More than 23 years after “Seinfeld” left the airwaves, a soundtrack album featuring its immortal theme (and 40 more minutes of classic “Seinfeld” music) is about to be released.
WaterTower Music will release the 33-track album on Friday, July 2, on all digital platforms. It will be the first time that any of the music for Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer has been available outside of its original television context.
“It was 30 years in the making,” says “Seinfeld” composer Jonathan Wolff, with a laugh, about the new release. He confesses he doesn’t know why there wasn’t a “Seinfeld” soundtrack while the series was on NBC between 1989 and 1998.
“It struggled for the first few seasons,” he points out. “We were an accidental hit. We were busy getting episodes out, and nobody was thinking about the music. And that’s OK.” The series was among TV’s most popular shows for its last five seasons.
The advantage of a decades-later album is that Wolff was able to look back on the music from all nine seasons and assemble a collection of fun tracks. Those familiar slap bass, synthesizer and mouth-popping sounds that accompanied Jerry Seinfeld’s opening monologue every week open the album, but Wolff also had music from 180 episodes to choose from.
How did he decide on the content? Wolff explains: “Was it the primary audio of a famous ‘Seinfeld’ scene? Did it contribute in a significant way to the comedy of the scene? And upon hearing it, will it serve as an instantly identifiable signature and bring warm fuzzies to a ‘Seinfeld’ fan who will remember that scene?”
The range of styles is surprisingly broad: hip-hop for “Kramer’s Pimpwalk,” happy whistling and guitars for “Jerry the Mailman,” a “Mission: Impossible” vibe for “Jerry vs. Newman Chase,” suspense-thriller scoring for “Cable Guy vs. Kramer Chase,” ’90s rock for “Kramer’s Boombox,” Eastern mysticism for “Peterman in Burmese Jungle,” and vintage guitar-and-harmonica blues for “Waiting for the Verdict” from the series finale.
A highlight turns out to be music that was intended for, but never heard in, the show. When Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) dates a saxophone player in a seventh-season episode, the original script called for several scenes in a jazz club where he was playing.
“So I needed to create a whole bunch of jazz, but all those scenes went bye-bye,” Wolff recalls. Three tuneful jazz numbers, reflective of Wolff’s pre-TV-scoring career as a pianist-arranger-conductor in both Hollywood and Las Vegas, remained, all featuring a four-man combo led by saxman Bob Sheppard.
Most of the “Seinfeld” music, however, was created by Wolff himself in his Burbank studio, where he scored an estimated 75 series, mostly sitcoms, over two decades beginning in the mid-1980s.
He got the “Seinfeld” gig because Jerry Seinfeld was unhappy with the original music in the 1989 pilot and his friend, comedian George Wallace – with whom Wolff had worked for years in Las Vegas – recommended the composer.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Variety