John Barry - The Cotton Club - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1984)

The Cotton Club is a 1984 drama, centered around the famous Harlem Jazz club of the 1930's. The story follows the people that visited the club, those that ran it, and is peppered with the Jazz music that made it so famous. Combining song and dance performances with drama (both on and off screen), Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club looks back to the 1920s peak of the legendary Harlem nightclub where only blacks performed and only whites could sit in the audience. Coppola creates a panorama of love, crime and entertainment centered on the club. The cast exists, among others, out of Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane and Lonette McKee. John Barry's efforts at supervising, scoring and recreating the energetic jive and wail of the era very nearly carry the day. His adaptations of standards by Ellington and Cab Calloway are reverent yet energetic, infused by original music that weaved it into an accessible and rewarding tapestry of time, place and art.