Out of Print Gems: Andrew Lloyd Webber - The Odessa File

Hip-hop producer J Dilla died in 2006 of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a blood clotting disorder, after an extended illness that left him wheelchair-bound for his final European tour. Though only 32 years old at the time of his death, Dilla's career had already featured collaborations with De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Roots (to name a few), in addition to a handful of solo releases. His final album, Donuts, was a universally acclaimed collection of instrumentals built on an emblematically eclectic group of samples, ranging from standbys like James Brown and Stevie Wonder to electronic music pioneers Raymond Scott and Bruce Haack. In creating tracks for himself and others, Dilla relied on a personal record collection numbering in the vicinity of 10,000 LPs. In the years following his death, most of these records traced a circuitous path back to the MC's mother, Maureen "Ma Dukes" Yancey. Ma Dukes subsequently has put many of these records up for sale on eBay, with proceeds going towards paying off debt incurred during the course of Dilla's treatment, providing income for his two daughters, and establishing a charitable organization for musically-inclined children.

J Dilla Collection sales are a grab bag, with each buyer being sent a record picked at random from the collection. Enticed by the lottery system (in addition to the obvious allure of potentially receiving a record actually sampled in one of Dilla's many hundreds of productions), I purchased an album last week and received - unsurprisingly - an obscurity: an Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack to a 1974 Nazi hunting film called The Odessa File.

The film was directed by Ronald Neame, fresh off the man-vs.-tidal wave cult classic The Poseidon Adventure, and starred Jon Voight as a reporter who uses information from a Holocaust survivor's diary to track down the SS commandant of the Jewish ghetto in Riga. Reception of the film online is in general highly positive, with the occasional critique often reserved for the film's score by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

By 1974, Webber had already begun his monumentally successful career as a Broadway composer with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar; he would famously go on to make boatloads of money by inexplicably anthropomorphizing cats (to unsettling ends) and earning the perpetual enmity of Roger Waters (to hilarious ones). In the meantime, The Odessa File was the 3rd and final soundtrack composed by Webber, following Gumshoe in 1971 and an adaptation of his score of Jesus Christ Superstar for the filmed version in 1973. Standing on its own, the album is an interesting piece of work, featuring funky interludes juxtaposed in a vaguely jarring way with a Perry Como-sung Christmas theme and German beer hall music. The entire experience is well summed-up by the video below, which begins with "Miller's Theme," a cello workout featuring Webber's brother Julian, and segues into a marching band polka number.

Surprisingly, despite the merits of the music and the stature of Andrew Lloyd Webber in American popular music, The Odessa File soundtrack was never released on CD, and in fact, has been out of print since its initial release 40 years ago. Interested parties can download the album here.