Jade is one of those James Horner releases that I suspect will be prized more for its collectibility than its musical content. I’ve often marveled at those who would spend hundreds of dollars on eBay for the out-of-print Vibes CD when one of his many in-print albums would be a lot more interesting. Those will probably be the same sort of completists that will seek out this album.

Neither commercially or critically successful, Jade was one of the less ludicrous entries in the sleazy “erotic thriller” genre that enjoyed a brief boom in the early nineties, thanks to the success of  Basic Instinct, the – ahem – climax of the genre. While Jade didn’t sink to the absurd depths of dreck like  Madonna’s Body of Evidence, it wasn’t too far off – let’s just say Linda Fiorentino is no Sharon Stone and David Caruso is no Michael Douglas.

Musically, Jade is all over the map. There’s James Horner’s brooding string and synthesizer sections, numerous pieces of traditional Chinese music, excerpts from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Loreena McKennitt’s world music extravaganza “The Mystic’s Dream”. It all adds up to a weird cultural/stylistic mishmash that never really coheres into something that makes much sense.

I think the one thing that puts me off most about this disc is Horner’s insistence on using primarily synthesizers that have dated the music badly some twenty years later. Ever wonder what a James Horner Law and Order episode would sound like? Well, here you go. There are a few nice ideas here, like the little theme in “Driving to the Airport” and “Governor’s Boy Visits”, that could have made this into a fun moody noir score had they been fleshed out by a real orchestra. As presented here however, it sounds cheap. And don’t get me started on the ridiculous “oohs” and “aahs” of the fake chorus in “Matt Gets Turned On”, patched straight in from the Casio keyboard you got for you 15th birthday.

I don’t want to be too hard on James Horner for writing this or La-La Land for releasing it, but considering this was the same year he did Braveheart, Apollo 13 and Jumanji, it’s hard to think of Jade as anything other than a footnote in Horner’s career. If you’re a collector who wants to fill a gap, this is a quality representation of the score – probably more than it deserved. If however, you’re considering a blind buy because it’s a James Horner score, you might want to listen to the samples first.