When we think “movie music,” jazz is generally not the first genre that comes to mind. Orchestral film scoring is alive and well; even if, these days, it’s often manipulated digitally and enhanced by synthesizers and even distorted electric guitars. But we’re not examining music production here; but rather structure and note choice. Jazz is always an interesting choice for movie scores, one it seems directors and producers must go out of their way to make. The classical music forms used for many scores share a relatively constrained vocabulary with most other music genres, whereas jazz uses all twelve notes.
The relative complexity of jazz, with its relaxed rules, swing beats, sophisticated syncopation, and upper extensions, may be perfect for noir crime dramas, but it comes with a risk for the filmmaker in that it can be a distraction for audiences who just want to enjoy a good story. This is why the film composer scoring with jazz must be extra skillful in the fine art of moving the story along without jolting viewers out of the on-screen moment. Herein, we examine 10 films made over the last seven decades that demonstrate jazz scoring at its finest. Join us as we take a deep dive into scoring movies with jazz.
A Streetcar Named Desire
One of the earlier examples of jazz scoring in motion pictures dates back to 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire. This smoldering screen adaption of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning play not only launched the Hollywood career of Marlon Brando (who had starred in the Broadway production), but it also seduced movie audiences with a sultry big-band score dripping with steamy New Orleans vibe that perfectly matched the seedy, world-weary story as it unfolded on-screen.
Composer Alex North’s music for Streetcar received an Academy Award nomination for Best Music Score and, although the music might seem foreign to today’s moviegoers, it wasn’t such a stretch for audiences at the time, coming as it did at the tail end of the Big Band era, when jazz was America’s pop music.
Sweet Smell of Success
The score for 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, a noir tale of showbiz drama and deceit in New York City, was written, arranged, and conducted by Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein. The soundtrack featured a mix of Bernstein’s orchestral cues and modern jazz played by drummer/bandleader Chico Hamilton’s quintet (which included live performances in the movie’s club scenes). Both serve to underscore the actions of the jaded characters and converge at key junctures in the plot through the strategic deployment of a common theme, the song “Goodbye Baby.”
Bernstein’s music employed dissonant big-band horn arrangements and gritty urban blues for a hard-edged sound that conveyed the cold, detached abrasiveness of big-city life in the late 1950s. The Hamilton quintet’s improvisations and Bernstein’s studio orchestrations join forces to create a highly sophisticated film score. Perhaps Guardian music critic John L. Walters said it best, calling the soundtrack “the sonic equivalent of a perfectly blended Manhattan: seven cool cues by drummer Chico Hamilton’s adventurous band, and 14 orchestral blasts by Elmer Bernstein.” Soundtrack music fans took note: two soundtrack albums from the motion picture were released in 1958, both achieving commercial success and garnering critical acclaim.
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
In December 1957, Miles Davis went into a Paris studio with his quintet and recorded the soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, which was released late the following month. Malle’s assistant was a jazz fan who suggested to his boss the possibility of getting the jazz-trumpet legend to score the director’s next film. Miles and his band were booked at a Parisian club in November. After the set, Miles was introduced to the director and signed on to score the film after a private screening.
The band entered the studio with no prepared charts, just a few sketches Miles had written in his hotel room. The movie’s plot was outlined to them, and they then proceeded to improvise as the relevant scenes were projected on a screen in the studio. Improvisation is nothing new for accomplished jazz musicians, but scoring a movie in this spontaneous way is completely unique. It is testimony to the sheer genius of Miles Davis and the musicians he chose to work with over the course of his remarkable career.
Blow Up
Skipping ahead to 1966, we have Herbie Hancock’s score for Blow Up, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language film about a London fashion photographer who unwittingly captures a murder with his camera while shooting on location in a park. The movie iconically encapsulates the mod subculture of the era, and its eclectic soundtrack captures the vibe perfectly. Hancock, then pianist with the Miles Davis Quintet, recorded the music in London with British musicians; but he was reportedly unhappy with the results and re-recorded the music in New York with American jazz musicians. The wide-ranging score hops genres freely, encompassing everything from post-bop to what decades later would become known as acid jazz.
To this day, Hancock remains one of the most important and prolific composers in jazz, and his score for Blow Up demonstrates his unparalleled compositional mastery and jaw-dropping ability to effortlessly morph seamlessly between genres as diverse as acoustic jazz, psychedelic rock, surf, Gypsy jazz, doo-wop, lounge, stride, and more. Of special note to rock fans, the Yardbirds featuring Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page make an appearance in the film’s infamous club scene, in which Beck experiences an intermittent signal-chain malfunction and ends up smashing his guitar in frustration. As much as any other movie ever made, Blow Up was uniquely emblematic of its era, and Herbie Hancock’s score nails the anything-goes zeitgeist of swinging ’60s London to a T.
Dirty Harry
Moving into the 1970s, jazz scores were suddenly everywhere; and Lalo Schifrin, who had composed the main title themes for the hit TV shows Mission: Impossible and Mannix in 1966 and ’67 and the scores for feature films Cool Hand Luke and Bullitt in ’67 and ’68, was at the top of his game. Schifrin had arrived in Hollywood at a time when jazz was starting to proliferate as a legitimate genre for film scoring. For Clint Eastwood, choosing a composer for his 1971 crime thriller Dirty Harry was easy. Eastwood — a serious jazz musician himself — had first worked with Schifrin on 1968’s Cogan’s Bluff. He liked the composer’s style, and the two worked well together. Dirty Harry — which would go on to become a lucrative 5-film franchise — had found its sound, and the stage was set for two decades of successful collaboration between the two Hollywood icons.
In Dirty Harry, Schifrin cranked out the tension with a studio band anchored by drums, electric bass and guitar, and electric and acoustic piano. The rhythm section was fleshed out with horns, strings, woodwinds, and percussion. Schifrin’s unique style pushed the envelope with unusual orchestrations that employed church bells, picked electric bass, prepared piano, vocal textures, bowed percussion, col legno string articulations, string and brass sections rocking out blues lick ostinati, and more. To say that Lalo Schifrin heavily influenced film scoring in the 1970s would be an understatement. Everything from television shows to Broadway plays to commercial jingles bore his inimitable imprint. And Schifrin’s influence lives on: the current Mission: Impossible feature-film franchise still uses the main title he wrote for the original TV show in 1966!
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
David Shire began his career as a pit pianist for Broadway musicals before breaking into TV scoring in the 1960s. He soon graduated to movies, and his masterful score for 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three shows him in top form. Shire’s score for Pelham blends big-band horns with a ’70s-style rhythm section. It’s heavy music and it rocks, albeit with a jazz sensibility.
Starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and New York’s graffiti-splattered ’70s subway system, Pelham is an intense ride. For those who have never seen either the original classic (highly recommended!) or the 1998 remake, the screenplay revolves around four men armed with machine guns who hijack a southbound 6 train, take hostages, and demand a one-million-dollar ransom (quaint, we know). Pelham is the quintessential Big Apple film — so it had to have a hip score. Shire obliged with swaggering jazz-rock cues that move the story along as fast as… well, as fast as a speeding train.
Chinatown
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, also released in 1974, has racked up its share of accolades. It certified Jack Nicholson, already known for leading roles in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Carnal Knowledge, as a major star. It revived the flagging career of Faye Dunaway, who considers it “possibly the best film” she ever made. The movie’s textbook neo-noir screenplay by Robert Towne is dissected in film schools. Likewise, its score, by legendary Hollywood composer Jerry Goldsmith, is studied in film-scoring classes. The picture racked up 11 Academy Award nominations — including Best Music Score — with Towne taking home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
On-screen, Towne’s dark tale of murder and water-rights skullduggery in 1930s Los Angeles resonates with haunting trumpet solos punctuating a soundtrack that effortlessly morphs between classical and jazz, with a pinch of Eastern mysticism thrown in for added flavor. All of which is to say: it’s classic Goldsmith, who famously wrote and recorded the music in just ten days after the original composer’s score was rejected. Aside from Goldsmith’s note choices, the music’s shiny uniqueness stems from his spare and rather odd orchestration: four pianos, four harps, two percussionists, a string section — and of course, that iconic trumpet. The Chinatown score is regarded as one of the greatest motion picture scores of all time and ranks No. 9 on the American Film Institute’s list of top 25 film scores. Kind of flies in the face of that old axiom —you know the one — about fast and good being mutually exclusive.
Three Days of the Condor
Let’s jump ahead a year to 1975, and take a look at Dave Grusin’s hip jazz-R&B-funk score for Three Days of the Condor, director Sydney Pollack’s taut political thriller about a bookish CIA analyst, Joe Turner (played by Robert Redford), who returns to his clandestine office from a lunchtime deli run to find all his co-workers murdered. The tense script plays out over three days as Turner, pursued by hitmen and on the run, must find out what’s going on before it’s too late. Faye Dunaway also stars in one of her more memorable roles.
