's Graveyard Site
13 - These Foolish Things Chet Baker
14 - Playing By Heart — Vows Renewed

DIRECTOR'S NOTES
Nothing at present.

ABOUT THE FILM
Nothing at present.

COMPOSER'S NOTES
Article by journalist Jon Burlingame

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture", said the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Clara Schumann. Willard Carroll, the writer and director of Playing By Heart, borrowed her remark for a line of dialogue heard near the end of his movie — altered slightly, so that it begins "talking about love ... ".

Both, as it happens, are true. Eleven fascinating individuals spend the two hours of Playing By Heart struggling to communicate about love. We could spend pages (and many writers have) attempting to explain why John Barry's music is so affecting, both within a movie and as a listening experience on its own.

When Carroll began conceptualizing his film (then called "Dancing About Architecture"), he decided to include a number of classic recordings by the great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, whose sensitive playing made him a favorite of the West Coast jazz crowd in the Fifties. Two of the film's key characters — a long-married couple played by Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands — came of age to this music.

For the film's underscore, Carroll says, "I wanted to have a sort of contemporary version of that sound. I knew that John was a jazz trumpet player and had written a lot in that idiom. I thought he was the perfect choice. And when I met him, it turned out that he was also a big Chet Baker fan".

The idea appealed to Barry, who in recent years has written such grandly romantic, large-scale orchestral scores as Out Of Africa and Dances With Wolves, but whose lengthy, Oscar-studded résumé also includes such jazz-inflected classics as The Knack, Body Heat and The Cotton Club.

From the moment that Barry first recorded his theme "Remembering Chet" in New York, Carroll knew that he had made the right call: its smooth, delicately bittersweet qualities perfectly complemented the film. Chris Botti, a Verve artist whose mellow style appealed to both Barry and Carroll, was signed as the trumpet soloist.

"John really connects with a movie in a very personal way", says Carroll. "Going back to what the movie was originally called, you can only talk about the music so far, and then your gut has to take over. When I heard John's music and it was put into the picture, I realized that that was what the movie required. It was exactly, and more, what I hoped the score would be."

The Los Angeles sessions were a delight. L.A. musicians love to play on Barry dates because he is among the few true melodists writing for movies these days. And Barry's expressive conducting style leaves no doubt about his intentions on every cue. The jazz soloists — trumpeter Botti, pianist Mike Lang, bassist Leland Sklar, alto sax player Daniel Higgins and drummer Harvey Mason — luxuriated in the sound of sixty-plus string players ("that big harmonic space", as Barry puts it).

Pressed to describe his score, the composer responds, "It's kind of moody, laid-back L.A. today ... very much what the West Coast jazz movement was back in the Fifties and Sixties, with Chet Baker and Shelly Manne and Bud Shank and Chico Hamilton, all those guys".

In fact, much of Barry's music for Playing By Heart evokes the atmosphere of after-hours jazz clubs, where the lights are low, the bar is open late, and the musicians are very much in synch with both the crowd and each other. A good deal of the film takes place in just these kinds of nightspots, and Barry's score reflects that ambience.

But a significant portion of the music of Playing By Heart is not the smoky jazz of piano riffs and alto sax solos, but touching, string-dominated orchestral cues that provide emotional support for some of the most heart-wrenching moments of the movie, notably those involving the dying Mark (Jay Mohr) and his mother Mildred (Ellen Burstyn).

By the end of the film, when six seemingly diverse storylines converge into a single, satisfying whole, "John's music becomes a full-fledged romantic score, which was always the idea", says Carroll. "The theme doesn't really get its fullest expression until the very last shot of the movie. That's something that we were very conscious about."

Those final scenes on the dance floor, with that long overhead shot of the couples swaying slowly to Barry's "Vows Renewed", sum up the film in a way that reminds us why these talented artists choose to work in this medium: those specific images, wedded to those unique and original sounds, create a mood and a memory and a feeling that couldn't be experienced anywhere else, at any other time, under any other circumstances.

Yet the music lives apart from the movie. That's the gift of John Barry, shared by only a handful of contemporary composers working in movies — to be able to provide a soundtrack album that is so effortlessly and intrinsically musical that it doesn't matter if you haven't seen the film. There is something about his music: something alluring, something beguiling, something magical.

Then again, talking about John Barry's music is like ... well, you know.