Alan Howarth – Live at Hollywood Theatre!
October, 2018 – about a week before Halloween – and soundtrack composer, Alan Howarth, announces “I’ll bet you know this one” to the sold out crowd inside Portland, Oregon’s Hollywood Theatre. This appearance is four years after after his last time playing inside this theatre. Both sets followed movies that he helped create the soundtracks for (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch in 2014, and Prince Of Darkness this year), only this show is in support of his first live album.
Recorded at that 2014 show, boutique small-run vinyl record label, Wyrd War, packaged and released the album – Alan Howarth – Live At Hollywood Theatre – some on orange and black jack-o-lantern colored vinyl that fits the season itself.
Having worked on movie soundtracks for decades now, Alan’s early stories are filled with in-studio improvisation and attempting to create certain sounds with a limited budget’s worth of synthesizers and sequencers. As he recalls this now, he emphasizes to the crowd that an artist can’t limit their output based on only having access to limited resources. He uses his own past to communicate to those in the audience that you have to push forward with whatever it is that you have available. As the theater lights dim and he plays compositions over a projection of parts of movies his work appeared in: Big Trouble In Little China, Christine, Prince Of Darkness, Escape From New York, They Live, and Halloween, the thought sinks in that everyone in this room is seeing someone who didn’t let those restrictions discourage him, and what resulted were some of the most iconic compositional sounds from the era of filmmaking…
Being fortunate to attend both shows, some of my photographs from his 2014 appearance were used for the cover and liner notes on Alan’s live record.
Below are a few pictures from Alan Howarth’s 2018 appearance at Hollywood Theatre…
More info on Alan Howarth and his illustrious musical career can be found at http://alanhowarth.com.
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