Daily Jam - L'uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo

This column was originally published right before Halloween in 2018.

I’m going to be out of the office next week, right during my most favorite time of the year, and so it seems like today is the day for a Halloween-themed entry into the annals of songs I ceaselessly entertain myself with. Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, the combination of autumn weather, horror movies, ghosts and ghouls, pumpkin ales, and adolescent debauchery being things I would take in full time if it were so possible. And I used to pride myself on my costume effort before the boys came along and the focus shifted to them instead. Some of my past disguises include:

    - Kurt Cobain

    - Hunter S. Thompson

    - Token Goth Guy

    - Shaggy from Scooby-Doo

    - Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman from The Lost Boys)

    - A Mad Scientist

    - A Bear

    - A Werewolf

    - Courtney Love

And for my sons:

    - Chewbacca

    - Freddy Krueger

    - Ash (from Evil Dead)*

    - A White Tiger

    - A Vampire

    - A Skunk

This year, it’s looking like I’ll be repeating the werewolf, my wife as a witch, and my boys as ninja and some cartoon character named Catboy respectively.

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that I love, love, love Halloween and everything that comes with it. But let’s get to the music.

From a man who really needs no introduction and whose catalog of work has been inspiring me for years and years and years, Italian Maestro Ennio Morricone’s score for Dario Argento’s directorial debut, 1970’s The Bird with The Crystal Plumage, ranks as one of my all time favorites. Though he’s most well known for scoring spaghetti westerns, Morricone actually provided the soundtrack to quite a few giallos as well, utilizing his usual penchant for combining and mixing styles into something uniquely his own. The Bird with The Crystal Plumage is no different, shades of psychedelia and choral harmonies crafting a surreal and unnerving tapestry of sound, and very notably so on the haunting “L'uccello dalle Piume Di Cristallo.”

So let’s all enjoy some wonderfully eerie music from a master of the craft and take in these last few days of the Halloween season before we have to wait all over again. Watch a scary movie. Eat some candy. Carry out that murder you were thinking about. And have a Happy Halloween (even if it's still June).

*That one is quite possibly my masterpiece.