Lalo Schifrin soars with Sky Riders
25-Jul-2009 -
Aleph Records has released
the beloved soundtrack from
the 1976 film.
Composer Lalo Schifrin wrote the score for
sequences of music underscoring hang-
gliders soaring through the skies.
The 1976 film Sky Riders starred Robert
Kulp and Susannah York as Jonas and
Ellen Bracken. The life of the international
industrialist and his family seems perfect
until Ellen and the kids are kidnapped by
terrorists in Greece and are held in an
abandoned monastery.
Inspector Nicholas (Charles Aznavour)
unsuccesfully attempts to free them leading
Ellen's ex-husband (James Coburn) to plan
a rescue attempt of his own. He hires a
group of professional mountain gliders to
help rescue the Brackens from the mountain
lair where they are being held.
Schifrin's score for Sky Riders incorporates
many flavors. He utulizes the bouzouki and
touches of a traditional Greek folk piece in
Climbers, eerie suspenseful power cues like
The Terrorists, and traditional circus
instrumentation (brass, percussion, and
glockenspiel) to achieve a lightness underscoring
the first appearance of the hang-gliders in
Flying Circus.
As described in the liner notes, Sky Riders
is an interesting score in the career of Lalo Schifrin.
Recorded in February of 1976, a year that would
see his Academy Award nomination for the more
conventional orchestral Voyage Of The Damned,
Sky Riders would prove to be the last, for a time,
in that long, innovative line of jazz/funk-dominated
scores with which Schifrin made his reputation.
It would be over twenty years before Schifrin
would revisit that style, when asked by Brett
Ratner to resurrect the funky sound of
Enter The Dragon for his 1997 film Money Talks.
The score for Sky Riders is available from
Also available as download via iTunes.
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