Naked Lunch: Music From The Original Soundtrack

Director David Cronenberg took on one of the greatest challenges of his career when he made a movie in 1992 called Naked Lunch. It wasn’t an adaptation of William Burroughs’ unfilmable novel; rather, it was a descent into the dissolving mind of a Burroughsian/Burroughs-esque character, with incidents drawn from the author’s life and from the novel placed alongside entirely new elements. Composer Howard Shore found the perfect partner to score the movie: alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose late 1950s recordings helped break open jazz, creating new avenues for instrumental expression just as Burroughs had cracked through the façade of 1950s social conformity with his horrific, junk-poisoned satire. (Naked Lunch was first published in July 1959; Coleman’s breakthrough album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, was released in November of that year.) Coleman leads a trio with bassist Barre Phillips and drummer Denardo Coleman (his son) on some tracks, joined by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. On other pieces, he plays solo in front of the orchestra, his saxophone floating in like a hallucination. Still other tracks feature the keening reeds of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, whose music fascinated Burroughs and with whom Coleman played in the early ’70s. The movie is a dark, weird vision of adaptation and autobiography that demands you get on its wavelength, and Shore’s and Coleman’s music is the perfect accompaniment, but also stands on its own as an avant-garde classical suite with free jazz adornments.