[Dixielandjazz] Movie Music - Jazz On Screen

[Stephen G Barbone]

NY TIMES - April 13, 2008 - by Matt Zoller Seitz
Jazz on Screen: The Sparks Are Eclectic

THE forthcoming exhibition of jazz-related movies, posters, video  
clips and merchandise at the Museum of Modern Art is dauntingly vast,  
but its title could not be plainer: “Jazz Score.” Those two words  
encompass the exhibition’s breadth and depth as well as its  
provocative omissions, and they allude to jazz’s complex, somewhat  
wary interaction with cinema — one that’s fundamentally different from  
the alliance between film and its longtime go-to music source,  
classical.

Classical music, like classical narrative filmmaking, prefers to  
execute detailed plans. Jazz starts with a spare, flexible plan and  
finds its magic in solo flourishes and the give and take of musical  
conversation. It encourages happy accidents and flights of fancy,  
phenomena that are often verboten in filmmaking because there’s so  
much money at stake.

The exhibition, which opens Thursday and runs until Sept. 15, eschews  
some well-known jazz-related movies (Clint Eastwood’s 1988 “Bird" and  
Spike Lee’s 1990 “Mo’ Better Blues," to name just two) and makes room  
for films that aren’t necessarily known for their scores, like Mr.  
Eastwood’s bullet-riddled 1977 star vehicle “The Gauntlet" (scored by  
Jerry Fielding) and Mr. Lee’s 1986 feature debut "She’s Gotta Have It"  
and his 2006 Hurricane Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke."

The conservative end of the collaboration scale is represented by some  
artistic triumphs and durable entertainments: Alexander Mackendrick’s  
1957 night-life melodrama, “Sweet Smell of Success,” and Otto  
Preminger’s 1955 jazz-addict cautionary tale, “The Man With the Golden  
Arm”; Orson Welles’s baroque 1958 morality play, “Touch of Evil”;  
Peter Yates’s 1968 hard-boiled cop picture, “Bullitt”; Richard  
Brooks’s 1967 true-crime adaptation, “In Cold Blood”; and Roman  
Polanski’s 1962 psychological thriller, “Knife in the Water,” to name  
a few. But with some conspicuous exceptions these scores support the  
drama rather than shape it. They’re less jazz films than films that  
happen to contain jazz.

Henry Mancini’s jumpy, conga-driven brass arrangements for “Touch of  
Evil,” for example, match the film’s jaunty, malevolent mood. And the  
2000 theatrical re-release — the version on the museum’s screening  
schedule, recut according to a detailed editing memo that Welles’s  
studio disregarded — spotlights them in the famous opening tracking  
shot, which follows Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh through a decrepit  
border town while Mancini’s distinctive melody drifts through open  
windows in a variety of modes (salsa, slow jazz, big band). Such  
touches, however striking, are more triumphs of sound design than  
instances of one art form informing another.

The same can be said for “Knife in the Water,” scored with Krzysztof  
Komeda’s stripped-down jazz quartet cues; “Sweet Smell of Success” and  
“The Man With the Golden Arm,” both fueled byElmer Bernstein’s  
galumphing string sections and hysterical bursts of brass; and Louis  
Malle’s stunning minimalist thriller “Elevator to the Gallows,” scored  
by Miles Davis a year before he recorded his landmark “Kind of Blue.”

Make no mistake; these scores are terrific, and in Davis’s case,  
brilliant. The bebop reveries that underscore the most dramatic parts  
of “Gallows” are as reflective and meticulous as Mr. Malle’s  
characters are recklessly passionate; when Maurice Ronet’s cold- 
blooded hero puts a gun to his boss’s head, Davis’s fast-paced yet  
oddly relaxed music cue seems both to mirror and mock his confidence.  
But while Mr. Malle gave Davis more creative input than composers are  
typically allowed — and even heeded his advice during editing to  
remove some music and replace it with eerie silence — here too jazz is  
more boldly conceived than employed.

Even the most jazz-appreciative films — a label that surely describes  
Mikio Naruse’s 1960 proto-feminist drama “When a Woman Ascends the  
Stairs” and Preminger’s 1959 rape-trial thriller“Anatomy of a Murder”  
— tend to draw on jazz’s smart, sexy aura but not its liberating  
potential. “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs,” about a widowed bar  
hostess (Hideko Takamine) trying to open her own place in Tokyo’s  
nightclub district, employs Toshiro Mayuzumi’s piano-, xylophone- and  
triangle-dominated score for dramatic emphasis and smoky atmosphere.

Duke Ellington’s “Anatomy of a Murder” score is an omnibus of  
influences, from New Orleans jazz to Irish folk music, and provides a  
dandy excuse for his cameo. Even so, the music’s more urgent function  
is to reassure audiences that they’re worldly enough to hear the  
film’s star, James Stewart, use taboo words like “panties” without  
being moved to write their congressman.

But in other features screened by the museum, the music doesn’t just  
help the film; it very nearly is the film.

In “The Servant,” an unsettling 1963 social satire written by Harold  
Pinter, John Dankworth’s score seconds the movie’s progression from a  
droll comedy of manners to something more unsettling, even sinister.

In Arthur Penn’s 1965 “Mickey One,” starring Warren Beatty as a  
struggling nightclub comic, Eddie Sauter’s eclectically influenced  
score doesn’t just reaffirm that the hero is stuck in an excitingly  
seedy milieu. It pursues the same aesthetic strategy as the film’s  
French New Wave-influenced editing (by Aram Avakian, who cut the 1960  
documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day”), finding an analogue for  
Mickey’s scattered thoughts and feelings.

More recently Terence Blanchard’s score for Mr. Lee’s “When the Levees  
Broke” is both a lament for vanished lives and property and an aural  
account of the cultural history the flood washed away. Mr. Lee bends  
image to music, truncating or extending shots to complement an ominous  
drumroll or a mournfully elongated trumpet phrase.

A few selections go even further, to the point of letting jazz call  
the tune that movies dance to. A double bill of Shirley Clarke’s early  
’60s race-conscious features “The Cool World” and “The Connection”  
shows how jazz’s penchant for controlled improvisation can be applied  
to filmmaking without dispersing a movie’s dramatic momentum or moral  
force. Zbigniew Rybczynski’s 1973 musical short “Plamuz” — one of many  
jazz-influenced Polish movies in the exhibition — animates a cool jazz  
ensemble’s jam session, splitting the screen into pulsing shards of  
color that dance to different instruments from one moment to the next.

The crown jewel on the schedule is Henning Carlsen’s 1962 neorealist- 
style “Dilemma,” which contrasts the privileges of white South  
Africans with the deprivations blacks endured under apartheid. The  
score juxtaposes American and African musical styles and reflects the  
film’s hopes as well as its anxieties. The film’s music-driven opening  
— an extended, worldless montage of Johannesburg life — is a symphony  
of a city that makes life itself seem musical.

Even less daring features have their lyrical, pure-jazz moments.  
Martin Ritt’s Ellington-scored 1961 movie, “Paris Blues” — a nearly  
plotless account of two American musicians (Sidney Poitierand Paul  
Newman) in Paris that is essentially an advertisement for jazz and  
French tourism — would rather marinate in cool than hustle toward  
catharsis. Good thing too. No moviegoer in his right mind would take a  
drum-tight plot at the expense of a dreamy-slow cover of “Mood Indigo”  
that could be hold music for an opium den, or the shot of Mr. Poitier  
and his lover (Diahann Carroll) strolling arm in arm toward the Arc de  
Triomphe at dawn, Ellington’s score imploring them to get a room.