Director Conrad Rooks actually did not use the music Ornette Coleman composed for his film Chappaqua, and the reasons why are not entirely clear. Regardless of whether it was because the music was thought to be overpowering, underwhelming or simply inappropriate, there is no denying that the score stands up to scrutiny as a listening experience independent of the movie. Indeed, of the orchestral works that dot his oeuvre, this is right up there with The Skies Of America and is an important recording insofar as it unveils the full extent of Coleman's ability to make highly layered, multi-faceted music that has all of the shifting drama that defines the best of celluloid works. Which makes it plausible that Rooks passed on the music because he feared a sensory overload. There is, after all, much to concentrate on for the listener and the way that Coleman's trio and the strings and horns both push with and against each other is a brilliant example of how harmony and discord, a flexibility of key and pulse, a juxtaposition of joyous energy and eerie friction, can produce outstanding music. At the centre of the performance is the near constant throb of the sax-bass-drums, which see-saws frequently from muscular swing to fragmented march rhythms that tumble into existence so casually by way of the inspired loose-yet-precise sticks of Charles Moffett, which the music appears to decelerate without losing pace. Arranger Joseph Tekula chooses the right moments to weave in unsettling Ivesian chords and skillfully moulds them into subtle rhythmic asides to the leader's voice so that the score is constantly changing shape. When strings and horns hit a twisted, high register ‘cry’ together the result is startling, if not nerve-wracking. Yet passages of beauty come by way of the discreet, wistful sounds that would appear as shadows on a cinema screen; the trickle of marimba against slivers of bowed bass; the lonely, resonant rimshots; or the expertly placed whimpers of the horn. All of the drama in the music thus comes across like its own well-scripted thriller.