Richard Chon

My good buddy Richard Chon – leader of that great Western Swing band The Saddlecats – has launched a new website, called “Dancing About Architecture,” to provide an online venue for his wonderful soundtrack work. Listen. (See some of the films themselves here.)

**Update** (July 28): Dancing About Architecture is now also home to Richard’s new blog. What a joy it is to read his prose! His first post is called “Guilty Pleasures: The Music of Sam Spence.”  Spence was the “house composer” for NFL films. Chon writes: “Spence’s music has high artisanal integrity. Its abundance of craft – he never sets a foot wrong – bespeaks a rigorous musical training, and his arguments are executed in bold, confident strokes of orchestral color.  One always feels that Spence is hitting his marks, that he’s gotten the effect he is going after. His sequences have a gratifying sense of logic, a thrilling sense of sequence and escalating tension, and they provide splendid pay-offs. Spence’s juggernaut cues build inevitably to grand and eloquent climaxes. And they speak with a confident rhetorical self-possession that just can’t be faked. That’s probably the most attractive thing about Spence’s music: it has the courage of its own convictions. Like William Holden and company in ‘The Wild Bunch,’ it walks the walk.”