Jazz scores
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Someone came up to you and told you to list 10 – and no more than 10! – great jazz scores that should cover most of film history. Which would you choose?
That depends a lot on where to draw the boundaries – how does the music qualify as jazz, are films based in stage musical allowed, and so on.
Anyway, these are the ones that immediately come to mind:
– Stormy Weather
– Singing in the Rain
– The Glenn Miller Story
– The Benny Goodman Story, although the sound could have been better and Goodman wasn’t in top form.
– Crime in the Streets
– West Side Story
– Chicago
– Swing Kids – not for Horner’s mundane score, but for the unbelievably good big band recordings of 30s swing classics.
– The Artist
– The PostRunners-up:
– Ellington’s film scores
– The Man with the Golden Arm
– The Pink Panther“Real” jazz — by that I mean mostly or to a larger degree spontaneous and improvised music — only rarely belongs in film scoring. Because when the director breathes down your neck and asks you to bring that oboe in earlier, you can’t. Improvisation — the soul of jazz — is for obvious reason the enemy of picture-locked precision. A trumpet that plays what it “feels” will always be a threat to a scene that needs what it means. In jazz, you let go, in film, you hit your mark.
Jazz is “free style”, which is often at odds with the needs of film, so why not fake it? But of course, that’s a generalization. There IS room for improvised music in film, and there are some “real” jazz scores. However, some scores that may “feel” like “real” jazz actually aren’t. Why should they? The audience neither cares nor notices if the sax solo is improvised, it’s just whether the music “lands”.
So when some film music feels like it has a “jazz score,” what it often means is that someone composed something that sounds like jazz. That’s certainly true of Alex North’s A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which “feels” jazzy, but is composed and written out like a classical symphony. It’s all in the score. It walks like jazz, it talks like jazz, but under the hood, it’s not a duck… I mean it ain’t actual jazz.
Also, while the first “talkie” was famously called “The Jazz Singer” and there has been a lot of jazz music on and in film, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the “sound of jazz” started to weave its way in the motion picture scores. For that reason, I don’t know how to list 10 Jazz scores that cover most of film history.
But I try to go for 10 Jazz Milestone Film scores. (I actually break the rules and name 11, but one is a “two for one” entry. 😉 )
Alex North: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
As I said, it’s not “real” jazz, it’s composed like any other film score. But nevertheless, it is groundbreaking. One of the first major Hollywood scores to incorporate “the sound” of modern jazz. And it’s just a darn great score.Elmer Bernstein: The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)
I haven’t seen the score for this one, but I suppose it’s composed through similar to Streetcar? Still, this is even jazzier, with diegetic and non-diegetic music sometimes blending, and with actual top jazz players perform.Miles Davis: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958
Perhaps the first “real” jazz score? Not sure. I think Miles Davis really improvised the entire score, so yep, this may be the first actual “jazz” score. The soundtrack sure plays like a smoky jazz album.Duke Ellington: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Another probably “real” jazz film score, composed by jazz legend Duke Ellington. Great album, feels like pure jazz, and works in the movie.Henry Mancini: The Pink Panther (1963) / Touch of Evil (1958)
I temporarily break rule here an name two Henry Mancini scores, because they are so very different.
All of the above were “dramas”… but isn’t jazz also fun and freestyle? In comes Henry Mancini. It’s perhaps more easy listening than actual jazz, but it’s got a jazzy vibe, and the theme is iconic… so I just had to mention it.
TOUCH OF EVIL I mention because it was quite ingenious to have ALL the film music play as diegetic music from some source. Nice “touch”.Quincey Jones: In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Bluesy, jazzy… not sure how this was composed, but it’s definitely a film score that has a “jazz” feeling to it. And it’s one of Quincey Jones most famous film scores, so I just had to mention it.Lalo Schifrin: Bullitt (1968)
Schifrin was classically trained but always loved Jazz. BULLITT just feels like a very jazzy score, and provided the template for the urban-gritty-jazzy sound many cop dramas and TV shows would have in the 1970s.John Barry: Body Heat (1981)
Hard to write a jazz film score list without mentioning at least John Barry, much of whose film score output of the 1960s was very jazz influenced. But I pick BODY HEAT… not necessarily “real” jazz, but certainly “smoky”, “bluesy”, with a sultry, haunting “jazz sex… I mean sax” part.Pat Metheny: The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)
Jazz fusion, perfectly suited for that movie. Of course, the song “This is not America” became quite famous, but the score is definitely worth hearing. In record stores (when there were such things), it as often in the “Jazz Section” (under Pat Metheny) rather than the soundtrack section, so I include it here. It sure has the sound vibes of the “Pet Metheny Group”, a “real” Jazz band.Jerry Goldsmith: The Russia House (1990)
Goldsmith’s jazziest score, with Michael Lang at the piano, and real jazz music legends Branford Marsalis on saxophone and John Patitucci on bass, so it’s about as much “real” jazz as you can get into a nevertheless meticulously planned and recorded score.Cool list – and great shout-out to the underrated THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN.
I’ve always considered TOUCH OF EVIL more blues than jazz, but the boundaries are sometimes fleeting.
Yes, I’m perfectly willing to say TOUCH OF EVIL (or IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT) is more blues than jazz… as you said, the boundaries are not set in stone, they are fleeting. What is “jazz”? Louis Armstrong (my uncle was a big fan and had lots of his music recording) once said “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know”, but of course, one has to define it in some way to distinguish it effectively from something else.
Good selections!
I’ve always considered TOUCH OF EVIL more blues than jazz, but the boundaries are sometimes fleeting.
The main title even is Latin jazz.
Jazz is really a fluid genre and didn’t it have its origin in blues/gospel as basically any US pop music has? As mentioned some jazz scores may not “really” be jazz because too much composed. Maybe excpet the Miles Davis one which as far as I know was improvise to picture.
I could list lots of 70s groove crime scores that also are or have jazz parts…
Ten scores with a jazzy slant that I love, in no particular order:
Twin Peaks (Badalamenti)
Get Carter (Budd)
Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (Bjerre)
Motherless Brooklyn (Pemberton)
A Streetcar Named Desire (North)
Petulia (Barry)
Not With My Wife You Don’t (Williams) – yes, it’s also poppy, as well as jazzy and bluesy
Gone With the Wave (Schifrin)
The Thomas Crown Affair (Legrand)
Høst (Vardøen)And then, breaking my own rules, a few more:
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Grusin) – but it’s closer to funk, so then I would need to count Shaft and Super Fly too, perhaps
Mad Men: On the Rocks (Carbonara)
Menage all’Italiana (Morricone)
Vivre pour Vivre (Lai)
Le Samourai (de Roubaix)
Peter Gunn (Mancini)
Chinatown (Goldsmith)
The Omega Man (Grainer)Not too long ago, I came across an Ennio Morricone score for a movie starring Kirk Douglas, called “Un Uomo da Rispettare” (The Master Touch) from 1972.
I had never heard of the movie or score before, but this became a favorite right away, it’s musically up there with the best Morricone scores, and I was surprised again by Morricone’s versatility. The score mixes avant-garde techniques with echoplex, Jazz fusion and trumpet (a bit remeniscent of Chet Baker’s sound… Morricone had actually done some collaborations with Chet Baker some years earlier). It’s really a dynamite “jazz(y) album”.This is the first track, it’s almost 12 minutes long.
Un Uomo da Rispettare
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