For his score to
Ocean's Thirteen
, the third entry in director
Steven Soderbergh
's franchise remake of the
Frank Sinatra
Las Vegas caper movie
Ocean's 11
, composer
David Holmes
deliberately harked back to what was considered hip
jazz
around the time the original film appeared. You would almost think that, having amassed his band, including
Bruce Fowler
(trombone),
Steve Tavaglione
(reeds),
George Doering
(guitar),
Jason Falkner
(guitar, bass),
Woody Jackson
Stephen Hilton
(keyboards),
Scott Kinsey
(electric piano),
Zac Rae
(organ),
Robert Hurst
(acoustic bass),
Tim Lefebvre
Zach Danziger
(drums),
Davey Warf Rat Chegwidden
(percussion),
Luis Conte
Hugoth Nicolson
(percussion), and
Tommy Morgan
(harmonica), he locked them in a room and played them some of the
soul-jazz
hits of the mid-'60s, such as
"The 'In' Crowd,"
by
the Ramsey Lewis Trio
and
"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,"
the "Cannonball" Adderley Quintet
, plus occasional tracks by
Booker T. & the MG's
Jimmy Smith
, then asked them to come up with music in the same vein. That is what they did, even if it was actually composed by
Holmes
, who probably was thinking of such predecessors as
Neal Hefti
Dave Grusin
as he wrote. All that keeps this music from working well on its own is that, due to the editing demands of the film, the cues tend to be so short, some less than a minute in length, so that the band launches into an interesting musical idea, only to stop abruptly when a scene in the movie changes. The few additional tracks fit into the overall style of the score, particularly
Puccio Roelens
' update of
Duke Ellington
's
"Caravan."
And, of course,
's swaggering rendition of
"This Town"
from 1967 is just icing on the cake. ~ William Ruhlmann