Soundtrack, The - Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2013

How is jazz filmed? This article argues that jazz criticism has prioritized the musical and historical authenticity of jazz films, but has neglected the ways in which film style creates and comments upon scenes of improvisation. How do films about jazz negotiate the ‘now’ of diegetic improvisation and the ‘then’ of the recorded, edited event? Analysis of mise-en-scéne, camera movement and the performance of actors are argued to be essential to an understanding of narrative fiction film’s depiction of improvisatory processes. Through close readings of two sequences in Young Man with a Horn (1950) by Curtiz and Round Midnight (1986a) by Tavernier, and by looking at past attempts to analyse these films, I suggest that we need a more refined understanding of what ‘improvisation’ means on film. By attending to the formal properties of film, criticism can discard tired debates around representation and authenticity.

The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) by Kloves is a fictional account of a frustrated sibling piano duo who, in order to liven up their act, hire a singer. As well as a portrayal of sibling rivalry, the film is a study of the working jazz musician and the suppression and expression of individual identity. The film’s soundtrack, arranged, composed and performed by jazz pianist Dave Grusin, uses jazz standards and original thematic compositions that work as ‘ambi-diegetic cinemusical moments’ (Holbrook), which provide improvisatory contexts for the main character’s emerging individuality and his relationships with the other characters. This article identifies those compositions and using transcriptions, analyses the score in detail, revealing the melodic, harmonic, structural and improvisatory devices Grusin uses to convey the authority of a jazz ‘standard’, particularly by drawing on the work of Bill Evans and Miles Davis; and shows that these improvisational structures enable and act as a form of expression for the main character and his emerging individuality. The film takes its premise from The Fabulous Dorseys (1947) by Green, the biopic of the swing-era bandleaders the Dorsey Brothers, allowing this article to also consider the historical context of the film and the question of authenticity in both films, particularly through the parallel use of Art Tatum/Bill Evans as signifiers of ‘real jazz’ and Duke Ellington as a site of articulacy.

During the 1930s, jazz in Shanghai (shidai qu 時代曲/music of the time), in a culturally, politically and musically hybrid form, negotiated the contesting sociopolitical values and cultural imaginations in the semicolonial city. In this article, Victor Fan contextualizes the re-emergence of the Shanghai jazz in the Hong Kong Mandarin musicals between 1945 and 1949, and uses the film Chang xiangsi (《長相思》)/An All-Consuming Love (He Zhaozhang 何兆璋, 1947) to examine how this genre re-appropriates this musical style to renegotiate the film-makers and spectators’ conflicting political affiliations and traumatic memories, what Fan calls ‘extraterritorial consciousness’.

This article examines the ways in which ‘jazz musicals’ and their soundtracks were implicated in urban history in terms of production (shooting in studios or on location) and representation (the relationship between cities and their cinematic musical accompaniment). It situates the relationship between jazz and urban representation in the Hollywood musical in the context of the decline and transformation of New York after World War II. While musicals were overwhelming set in cities, and especially New York, the genre’s artificial, anti-realist settings became increasingly out of step with the city’s reality as it entered a long period of urban decline. The article focuses on New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977) arguing that the film’s depiction of jazz and treatment of the musical genre was shaped by the wider context of the expansion of location shooting in the 1970s as well as what Miriam Greenberg has called New York’s ‘image crisis’.

Jazz and animation enjoyed an organic relationship in what was the developmental period for both forms. During the Jazz Age, from the 1920s to the early 1930s, jazz provided frequent animation soundtracks. For the most popular and enduring cartoon characters, it was their music of choice. Two forms with clear structural similarities of syncopation and rhythm temporarily merged. Together they created a timescape or representational space that critically challenged taken for granted relationships with the modern(ist) world. In an anti-realist attack on modernism, animated characters asked critical questions of their audience in a similar way to Brecht’s epic theatre. In an alliance with jazz, they unmasked hidden aspects of society and its technological marvels in a questioning, revealing and confrontational manner. The article takes a phenomenological ‘letterbox’ approach to the period. Three case studies of early animation and jazz, Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, are employed to demonstrate a distinctive collaboration between the visual and sonic. The article argues that the comparatively marginalized position of two improvised forms allowed for the development of a critical artistic movement identified by the Frankfurt School. In particular, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno recognized that popular or ‘low art’ was not merely a reflection of economic life but constituted a conscious, active force for change. The subterranean and often subversive values of the animation–jazz alliance were quickly recuperated, but for a limited period offered a resistance that ran counter to established taste and the bourgeois appropriation of ‘high art’.

In the quantity of Duke Ellington’s oeuvre, his film music is only a small aspect. Nevertheless his first appearances on-screen were crucial to get nationwide attention. With the help of his impresario Irving Mills, he was the first African American musician to be featured in ‘white’ major Hollywood productions. Ellington was a visionary as a musician and as an entrepreneur. He also used his growing popularity to promote an image of African American culture and dignity that was completely different from the racist clichés that were cultivated in minstrel or blackface. Ellington managed to keep his band together even in the late 1940s when most other big bands had to give up. His sensational comeback concert in Newport 1956 catapulted him into new stardom and with this he became interesting again for Hollywood. In 1959 he was assigned by Otto Preminger to score his courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959). With this, he was the first African American to write a non-diegetic film score for a major Hollywood feature film. Some films such as Black and Tan Fantasy (Murphy, 1929) or Anatomy are discussed in detail.