[In Lorretta’s Bedroom] Gettin’ Ready (Moonstruck Soundtrack) 1987 – Dick Hyman, Moe Koffman (alto saxophone)

A lot of music from the Moonstruck soundtrack has featured here, but today’s short piece is the first one written directly for the movie by jazz pianist and composer Dick Hyman (image inset), with Moe Koffman on alto saxophone. Once upon a time, if you had asked me what was so special about this 1:46 piece, I might have said it was just cocktail-lounge filler from an otherwise magnificent soundtrack. But over the decades my appreciation of it has only grown. I won’t pretend nostalgia hasn’t played a part in that.

As the title suggests, [In Loretta’s Bedroom] Gettin’ Ready plays during the scene where Loretta (Cher), a widowed Italian-American woman, is getting ready to go out to see La bohème (the opera by Giacomo Puccini) with her fiancé’s hot-tempered, estranged younger brother, played by Nicolas Cage. Make no bones about it – this piece is very much a product of its time and place. You can hear New York’s 1980s cocktail-bar nightlife running right through it, with a smooth, sensual jazz feel typical of what you might have heard heading out in that era. It also sends me back to another stylish New York film made just a few years earlier – Tootsie, of course.

Not just a neat snapshot of time and place, the sensual, slightly mysterious alto saxophone (played by Moe Koffman) tells you almost everything you need to know about Loretta’s sassy, sultry, and brash character. You can feel her anticipation building as she gets ready for the night ahead and the opera to come. This short, distilled piece probably won’t still be played in a hundred years like La bohème, but it works perfectly as a small time capsule – sharply capturing a character, a moment, and a very specific New York mood.

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand