Happy birthday, Angelo Badalamenti!

This great composer is probably best known for his dream-like and haunting work for the films of David Lynch.  Among the many songs and musical pieces that he’s done for Lynch, he composed the jitterbug music that opened David Lynch’s 2001 film, Mulholland Drive.  The scene below features the perfect mix of Lynch’s visual vision and Badalamenti’s musical ear.  What I especially like about this scene is that the music starts out as a very cheerful and vaguely generic but then it grows steadily more ominous as the scene plays out.

Here it is.  The haunting opening of one of the best films of the current century: