A CASE FOR JAZZ IN FILM MUSIC
Jazz and cinema were practically born together in the early decades of the 20th century, and by the late 1950s the two quintessentially American art forms were so deeply entwined that a trumpet fanfare or saxophone riff on a soundtrack could instantly establish a film’s genre and mood. Jazz’s cinematic qualities, its bright but subtle emotional tonal palette and character-revealing sonorities, were certainly appreciated by filmmakers in the US, UK, France, Italy, Poland, and Japan. Iconic films such as Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up feature supremely evocative jazz scores that were integral to their success and lasting power.
Strangely, the use of jazz in film tapered off after the 1960s, making more recent work like trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s scores for the movies of Spike Lee and Ornette Coleman’s riveting music in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch stand out as exceptional cases. Many in Hollywood seem to feel that jazz is passé, that it no longer speaks effectively to audiences. But the brilliant success of drummer Antonio Sanchez’s dynamic trap set score for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Academy Award-winning film Birdman has put jazz back in the spotlight again.
With its bristling energy and coiled power Sanchez’s music contradicts jazz’s “cool” reputation, but it’s actually an apt example of where jazz is today. In recent decades, jazz has evolved and broadened, taking on countless forms and variations, styles and traditions, while borrowing from the entire musical heritage of the Americas as well as the diverse cultures around the globe. It is high time for Hollywood to tune into the musical breadth and richness that jazz has to offer film today. Given that it is above all a form rooted in innovation and defined by its groundbreaking creativity and absorption of other musical forms, and given the rigorous musical training that many of its current practitioners have undergone, jazz is arguably the most varied, compositionally sophisticated, and yes, gorgeously cinematic musical form that Hollywood could hope to mine. You can find all the evidence you need of jazz’s film-enhancing potential in our catalog.