Three years after he received the 1960 Oscar for Original Song for the film “Never On Sunday”, Manos Hadjidakis teams up with Elia Kazan for the soundtrack of AMERICA AMERICA.
41 years after, the soundtrack has been remastered and republished.
Needing to disassociate himself from the picturesque folklore that was generated by the use of bouzouki and the “Never on Sunday” aftermath, Hadjidakis chooses to turn the zither into the leading instrument in the film. This way the orchestration, the music themes and the three songs by Nikos Gatsos retain their “greekness” intact.
The music recorded with the Athens Experimental Orchestra, full of lyrical elements and all rudiments of the distinct Hadjidakis aesthetic, narrates the voyage of a man in search of a better place and a better future. After all, as Kazan himself wrote we all come FROM someplace, we are all IMMIGRANTS, we all come here LOOKING FOR SOMETHING.
Impossible to find for the last two years, the soundtrack of AMERICA AMERICA is released again by SIRIUS, digitally remastered and accompanied by a lengthy booklet containing press reviews from the time the film and the soundtrack came out, an excerpt from Kazan’s autobiography, the complete soundtrack list of Manos Hadjidakis, the song lyrics by Nikos Gatsos and previously unpublished photos from the film shooting.
