3 Days of the Condor [Original Soundtrack]

It took veteran bandleader and film composer Dave Grusin a while to raise his profile higher than just being the guy who wrote the Graduate soundtrack jazz pieces most people skipped to get to the Simon & Garfunkel songs. But if any work really made his name as a key figure of ’70s cinema jazz, it was his score for Sydney Pollack’s 1975 CIA conspiracy thriller 3 Days of the Condor — a pairing of paranoia-tweaking political-intrigue espionage and upbeat, smooth-yet-sinister jazz-funk that turned out counterintuitive yet oddly effective. The title cut (glibly truncated as “Condor!”) has all the hallmarks of hip, urbane, post-Head Hunters synth-laced fusion, and instills it with a sense of grand scale where the deep rhythm takes precedence enough to carry any symphonic flourishes. That thrives elsewhere in the score, too — the slap bass-driven rumble that serves as the crescendo of “Yellow Panic,” the fidgety proto-boogie of “Out to Lunch”, and the theme-variation “Sing Along With the C.I.A.” — though another key highlight, the Jim Gilstrap-sung “I’ve Got You Where I Want You,” places its deep soul a bit further back to the turn of the decade. It’s a fairly lean LP: its dozen tracks play out in less than a half hour, with most of the cues clocking at under 2 ½ minutes, and counting a skippable if mordant-by-association version of Christmas chestnut “Silver Bells” in keeping with the film’s ironic holiday setting. But it still captures the movie’s potent blend of Beame-era NYC luridness and post-Watergate anxiety to a T.