As El Somnambulo noted last Sunday, this year’s WXPN countdown is gathering listeners’ votes for what’s billed as the 885 Greatest Songs from Movies & TV. I think they’re mixing apples and oranges.
Given how much film producers rely on already-known hits to evoke emotions on the cheap, I expect the list will be full of songs they cadged for soundtracks, detached from their original context and repurposed. I expect a lot more will be songs written for movies that have little to nothing to do with the screenplays they’re attached to.
Correspondingly, I expect TV theme songs to get short shrift. You probably couldn’t put together a list of 885 of them, but over the years lots of publications have compiled some version of “the 100 best TV theme songs.” I looked up a bunch of them, and if you combine them a lot more than 100 tunes are named.
I was surprised that one of my favorites made relatively few of those lists. I consider Dave Grusin’s theme for “St. Elsewhere,” the groundbreaking medical show that debuted in 1982, a classic of the smooth jazz genre that grew out of jazz fusion in the ’70s and flourished through the ’80s. It manages to sound simultaneously playful and melancholy, a perfect encapsulation of the show’s energy and tone.
Grusin scored or contributed to music to more than 100 movies and several TV shows, while also working as a bandleader and founder of GRP Records, which helped pioneer digital recording. He led a consortium of the label’s top-flight musicians, the GRP All-Stars, that included guitarist Lee Ritenour and Grusin on piano. They ended a 1985 concert at the Record Plant in Los Angeles with the “St. Elsewhere” theme.
