Jazz Music in Hollywood

Jazz Music in the Film Industry
by CJ Colandrea
Music and film have been closely related ever since the first motion picture was created in the late 1800’s. Original and recorded music play a major role in the production and delivery of a film. All kinds of music is heard in movies; popular music, classical music, and jazz. It is important for a film composer to have a large musical vocabulary and sense of emotion to write the proper score for a movie. Film composers have an enormous amount of control over the emotional direction of a film. Using music as a storytelling mechanism, composers will often incorporate period music and music of multiple genres in their scores to represent time and the era in which a film takes place.
Jazz first made its way onto the pages of the score for a major hollywood film in 1951, with the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play, A Street Car Named Desire. Jazz music fit very well into the score, composed by Alex North, mainly because the entire plot takes place in New Orleans, a well known jazz epicenter. New Orleans has harbored some of the most famous jazz musicians of all time, including jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong. A Street Car Named Desire never reached nation wide success, even though it is regarded as the first jazz movie score in history. The first jazz score to ever reach the charts was Elmer Bernstein’s score for Man with the Golden Arm, in 1955. "Until now jazz has been used as a specialty or a culmination of a plot point," Hollywood Reporter critic Jack Moffitt wrote in1955.
Over the next few decades jazz music was widely used for film scores and theme songs, putting many classical composers out of work. Musicians who have heavily studied jazz are generally excellent interpreters of emotion and can replicate period music well using counterpoint techniques. Jazz musicians are known for having large musical vocabularies and being able to translate different styles of music into their playing. One composer, specifically, that fits right into the category is Henry Mancini. Mancini’s first major success was in 1958 for the TV show, Peter Gunn. The Peter Gunn theme song made Mancini a star. It also featured the young, and not yet well known pianist, John Williams, who was merely a session musician at the time who was randomly hired to play on the original. Through this, Williams became a protégé of Mancini, studying jazz piano and composition with him. In years to come, John Williams would go on to become one of the most famous and successful film composers of all time. In many cases, the best film scores are written when the composer and movie director form a relationship. The best known example would be the relationship between Steven Spielberg and John Williams. When both people are tied into the same ideas, the best scores can be written. Good directors are able to tell the composers exactly what he or she needs and the composer must be able to execute it properly.
Two of the most famous movie directors, who are also avid jazz fans, and utilized jazz music in their movies, are Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen. Both Eastwood and Allen have incorporated jazz composers and performers into their movies, featuring real life jazz players in their movies as characters as well as using them for source music. Source music is music in a film that is heard by both the audience, and the characters in the movie. Perfect examples of source music are heard in the movies, Bird, and Sweet and Lowdown. Clint Eastwood’s movie Bird is a biographical story based on the tragic life of jazz great, Charlie Parker. Eastwood uses actual Charlie Parker recordings when the character of Parker is playing music in a scene, as well as using it as background music in other scenes, often combining the two together.
Sweet and Lowdown is written and directed by Woody Allen, who also happens to be a semi-professional jazz clarinetist. The movie’s plot centers around a fictional jazz guitar player named Emit Ray. Allen uses Sean Penn as the character of Ray. For the musical aspect of the movie, Allen hired jazz guitar prodigy Howard Alden to record all of the source music for Emit Ray’s guitar playing. Alden’s talents were also utilized in coaching Penn looking the part of a on screen jazz guitar player. The film Round Midnight, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, is another major motion picture about the life of a fiction jazz musician. However, the main character in Round Midnight, Dale Turner, is played by jazz legend Dexter Gordon. Gordon also plays all of the source music for the film, some prerecorded and some of it right on camera. Most of the music was written by Quincy Jones, who is credited as the films composer. There are many other movies that feature jazz music such as Ray, Mo’ Better Blues, and The Color Purple; however, these three provide the best examples, and are my personal favorites.
Music is an extremely powerful artistic device that affects people on many levels. It can make or break a movie, and is considered to be one of the crucial aspects in delivering the message of a film. The music of a film can either give a movie great success or absolute failure. Many styles and genres are heard in the scores of all of our favorite movies. Jazz dominated the industry from the late 1950’s to 1975, when John Williams’ score for Jaws brought classically written film scores back into focus. Jazz music is one of the greatest original American art forms and will be listened to and studied for many years to come.

References
Davis, Richard. Berklee Press (1999)
“The Art and Business of Writing Music for Movies and TV”
Complete Guide to Film Scoring

Prendergast, Roy M. WW Nortan & Company, Inc. (1992)
“A Neglected Art”
Film Music

Morgan, David. HarperEntertainment (2000)
“Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Writing for Cinema” Knowing the Score