Photo by Jeff Busby

The full legacy of composer Ennio Morricone is probably impossible to measure. The would-be experimental jazz musician made his name in the 1960s, reinventing the sound of the American frontier through his epic and innovative scores for director Sergio Leone’s iconic, Italian-made Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and Once Upon a Time in the West. His innovative soundtracks have influenced generations of artists, from indie bands like Calexico to filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino.

“He took this great big orchestral score and mixed it with weird sound effects and human voices howling like coyotes and it changed everything,” says Canadian-born and British-based designer and director Denis Blais, who brings his successful The Spaghetti Western Orchestra to Harbourfront’s World Stage this weekend. “He made Westerns sexy.”

Blais says that the show, in which five Australian musicians — Boris Conley, Patrick Cronin, David Hewitt, Graeme Leak and Philip Mcleod — play up to 100 instruments, including unconventional noisemakers like corn flakes and nail clippers, is difficult to describe. “I call it ‘soundscape cinematheque,’” he offers with a laugh. “It’s a bit of an event. It’s not just a concert, because it has so much comedy in it and quite a lot of theatrical elements.”

Blais fell in love with an earlier incarnation of the show that he saw at the Edinburgh Fringe. “I was a groupie fan. I wasn’t looking for a show — I don’t really do this for a living; I usually do interior and architectural design. The last thing on earth I wanted was to direct a show,” he says.

But when he approached the players and shared some of his ideas for refining and expanding the show, they asked him to come on-board to direct the production. He introduced a subtle narrative arc and christened each of the performers with an appropriate alter ego, like The Bankteller and The Youngfeller. He used light and colour — orange, cyan and the purple haze of dawn and dusk — to evoke the atmosphere of the films, but shied away from elaborate staging. Despite his strong design background, it was important to Blais to keep the focus on the music and the organic nature of the show itself.

“They had so much shit on stage, all these bits and bobs to recreate all these sounds, plus their instruments — grand piano, vibraphones, xylophones, everything — and all the cabling for 65 microphones. This to me is the set,” he says.

The show, which premiered at the 2007 Montreal Jazz Festival, has just finished a successful month-long run in Paris and will be touring the States after its stop in Toronto. While in Montreal, Justin Trudeau, a family friend of Blais’, teared up a bit afterwards, explaining that his father was mad for the Morricone-Leone oeuvre.

“Everybody has some memories from these movies. And even if you don’t, the scores are so powerful — they’ve been reused by everyone from Metallica to Ultra Mars to the Ramones — that the music continues to haunt us in a really magical way.”

“You see these reels rolling in the audience’s heads as they create the movies in their minds,” he says. “I tell them: we’ll be Morricone; you be Leone.”