Bernard Herrmann: Taxi Driver (soundtrack) [MUSIC ON VINYL]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 180g pressing is part of Music On Vinyl's At The Movies series. It is the last score Herrmann wrote, and it earned him a posthumous Academy Award nomination.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered
• At The Movies series
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Bernard Herrmann gave Hitchcock the shrieking strings of Psycho and the vertigo of Vertigo, and Orson Welles the music for Citizen Kane. For Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver he found something else entirely: a lonely, smoky jazz theme for a New York cabbie who can't sleep. He finished recording the score in December 1975 and died in his sleep hours later.

The "Theme from Taxi Driver" is the one everybody knows, an alto saxophone drifting over brushed drums like steam rising from a manhole. Around it Herrmann sets low brass, harp and snare in dark, tightening patterns; "I Work the Whole City" prowls, "Betsy in a White Dress" softens for a moment, and "The .44 Magnum Is a Monster" bares its teeth. Neely Plumb produced the original Arista album for its 1976 run in record shops, and "God's Lonely Man" closes it on the theme once more.

Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd did the rest on screen, and the music has followed the film into film-school syllabi ever since. It remains the smoothest saxophone ever written for a man having a decidedly difficult fortnight.

Also at Kops: more Bernard Herrmann on vinyl · browse Soundtracks

Tracklist

Listen

On Arista / Music On Vinyl (cat# MOVLP492), a reissue of the 1976 soundtrack.