Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold & Max Steiner

4-STARS The film music composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner left their hometown of Vienna in the early 1930s to seek their fortunes in California. Many years later, in the late 1970s, Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine encountered Korngold's work for the first time when Joe Zawinul suddenly played a Korngold melody on tour. This sparked a fascination in Erskine that continues to this day. Peter Erskine, with the all-star band from the Jam Music Lab private university, has now given the compositions of Korngold and Steiner a jazzy twist. "Vienna to Hollywood" includes, among other things, "Tara's Theme" from the 1939 film "Gone With the Wind," presented here in a relaxed, swinging version. Or the title track from the 1959 film "A Summer Place" in an accelerated version, where the melody comes from Andreas Varady's guitar and not - as in the original - played by strings. "Vienna to Hollywood" is a testament to how Peter Erskine, pianist Danny Grissett, and the Jam Music Lab Ensemble approached the original pieces: calmly and with respect for this compositional foundation.