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Ethan and Joel Coen (photo: Wilson Webb)
The movies of Joel and Ethan Coen are known for a lot of things—music, of course, included.
The extraordinary soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in fact, not only won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002 (it also provided Dan Tyminski, Harley Allen and Pat Enright the Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals on “Man Of Constant Sorrow” and Ralph Stanley the Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance for “O, Death”) but spawned the Down From The Mountain concert documentary film and tour of the soundtrack artists.
The new Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man, which is set in a suburban Jewish neighborhood in the Midwest in 1967, is heavily laced with Jewish liturgical and Yiddish music. Can it do for this genre what O Brother did for country roots music styles?
Probably not. The soundtrack credits only one Yiddish song, “Dem Milners Trern,” and the liturgical music, most of which accompanies religious services, is unidentified—though likely familiar to observant Jews.
The Jefferson Airplane, on the other hand, could get a lift from the soundtrack, particularly the group’s groundbreaking 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. Four songs from that album are featured: it’s classic No. 5 hit single “Somebody To Love”--the soundtrack’s most prominent song--along with album tracks “Comin’ Back To Me,” “3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds” and “Today.”
Also included is “Good Times,” by Boston’s obscure Jefferson Airplane-sounding group The Art Of Lovin’, and Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” But unlike O Brother!, no soundtrack album is available.
“We might yet do one,” says Ethan Coen, “but we’ve kind of passed the window.”
He notes that frequent Coen Brothers soundtrack collaborator T Bone Burnett is interested in compiling a soundtrack album, “but it would mostly be Surrealistic Pillow and Hendrix and Belarsky.”
That would be the late Sidor Belarsky, the Russian opera singer who became a famous interpreter of classic cantorial music and Hassidic, Yiddish and Hebrew songs after moving to the U.S. in 1930. It is Belarsky’s version of “Dem Milners Trern” which is heard four times in A Serious Man.
The poignant song translates as “The Miller’s Tears” and evokes the exile of Jews from villages in Czarist Russia in the early 20th Century.
“We used it during the end credits and when Michael’s character [the movie’s central character Larry Gopnik, played to perfection by Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg] is listening to soothing music in his living room, and when it cross-cuts between him driving to work and Ableman [Gopnik’s acquaintance Sy Ableman, played by Fred Melamed] driving to the golf club,” says Coen. “We happened on it looking for Yiddish songs at the book shop at the Workmen’s Circle in New York [the Jewish community organization for émigrés founded in New York in 1900] and got it from his daughter Isabel Belarsky, who’s 89 and has kept his music alive since his death in 1975.”
The music of Surrealistic Pillow, obviously, was readily available.
“It was familiar because it was Top 40 stuff,” continues Coen. “And one thing about Jefferson Airplane and ‘Somebody To Love’ is that they fit the period—1967—unambiguously.”
The Coens sought “a consistency of the sound,” he adds, explaining why they stayed with the band and the album rather than having “a potpourri” of like-period artists in the manner of previous films like O Brother! “We even thought of using it to score the [film’s fanciful] story of the goy’s teeth, but then Joel remembered the Hendrix thing from Live At The Fillmore East and it seemed so much better.”
One is tempted, this being a Coen Brothers film, and especially in this particular Coen Brothers film since it focuses so much on meaning, to search for meaning—even when there really isn’t any. So the question of why the venerable rabbi at the end of A Serious Man mistakes the word joy in the first verse of “Somebody To Love”—as in “And all the joy within you dies”--for hope is timidly raised.
“We’re so unbelievably lazy!” Coen attests. “We quoted the lyric from memory and didn’t bother to check! ‘Joy…hope.’ It’s just a f***-up--not by design.”
A random moment, then, in a film that by brilliant design explores the seeming randomness of life.
Check out other stories I've written:
A Manhattan maestro's mix of music and martial arts
Ashford & Simpson's Sugar Bar no longer so secret
Comments
The "soundtrack" of this movie doesn't need to "make it big", nor does it resemble or supposed to resemble in any way the cheap commercial soundtracks of their previous movies. It is a marvelous piece of singing art by of one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, a man whos life story deserves a movie as to itself, while the phenomenon of his singing and what it stands for is probably bigger and deeper in meaning than all of the american cinema of the 20th century.
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