Playlists on Amazon Prime--a whole new source of albums... (1 Viewer)

[Vic Pardo]

I discovered a couple of days ago that if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can create playlists from the music available on the site and play them on your computer or your kindle. So I started checking different film composers to see who they had--Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, etc.—and when I saw the feature for “Create a Playlist,” I made one for each of the aforementioned composers and began going through their albums, avoiding pieces I’ve heard ad infinitem over the years (the Leone westerns, THE MISSION, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, PSYCHO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, BEN-HUR, etc.). Morricone is better represented than the others. You can also just add whole albums to "My Music," so I did that with the Morricone soundtrack for L’ASSOLUTO NATURALE (HE AND SHE, 1969), which I’d never even heard of before, and many others. And then I began searching for more obscure composers I like. I was disappointed that there was only one album for Hayao Miyazaki’s go-to composer, Joe Hisaishi, and zero results for several other Japanese composers. But then I got the idea to search for Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, a prolific Italian film composer active from the 1950s to the 1970s, and was delighted to find several albums, including LA MAJA DESNUDA (THE NAKED MAJA, 1958), the film that first ignited my interest in Lavagnino when I saw it on WOR/Channel 9 in the ‘70s. (It stars Anthony Franciosa as Goya and Ava Gardner as the title Maja.) I only have one CD album by Lavagnino (his ‘60s sci-fi themes—WILD, WILD PLANET, et al) and random pieces by him on some Spaghetti Western compilation CDs, so this was quite exciting.