Drummer Antonio Sanchez’s percussion score for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman was an inspired solution to the director’s problem of how to add punctuation and pacing to a movie structured as a single continuous take. Sanchez, the virtuosic and diverse drummer with guitarist Pat Metheny’s bands, improvised his contributions to Iñárritu’s descriptions of the action (shooting hadn’t begun yet), using hands, sticks, mallets, brushes, a mix of new and vintage kit, and recordings made both in studios and in the streets. Sanchez’s score is full of bird-wing flutters; jolting, low-tone accents; balefully tramping beats tempered by hi-hat flickers; hollow, clanging sounds and chattery brushwork – and, for anyone who saw the movie, it all brings the Michael Keaton character Riggan’s disoriented lurchings straight back to life. Whether it works on its own depends on how fascinated you are by the detailed sonics of drums, but Sanchez’s playing is so varied, subtly paced and vehemently hip as to evoke a soundscape all its own. The set winds up with the Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Rachmaninov and John Adams music that also featured in Birdman.