One of the most accomplished “hyphenates” in the entertainment industry, composer, arranger, producer, record company owner, and pianist Dave Grusin has graced over 100 films with his considerable musical talent. The Condor score masterfully weaves its magic with a funky rhythm section consisting of Grusin on electric piano, plus drums, electric bass, and Shaft-style wah-wah guitars, augmented by strings, horns, and percussion. Unlike classic Hollywood composers whose music can assume the complexion of any film they’re working on, Grusin’s scores tend to reflect his own musical proclivities. This is why, given the mid-’70s timeframe, parts of the Condor score would not sound out of place on a Steely Dan album — which is not a put-down!
The Falcon and the Snowman
Although he’s hesitant to label his music “jazz,” Pat Metheny is often thought of as a modern jazz artist, which brings us to one of the more unique film scores ever to emanate from the silver screen. 1985’s The Falcon and the Snowman is a spy drama starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn early in their careers (they were both 24 at the time). The score, composed by Metheny and Lyle Mays and performed by the Pat Metheny Group, has that signature Metheny “soaring” quality — no doubt the reason director John Schlesinger chose the guitarist to be the film’s composer, as Hutton’s lead character, Chris, is an experienced falconer. Even the more overtly “cinematic” cues with orchestra and choir bear Metheny’s singular sonic trademark. The band at that time included Pat on guitars and guitar synth, Lyle on piano and synthesizers, Steve Rodby on bass, and Paul Wertico on drums. So yes, the score is largely jazz fusion. But upon first viewing for Metheny fans, the film’s big musical surprise is the song that plays as the end credits roll.
“This Is Not America,” with lyrics and lead vocals by David Bowie, was released as a single the month after the film premiered and proceeded to climb the charts, topping out at No. 14 in the UK and at No. 32 in the US. In post-production, Bowie’s vocals were overdubbed on an instrumental cue, “Chris,” the Hutton character’s theme. And this being Sweetwater, it would be remiss of us not to mention that the song was mixed by none other than the great Bob Clearmountain. Bowie included “This Is Not America” on his 2002 greatest hits compilation Best of Bowie, and Metheny was later quoted as saying that Bowie’s lyrics were “profound and meaningful — and absolutely perfect for the film.” With an 80% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Falcon‘s legacy as a good movie is secure. And as a bonus, it spawned a hit record!
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Now we leap forward 29 years to our next (and final) film, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which coincidently shares two connections with our previous example — the first obviously being the feathery title. If an award existed for the most unique film score of all time, it might well go to jazz drummer extraordinaire Antonio Sánchez for the 2014 film Birdman, starring Michael Keaton. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu had approached his drummer friend, then recording and touring with the Pat Metheny Group, with the idea of using solo drums to score his new film; and although he had never scored a movie, Sánchez was intrigued and accepted the challenge.
A week before principal photography was to start, they went into a New York studio to record demos. As there was yet no footage, Iñárritu worked off the script, standing in front of the drum set while talking Sánchez through the scenes and signaling mood changes and emphasis as the drummer improvised live in the studio. Months later, Sánchez went into a Los Angeles studio to record the score. Over the two days of recording, Sánchez viewed scenes to see how Iñárritu had used his demos before re-recording the cues. As in the demo sessions, Iñárritu supervised, but this time offered more specific instructions. For the final soundtrack, snippets of classical music and jazz compositions from various composers were later added — but it’s Sánchez’s drumming that steals the show, imprinting the movie with an instantly identifiable sonic signature.
The Birdman soundtrack was released on CD and proceeded to win a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. The Motion Picture Academy, however, disqualified the film for Best Original Score Oscar consideration, citing the fact that the film also contained over a half hour of non-original music that they felt equally contributed, along with the drums, to the musical identity of the movie. Sánchez and Iñárritu appealed the decision, which the Academy ultimately declined to overturn.
As fair or unfair as this episode might seem, it may also reveal a truth about jazz scoring in movies — and the state of contemporary jazz in general. Once America’s pop music, jazz today is a niche market. As far as record sales and concert attendance is concerned, classical is too — and yet many movies today are scored with symphonic orchestration. Not so with jazz, which in Hollywood remains an acquired taste.