Bare-root music

The last time Jack White played in Los Angeles, he was leading the White Stripes through a blistering blast of primitive rock ‘n’ roll at the Greek Theatre.

For his return to town on Monday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, White traded in the Stripes’ red and white uniform for a throwback brown coat, and his electric guitar for an acoustic. Instead of his kinetic young fans, the Detroit-based rocker faced an older, Hollywood crowd, and in place of Stripes drummer Meg White there was a traditional mountain string band alongside him -- banjo, mandolin and fiddle.

The occasion for this role reversal was “The Words and Music of ‘Cold Mountain,’ ” an event designed by Miramax Films to celebrate the Anthony Minghella-directed Civil War drama that will be released on Christmas Day. The program included a discussion of the film with Minghella and readings by cast members Nicole Kidman, Jude Law, Brendan Gleeson and Kathy Baker. But it was the movie’s music that dominated the stage, from White’s traditional numbers to the two sublime ballads sung by Alison Krauss (one, “You Will Be My Ain True Love,” accompanied by Sting, the song’s writer) to the finale, a rousing vocal fusillade from a choir of sacred harp singers from Alabama, joined by Kidman and the other actors.

If the combination of period film and American roots music rings a bell, that means you’re up on your recent movie-music history. When music producer T Bone Burnett assembled the music for Joel and Ethan Coen’s picaresque Depression-era epic “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” three years ago, he managed to trigger a mini-phenomenon.

The soundtrack album of folk and bluegrass songs defied all expectations by selling 6.5 million copies and winning a Grammy as album of the year, inspiring a surge of interest in the folk music of the American South.

The “Cold Mountain” album, which will arrive in stores Tuesday from Burnett’s DMZ label through Columbia/Sony Music Soundtrax, is Burnett’s follow-up in that genre, but the veteran musician and producer isn’t counting on a recurrence.

“ ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ was one of those crazy moments where everything lines up,” he said last week. “And that was so much the Coen brothers’ vision and idea and everything. That to me is a thing unto itself. This one, I enjoy the record tremendously. It’s very serious, it’s much more somber music than ‘O Brother.’ I don’t expect anything, and certainly nobody has pushed me in that way. I don’t think there were any expectations of selling millions and millions of these records.”

Still, the “O Brother” track record, along with the presence of such names as White, Krauss, Sting and Elvis Costello, who co-wrote the end-title song, “The Scarlet Tide,” with Burnett, will generate more interest for “Cold Mountain” than most soundtracks and most folk-leaning albums enjoy. But the record doesn’t make any concessions to accessibility, in keeping with the film’s grueling depiction of human cruelty and corruption.

The arrangements of such traditional tunes as “Wayfaring Stranger,” “The Cuckoo” and “Sitting on Top of the World” are bone-bare authentic, emanating an integrity that suits their function in the film. Among other things, the music represents the deeply rooted social foundations that are destroyed by a war whose violence creeps into places far from the battlefield.

Like “O Brother,” “Cold Mountain” is a variation on “The Odyssey,” an episodic tale of a warrior’s journey back to his woman. But as Burnett points out, “This odyssey takes several decidedly darker turns than the other one, and the music is much more somber. It goes deeper back into the old church roots of all of this music.

“The most authentic American voice in the film really is the music -- the music was important to somehow ground it in America,” added Burnett, noting that the film was shot in Romania and features an Australian actress, a British actor and director, and a Lebanese score composer in Gabriel Yared.

The biggest surprise might be the twangy authority brought to the songs by White, who also wrote and performed a number called “Never Far Away” that’s included on the album but isn’t heard in the film. White, recruited for the project long before the Stripes’ recent transformation into million-selling Grammy contenders, also has a prominent minor role in the movie as an itinerant musician.

Was it hard to turn the guru of garage rock into a mountain troubadour?

“It was not hard at all,” said Burnett. “Jack White is a great rock ‘n’ roll singer, and we just sort of let him do what he did.

“As I had been listening to his records, I was impressed by the breadth of the knowledge of music he had,” said Burnett. “He wasn’t one of these kids whose knowledge of music went back to Pearl Jam. He had obviously paid a lot of attention to the whole range of rock ‘n’ roll. I could hear it in his guitar playing, I could hear it in his melodies, just his approach to the chants he cooks up.

“I think he was somewhat nervous coming into it, because those musicians are extraordinary,” Burnett said. “It’s a very, very high level of musicianship. But he’s tough, man. He’s tough enough.”