For the past year and a half I've been compiling Shaw Bros music and cues. Like I said in the last post, even as a child I really had a thing for movie music. I've been watching Shaw Bros since I was in the womb. As time goes on, this music is finally starting to get some of the recognition it deserves. I would never have dreamed that I could have found this stuff. In all, I have about 1.25GB worth so it'll be uploaded in a number of posts. Who would have thought the whole first post would be just numbers? Aside from that, originally I thought Shaw was exclusively De Wolfe but I've found that they would use pretty much whatever sounds good. They've lifted cues from spaghetti westerns, poliziotteschis, 007, american action films, giallos, UK and japanese tv series' and who knows how many other places.
I was listening to any and everything that fell under those categories and I became obsessed. That's also how I got into library besides instrumentals. So I'm not so caught on IDing cues. It's funny that I can look back and see how much "greatness" I've missed because I paid no attention to how good it sounded, I just knew it wasn't a familiar Shaw Bros tune. I'm not listing individual tracks because there are so many. This first part is 87 files alone... so I'll just list the movies. Also, I paid the ID3TAGs no mind. If you really want to know who a certain track is by I may be able to find out. They are strictly listed by filename.
2 Champions of Shaolin
3 Evil Masters
4 Riders
5 Element Ninjas
5 Shaolin Masters
5 Superfighters
5 Venoms
7 Man Army
8 Diagram Polefighter
10 Tigers of Kwangtung
Keep in mind that the quality varies alot. Some of these are original rips, some are streaming rips, some have sounds, and some sound like crap (my earliest ones). With all of that being said, enjoy and feel free to discuss and or contribute tips as to where I can find more. BTW, Yu Xihong (Ironboat) is a name I've used on a number of Shaw Bros/music forums over the years.
8.01.2008
Yu Xihong's Shaw Bros Library No. 0-10
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3 comments:
Very interesting. I'm also a big fan of movie music/MA films, so of course I'm checking this stuff out. One thing I loved about the early HK films was how they'd simply take music from whatever and wherever and just put it in their films, and then in the credits they'd have it say, "composed by...", even if the 'musician' hasn't actually done anything! This isn't true of every film, of course, but quite a lot of them borrowed liberally, and not just Shaw Brothers films, either. Golden Harvest had some notable composers in their stable like Joseph Koo (best known for Bruce Lee and of course A Better Tomorrow w/ Chow Yun Fat) and Frankie Chan (also in MA films; check him out as the villain in Prodigal Son, for example). There's so much cool stuff out there.
Thanks.
Thanks Mike. As for the random "borrowing," I just found out recently that it's not quite so random like I thought. Maybe for non-shaws it is though.
I've finally discovered the Shaolin secret (no j/k), but stuff that I thought was unrelated actually belongs to the same family. The giallos, spaghetti westerns, poliziotteschis, and what ever else all came from RCA Italy. So I think, ok I'm on to something, but still it's not quite so easy.
At first it seemed that the credited musicians ("composed by Chen Yung Yu" etc) chose the best tracks from selected OSTs. Again I was wrong. Even though they were on RCA Italy as LPs, they were compiled into themed library LPs and dubbed the RCA SP 10000 series. Coincidentally, all of the "best tracks" were all on the same LPs together. They go by the respective themes:
Azione
Musiche De Genere E Di Maniera
Esterni
Musiche Leggere E Gaie
Romantici
Esotici Danze Folklore
Dramatici E Musiche Di Tensione Psicologica
Ballbili
...among other non-volume releases.
And this stuff is really rare. I'm still trying to draw a distinction between some of the later movies "borrowed" (Mad Max and Taxi Driver). People have asked about non-shaws quite a few times, but I haven't crossed that line yet. Maybe someday. And yeah they did get away from library in the 80s I have to catchup to some of the later stuff (police stories). Thanks again.
One of these LPs popped up on Ebay @$299.99 "Buy It Now." Yeah right...
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