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Ennio Morricone Experience.
 There's
something amusing about five accomplished musicians scrambling
from one instrument to the next in an attempt to play all the
parts from various Ennio Morricone musical scores, complete
with snatches of dialogue, and a range of appropriate sound
effects.
The ensemble's trumpet player, whistler and co-vocalist, Patrick Cronin, explains how the Ennio Morricone Experience first came together. "I'd been thinking about doing this sort of music for a couple of years myself, having listened to a lot of Ennio Morricone music, but I couldn't work out how you'd actually do it on stage unless you had a ninety piece orchestra involved, because a lot of it is quite orchestral.
"So I'd been mulling about it for a while," continues Cronin, "and I was speaking to Graeme Leak [percussion, string can] who has backgrounds in contemporary music, orchestra and composing, but who also works with samples and tape loops. Together we came up with an approach where we could get by with just a few musicians using tape loops and sounds to support the sounds of the acoustic instruments." Cronin goes on to explain how the idea developed further once the full cast of five were on board, each member bringing experiences from completely different backgrounds in music and stage performance.
"Dan Witton [bass, euphonium, vocals] in particular comes from a performance and theatrical background," Cronin elaborates. "We decided not to take a purely musical approach but to try to push it into a kind of theatrical or cabaret venture. So we do lines from those films, we do famous scores, we do sound effects. So it's a real mixture of everything." Indeed a night with the Ennio Morricone Experience is a little like watching the recording of a vintage radio play, but where the actors have to play all the instruments as well.
The music of composer Ennio Morricone is most often associated with the films of Sergio Leone, particularly his highly stylised spaghetti westerns such as 'A Fist Full Of Dollars', 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly' and 'Once Upon A Time In The West'. The Ennio Morricone Experience uses that public awareness to create a theatrical atmosphere for their performance. According to Patrick Cronin, it's one of the things that make Ennio Morricone's music so perfect for a live show.
"When you analyse it, it becomes interesting," says Cronin. "I think firstly it's a little bit familiar. The tunes have a real resonance; they're all in the back of people's minds. The other thing is they're all popular tunes, but they've also got a really strong orchestral basis to them."
So how do five Australian musicians manage to tackle such grandiose arrangements?
"Well we're always busy," laughs Cronin, "but in terms of performance, that's what makes it interesting, and that's where the comedy lies. When you have five blokes desperately trying to get around all these instruments and recreate these magnificent scores with so few of us, that's where humour comes into it.
"I think it works for us because we combine the music with theatrical presentation. If we were just playing music and treating it like a dry concert, I'm not sure it would have the same impact. It's all the stuff we do around it that puts the music in a context, so what we try to do is to get people to imagine a film while we play."
A lot of the humour in Ennio Morricone Experience comes from the ingenious use of everyday props such as wire coat hangers, flour sacks and cornflakes to create the various sound effects. And with so many instruments, objects, props and objects to arrange on stage, setting up for a performance can often take as long as five hours, and it's this reason that forces the ensemble to choose their venues and dates carefully...
"We also hire stuff wherever we go, like vibraphone and timpani drums," says Cronin of all the equipment required. "We really enjoy working at the Space Theatre; it's really good for us, because often we've worked in pubs and outdoor music festivals where it's difficult to get a lot of focus. In a theatre you've got an audience that are absolutely focused, and because the audience is quiet, you can do very quiet things." There's plenty of loud things in there too though, both instruments and props. "I've never actually counted them all," says Cronin on the number of their various pieces, "but we have got a very large road case."
Steven Hocking
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The Ennio Morricone Experience play Sat 19 & Sun 20 June at the Space Theatre.
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