Although he's written music for Sonny and Cher, Michael Jackson and other stars, Lex de Azevedo will be forever linked locally to the LDS musical "Saturday's Warrior."
That association has been a plus and a minus for the composer. On the up side, it gives him real name recognition and marketability here. On the down side, he's pigeon-holed.Now, by targeting Utah to premiere his instrumental compact disc "Mountains" (Aubergine Rec-ords ER-21902), Azevedo hopes to show local citizens he's more than a one-trick pony. And, indeed, "Mountains" is a CD full of tricks - a good many of them computerized.
"My whole life I've written for hire," says the composer. "I just finally decided to do something for myself. When I left the Pacific Coast years ago I fell in love with the mountains. I wanted to write something that said to people, `Be still, listen, take time to live in the present.' This is a collection I did for myself."
"Mountains" - with its tandem use of full studio orchestra and state-of-the-art synthesizers - delivers those messages and several others. It's a "concept album." Each song plays off the other songs to create a pastiche, a "collage of song."
And the running theme is "a sense of place."
"For me, writing music begins with experience," Azevedo says, "then the experience becomes emotion and the emotion turns into music."
On "Mountains" we get the song "Park City," for instance, a jivey, upbeat number that brings to mind bustle and hustle. "Meadow" is a meditative layering of sounds, "Jackson" is a jaunty guitar piece along the lines of the "Gun-smoke" them and "Night in Bahia" is all Carnival.
The impression left by all of thisis - first - Salt Lake City must indeed be the crossroads of the West since the city tends to serve as a hub for the places Azevedo chooses to "profile."
Azevedo returned to Utah after a tempestuous few years on the coast ("I commute to California now"), and his fresh appreciation for space and scenery keeps what could have been warmed-over new age music from fading into pastels and pleasantries.
Yes, the high tech aspect of these cuts tends to make them feel over-produced at times, but - as Azevedo hoped - honest emotion serves as a firm base here. It invigorates the songs and keeps the listener listening.
Sometimes Azevedo seems to have been influenced by the landscape itself, sometimes he plays off the music traditionally associated with a landscape - as in the Brazilian and Western pieces. And - to no surprise - some of those experiments work better than others.
"Meadow," for instance, seems derivative of the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra"), and "Jackson" owes a debt to Aaron Copland's "Rodeo" and all the big-vista Western themes that have played off that piece.
On second listening I found myself skipping "Black Diamond" (a ski resort tribute) but re-playing "Hart to Heart" (a back-country musical ode).
During a recent press session, Azevedo himself claimed the cliche is true: one picture is worth a thousand words.
Now he's out to show that one picture can be worth a thousand notes as well.
The next few months will show how the CD-buying public responds.