Hurricane Warning/12 Strings of Joy – Les Fradkin (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Although we are used to Les Fradkin’s songs having a lyrical component, this time, he offers not one but two instrumental pieces.

The first, “Hurricane Warning,” as featured in the motion picture “The Accidental Icon: The Real Gadget Story”, runs on a simple but effective riff, one that seems to explore a number of sonic tangents and also cocoons itself in additional sounds and instrumentation as it goes. There is an inbuilt tension to the track, one that crackles with the anticipation of the titular weather front to come – a song that demonstrates just how effective instrumental music can be, in the right hands, at painting pictures without resorting to anything as obvious as words. Les Fradkin is the right pair of hands.

“12 Strings of Joy” takes the main musical motifs from some well-known classical pieces—namely Bach‘s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring“ and Beethoven‘s “Ode to Joy“ (hence the name)—and rocks them up in the way that the classical/rock crossover band Sky did so well back in the day.

All of this reminds us that Les Fradkin might be known for many things, and one of them is undoubtedly as a composer and arranger of sound scores and cinematic music.