With fairgrounds and variety shows as its early venues, cinema was commonly seen as a lowbrow art form, and it’s unsurprising that it became associated with popular music – or, indeed, music “from the wrong side of the tracks”. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), for instance, is a masterly romantic melodrama in which a simple farmer is lured to the (jazz-blaring) big city by a loose woman who urges him to kill his wife: Hugo Reisenfeld’s appropriately decadent score provides a brassy contextualizing shorthand. In later movies, jazz would lend an apparent period authenticity, transporting us back in time as effectively as the costumes and sets. Witness the Scott Joplin rags popularized by The Sting (1973) – despite the fact that they were actually written decades before the era in which the film was set. This approach also suits biopics, such as The Benny Goodman Story (1955), Bertrand Tavernier’s Dexter Gordon movie ’Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker film Bird. Naturally there are also hundreds of notable documentaries and concert films such as Jazz On A Summer’s Day (1960), A Great Day In Harlem (1994) and Triumph Of The Underdog (1998) about Charles Mingus.
The 1920s was the decade known as “the jazz age”. Musicians played on-set music to get everyone in the right mood, and often appeared on screen (albeit silently) before The Jazz Singer (1927) – with its misnomer of a movie title – heralded the arrival of sound cinema. Famous performers began appearing in jazz interludes, and showbiz musicals such as the Gold Diggers series became popular, but jazz rarely drove the drama musically, and black performers were cut from prints distributed in the southern US. Following in the wake of the short programme-fillers that were set to classical music, producer Walter Lantz’s 1940s Swing Symphonies were animations set to jazz hits, and Norman McLaren’s pioneering animation Begone Dull Care (1949) featured the music of Oscar Peterson.
In the 1950s jazz reached its cinematic high point. Frank Sinatra portrayed a junkie drummer in Otto Preminger’s The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), which featured a tough Elmer Bernstein soundtrack. Bernstein also wrote the score for Sweet Smell Of Success (1957), featuring (as themselves) The Chico Hamilton Quintet. Crime and jazz seemed to make great bedfellows: noir classic The Big Combo (1955) had a big-band score by David Raksin while Henry Mancini provided Latin jazz for Orson Welles’s Touch Of Evil (1958). The Pink Panther man also gave the following year’s Peter Gunn its drive, whilst Anatomy Of A Murder (1959) benefited from a masterpiece of a score by none other than Duke Ellington.
Meanwhile, in Europe John Barry moved from pop to jazz with Beat Girl (1958) and the following year Martial Solal scored Jean-Luc Godard’s quintessence of cool, A bout de souffle. Jazz was often unrelated to the narrative but, after discussions with director Robert Wise, John Lewis wrote a truly integrated score for the interracial heist movie Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). On Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift To The Scaffold, 1957), Miles Davis’s group improvised on previously written themes and Chico Hamilton provided some wonderfully edgy music for Roman Polanski’s swinging London shocker Repulsion (1965). Malle’s Milou en mai (1989) has a very different kind of jazz score – a far fluffier one – by Stéphane Grapelli. In the 1960s popular jazz merged with pop but Barry’s understated music for Petulia (1968) still deserves a mention. The turn that mainstream jazz took in the 1970s – towards fusion and funk – was harder to place in cinema. Often it threatened to overwhelm the film. But in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) David Shire gave us an uncompromising big-band clash of atonality and funkiness.
Few jazz composers managed to
develop regular film-scoring careers, but there are exceptions: Jim Jarmusch’s
regular collaborator John Lurie; the occasionally New Age-ish Mark Isham; and
trumpeter-turned-director Mike Figgis, who often scores his own films. Despite
jazz’s American roots, European composers such as Krzysztof Komeda and Michel
Legrand have also written splendid jazz scores – Komeda’s highly groovy
soundtrack for Polanski’s Cul-de-sac (1966) being well worth a listen. As jazz
entered the mainstream it was no longer seen as transgressive or cool, but the
boundaries continued to be pushed – Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman’s music
for David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William Burroughs’ junkie nightmare Naked
Lunch (1991) being an excellent case in point. But as jazz has lost popularity
it has been less and less frequently used in films, except for special
assignments: evoking the past in LA Confidential (1999) or in Francis Ford
Coppola’s overblown and underrated The Cotton Club (1989). One diehard is, of
course, Woody Allen who compiles the soundtrack to many of his films from his
own eclectic record collection.
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