Aleph Records To Release The Beloved Soundtrack From The 1976 Film

Aleph Records will release the soundtrack for Sky Riders on July 28. Composer Lalo Schifrin wrote the score, which features breathtaking sequences of music underscoring hang-gliders soaring through the skies.

The 1976 film Sky Riders starred Robert Culp and Susannah York as Jonas and Ellen Bracken. The life of the international industrialist and his family seems perfect until Ellen and the kids are kidnapped by terrorists in Greece and are held in an abandoned monastery. Inspector Nicholas (Charles Aznavour) unsuccessfully attempts to free them leading Ellen’s ex-husband (played by James Coburn) to plan a rescue attempt of his own. He hires a group of professional mountain gliders to help rescue the Brackens from the mountain lair where they are being held.

Composer Lalo Schifrin is a true Renaissance man. As a pianist, composer and conductor, he is equally at home conducting a symphony orchestra, performing at an international jazz festival, scoring a film or television show, or creating works for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the London Philharmonic and even The Sultan of Oman.

He has written more than 100 scores for films and television including the classic scores for Mission: Impossible, Mannix, The Fox, Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Amityville Horror. Schifrin’s recent film scores include Tango, all 3 films from the Rush Hour trilogy, Bringing Down The House, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, After the Sunset, and Abominable. To date, Lalo Schifrin has won four Grammy™ Awards (with twenty-one nominations), one Cable ACE Award, and received six Oscar™ nominations.

Schifrin’s score for Sky Riders incorporates many flavors. He utilizes the bouzouki and touches of a traditional Greek folk piece in “Climbers”, eerie suspenseful power cues like “The Terrorists”, and traditional circus instrumentation (brass, percussion, and glockenspiel) to achieve a lightness underscoring the first appearance of the hang-gliders in “Flying Circus”.

As described in the liner notes, by Julie Kirgo, Sky Riders is an interesting score in the career of composer Schifrin. Recorded in February of 1976, a year that would see his Academy Award™ nomination for the more conventional orchestral Voyage of the Damned, Sky Riders “would prove to be the last, for a time, in that long, innovative line of jazz/funk-dominated scores with which Schifrin made his reputation.” It would be over twenty years before Schifrin would revisit that style, when asked by Brett Ratner to resurrect the funky sound of Enter the Dragon for his 1997 film Money Talks.

Sky Riders will be available in stores and via iTunes July 28, 2009.