PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles Symphony recorded last weekend the cool, smoky down-beat sounds of detective film noir created by conductor and director Adam Stern for an old-time radio drama that will air Tuesday, Dec. 7.
Stern led a six-piece ensemble on Port Angeles High School Auditorium’s stage Saturday, recording the soundtrack for “Adrian Cross, For Hire.”
Penned by Dungeness-area resident John Grissim, who wrote, produced and directed the radio play based on the Olympic Peninsula, the drama will air on Sequim radio station KSQM 91.5 FM.
Although a time has not been yet scheduled for the broadcast, Grissim said the radio drama will be aired sometime in the evening on the radio station’s second anniversary and will be rebroadcast thereafter.
Grissim said he was honored to have a music professional the caliber of Stern write an original soundtrack for the radio drama.
Grissim in 2009 contacted Stern, who also conducts the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, and the rest is radio music history.
“I’ve written a lot of music for plays,” Stern said sitting at a Baldwin grand piano during a recording session break Saturday afternoon.
“Making the hero’s theme suddenly tragic, or suddenly mysterious, is something I’ve done many, many times in my life,” he added.
“So when I read Mr. Grissim’s script, I said, ‘Well, if I needed to be sold before, this just nails it down.'”
Stern said he had a tremendous amount of fun coming up with the score.
‘Cross my fingers’
“I’m a classical geek, I’m a Bach, Beethoven, Mozart guy, so me trying to write jazz is a bit of a stretch, but I think it worked, cross my fingers.”
Grissim said that, besides Stern’s vast experience with the Seattle Philharmonic and Port Angeles Symphony, the conductor was once a musical copyist for rock-jazz fusion legend Frank Zappa.
Stern won a Grammy Award in 1991 for “Best Classical Record Producer.”
Stern is in his sixth season with the Port Angeles Symphony, commuting here from Seattle once a week to work with the orchestra.
“Adam is devotee of film noire and music for the screen,” Grissim said, citing a big reason why he sought out Stern.
Strait Music’s Leo Bidne donated the equipment and recording time Saturday, digitally capturing the soundtrack as the musicians churned it out on the fly, with little or no rehearsal.
Grissim said the music was recorded in surround sound, which he said is the future of digital radio.
Joining Stern, who played piano, were Mary Moon, violin; Fred Thompson, cello; Clint Thomas, bass; Lylburn Layer, clarinet; and Beatrice Kaufman, bassoon.
15 characters
Grissim auditioned some 40 radio voices earlier this year and filled a cast of 15 characters.
They are Ron Graham as Adrian Cross; Shelley Taylor as Christine Hale, Cross’ love interest; announcer Steve Berg; Jim Dries as Preston Hale; Graham Reaves as E. Danforth Hale; Chandler Wendenborn as Mitchell Hodder.
And Ric Munhall as Audie Chambliss, Ric Munhall as Roscoe the Parrot, Frank Romeo as LeRoy Purvis, Sheri Burke as Sgt. Jennings, Jim Weldon as Chief Callaham, Greg Madsen as Nelson Paul, Erika Van Calcar as the Coast Guard dispatcher, Ian Scott as the Coast Guard pilot and Mike Bunnell as Tyler at the fuel dock.
Grissim, who in the 1960s and ’70s followed, interviewed and wrote about rock and country artists such as the Grateful Dead and Johnny Cash for Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco, produced the original one-hour radio mystery drama, single-handedly auditioning the players and recruiting Stern and his ensemble.
He also is a former editor for Surfing magazine in Australia.
This is Grissim’s first show at a radio script.
Loner, jaded romantic
He describes the show’s protagonist, Adrian Cross, as a lover of the ocean and an adventurous, self-reliant loner and slightly jaded romantic. He lives aboard an aging cabin cruiser in the Sequim’s John Wayne Marina and “scrapes by as a yacht surveyor, charter captain, hull cleaner, salvage consultant, boat repo man — anything more or less legal — and regularly crosses paths with Sequim’s police chief with whom he has a flinty relationship.”
Grissim approached station founder and board President Rick Perry in February. He pitched the project, and Perry embraced it.
First episode
In the show’s initial hourlong episode, “The Schooner Mystic Rose,” Cross tracks down a priceless artifact stolen generations ago from a renowned elder of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, tangles with a notorious motorcycle club, courts the aristocratic daughter of a timber baron, foils a kidnapping and participates in a dramatic shootout in the waters off Salt Creek County Park west of Port Angeles.
The show includes a couple of steamy scenes that probably wouldn’t have been aired in the old days, Grissim admitted, and the project is designed to appeal to the station’s older listener demographic as well as attract new listeners from younger generations.
Greg Madsen, one of the cast who has directed films in Chicago and Los Angeles, said using Port Angeles High’s stage as a sound recording studio had to be a first.
He described Grissim “a Renaissance man in our midst.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
