Angelo Badalamenti, favorite composer of David Lynch, died

The American musician, who disappeared on December 11 at the age of 85, had known celebrity thanks to the soundtrack of the series “Twin Peaks”.

by Bruno Lesprit

After Bernard Herrmann with Alfred Hitchcock or Nino Rota with Federico Fellini, he constituted with David Lynch one of the most famous song filmmaker-songwriters. US musician Angelo Badalamenti died on Sunday, December 11 at his home in Lincoln Park (New Jersey), his family announced. He was 85 years old.

Has his disappearance first comes in memory the theme of Twin Peaks (1990). One then two notes played on the baritone guitar with a tremolo effect, a minimalist dialogue with an electric piano then the entrance to the synthesizers. An obsessive motif arousing a feeling of sadness and then escape.

The Badalamenti meeting with Lynch was done in 1986. The director of Elephant Man was looking for Isabella Rossellini a vocal coach in Blue Velvet, and this one will end up signing the soundtrack. Lynch has ideas on music, ambition that composers generally fear. On the piano, Badalamenti gets to work, barely looks at the images and discusses with the filmmaker, who talks to him about the 15 symphony of Chostakovitch and a “ethereal beauty”.

Synthetic tablecloths

will follow a theme rather in Hollywood classicism and, for ether, the synthetic tablecloths of Mysteries of Love, song performed by Julee Cruise, whose voice was recommended by Badalamenti. Again, Lynch has a model in mind: the resumption of Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren by the group This Mortal Coil associated with Elizabeth Fraser. This is how Badalamenti will import the Scottish Dream Pop in American cinema.

What could not suggest a course started in Brooklyn. Born on March 22, 1937 in New York, Angelo Badalamenti went on the keyboard from the age of 8 and received academic training, composition, piano and cor. His brother, trumpeter, initiates him in parallel with the pleasures of jazz. Behind the pseudonym of Angelo (or Andy) Badale, he worked as a composer and orchestrator and gained visibility in 1966, when he co -signs two songs from the album High Priestess of Soul by Nina Simone, I Hold No Grudge and He Ain ‘ t comin ‘home no more.

More determining is his collaboration in 1967 with the electronic music duo formed by French Jean-Jacques Perrey and the German Gershon Kingsley (future author of the world popcorn tube). But Badalamenti is still in the shadows when he decided, in 1981, to publish a curious album under the name of The Andy Badale Orchestra. As announced, Nashville Beer Garden is a tribute to the German Polka recorded in the capital of Country.

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/Media reports cited above.