Saturday the 20th of June marks the debut concert of THE JASON FREDERICK CINEMATIC SOUND, performing new arrangements of music from action and detective films from the 1960's and 1970's from films such as DIRTY HARRY, BULLITT, THE ITALIAN JOB, GET CARTER, STARSKY AND HUTCH, and THE SWEENEY, in support of the release of their album of the same name.
MODS AND COPPERS the album was recorded in spring 2015 in the UK, and features performances by Brandon Allen, Quentin Collins, Dan Mullins, Robbie Harvey, Steve Bingham, Scott Wheeler and Sean Freeman, of new arrangments of film and tv music by Jason Frederick.
The following are excerpts from a short interview about the project:
Jason Frederick : "It’s always been the music that I feel as though I grew up with. It feels so comfortable, the combination of the incredibly strong material and the great sounds and the great musicianship. I’ve gone on to be exposed to a really wide spectrum of music in the years since, but it’s always sort of been the foundation – there’s been elements of that late 60’s / early 70’s approach in lots of what I’ve been involved in since, even if it’s something as simple as combining a muted pick bass with orchestra or choice of organ on something..."
“...I got really excited about the idea of making an album with a band again. For a few years now I’ve been overdubbing and creating studio-based music for the most part, and as fun as that can be, I originally came from the world of writing music for musicians to play, whether it was for bands or small ensembles or orchestras…"
"...A lot of modern music, by necessity, gets produced nowadays with a few musicians overdubbing on top of a sequenced track – for reasons that are both practical and necessary, this is what has become the reality of how a lot of this music gets made (You can get by with a completely electronic production as well, with no human musical performances, but I generally avoid that). But the days of the great groove-based library music of the 1970’s are by and large a thing of the past…
So anyway, yeah, because this music is so wonderful, I really thought it’d be great to cast an album the way someone like Henry Mancini or John Barry would’ve, where they knew the quality of the players they were getting, and that they were really ideal for what they were writing. And I got really lucky with it, because everyone I approached, my very short list of who I thought would be particularly good and who understood the feel of this music, all said yes. ..“
“Trying to sort of…honour the music by reinterpreting it but retaining what makes it so fantastic, that was the challenge-if you can call it that, it’s a pretty good challenge as far as challenges go! I remember listening to Pin Ups by David Bowie as a teenager, and thinking that even though it was a cover album, it was completely of a piece with Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust – that was one of the first times I thought that you could do material by others and still have it sound like you, and that was potentially as original a statement as writing something ‘original’ that was actually completely indebted to someone else…but then, of course, you can too far in the other direction and deconstruct something to the point that it really isn’t recognisable anymore – what made it so interesting in the first place is no longer there. Which has it's place too, of course, but like I was saying, that was the sort of balancing act of this album, to approach it as a fan of this music, and to add something else to it so that it wasn’t just a recreation of something that was already there and already brilliant, but to keep as much of what is so great about it and the era in which it was made as possible, at the same time…"