Undisputed jazz genius scored in Hollywood. Duke Ellington — arguably the most influential composer and bandleader of the big band era — contributed a Grammy Award-winning score for Anatomy of a Murder (’59). Although Ellington had occasionally composed music to low budget musicals and short films prior to WWII, this courtroom drama offered him a unique opportunity. The music — with its rich harmonic shadings and intuitive use of soloists — is unlike any other crime jazz soundtrack, and many of the individual tracks would not sound out of place on other Ellington records of that period.
To his credit Ellington provided the requisite array of moods and variations on theme to complement the film’s characters and scenes, rather than merely recording variations of pre-existing music, to which he fittingly resorted for Paris Blues a year later.
Miles Davis, another jazz iconoclast, also scored in the crime genre — this time in Europe. Considering the immense popularity of jazz in France during the period, it comes as no surprise that filmmaker Louis Malle wanted to have an American jazzman provide music for his thriller Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold, ’58). Unlike most film music, Davis’ score was improvised in the studio. According to the soundtrack CD booklet notes, it was an informal gig for the trumpet player and his mostly French sidemen; in fact, the film’s star Jeanne Moreau played bartender in the studio while Malle screened selected scenes to the musicians. A rookie to the soundtrack game, Davis took little to no control over the selection of final takes for the film, letting Malle call the shots. Davis used a few tracks on his Jazz Track LP.
While many crime scores barely qualify as genuine jazz, there are a handful from the era that come closer than most. One of the best belongs to I Want to Live! (’58), a true story about a murderess on death row. Johnny Mandel’s sexy smoky score is a classic. The 26-piece All-Star Jazz Orchestra burn through the main theme, “Poker Game,” “Stakeout” and “Gas Chamber Unveiling” and other hot-blooded and emotionally wrenching tracks. Also featured are half a dozen cuts played by Gerry Mulligan’s Combo.
The legendary baritone saxophonist leads veteran jazz greats such as Shelly Manne (drums), Art Farmer (trumpet), Bud Shank (alto sax, flute) and Red Mitchell (bass), Frank Rosolino (trombone) and Pete Jolly (piano) on “Night Watch” and “Black Nightgown.” Mulligan’s inclusion is significant. The original LP cover notes by William Johns describe how the film’s main character “moves through an atmosphere in San Francisco and San Diego where jazz hovers constantly in the background. One of the few stabilizing things in her life is her interest in jazz and, particularly, in the music of Gerry Mulligan.” Mandel penned the tracks specifically for Mulligan’s group, and they’re peppered throughout the film as source cues.
“We'd been through a lot of bands together,” Mandel said of Mulligan in a 1998 interview with Patrick McGilligan for the Rykodisc reissue. “I first ran into Gerry when he was with Gene Krupa and I was with Buddy Rich. This was in ’46. ‘Disk Jockey Jump’ had just come out and somehow Mulligan and I … were thrown together in the New York nightclub and session scene. We remained good friends, right to the end.”
The bits composed for the larger group are highly experimental and were daring for the era. Among the unusual instruments employed are contra-bass clarinet, contra bassoon, bass trumpet, bass flute, and E-flat clarinet. In addition, there is a wild assortment of percussion such as scratcher, cowbells, Chinese and Burmese gongs, rhythm logs, chromatic drums and claves as well as bongos and conga drums — collectively representing “the forces of law and order always hovering in the background,” as McGilligan observed.
More importantly, I Want to Live stands apart from most crime jazz scores in that it is genuine jazz featuring improvisation and not merely “scripted” jazz.
“I was really very nervous,” Mandel told McGilligan, “until I realized, after I learned the language and how to sync everything, that essentially it is what I’d been doing for a long time and just didn’t know it. It married all the things I’d been doing previously.”
Mandel went on to win an Oscar for “The Shadow of Your Smile” from The Sandpiper and scored many other popular movies, but his boldly inventive I Want to Live is among the best of the crime genre and of the era.
A sure sign that jazz had found a home in Hollywood came in ’56 when Elmer Bernstein earned an Academy Award® nomination for The Man with the Golden Arm. The film’s gritty subject matter — heroin addiction — may have opened many eyes to the dangers hounding modern man, but the score opened audience ears to the high drama of hard-driving horn blasts, sultry woodwinds, rumbling bass and crashing percussion. No crime theme seems to swing harder than “Frankie Machine.” The brass screams against a backdrop of jackhammer percussion. On “The Fix,” the same theme takes on a nightmarish urgency. On “Desperation,” rumbling discordant piano and locomotive drums capture the single-minded obsession of the junkie. Golden Arm is simply one of the genre’s most iconic scores.
A year later, Bernstein scored Sweet Smell of Success, a cynical drama set on New York City’s Madison Avenue, where reputations are built up and torn down over cocktails. While Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis exchange Machiavellian manipulations, Bernstein’s score and additional jazz tracks by Chico Hamilton pour on sophisticated scorn.
As Bernstein stated in cover notes for a ’62 LP of his Movie & TV Themes, “Jazz is contemporary... (and) so are most films. Thus it seemed quite natural for me to utilize the elements of the jazz idiom in my work.”
Also in ’56, Bernstein contributed jazz for a short-lived TV detective show Take Five. “(It) failed,” he noted, “but similar shows that followed did not, and jazz took a firm hold in television scoring.”
Before the decade ended Bernstein would take another crack at TV crime with somewhat greater success, but first another young Hollywood composer would strike mainstream gold first with his own take on TV crime jazz.
The claim came in ’58 when Henry Mancini, a long-time apprentice arranger at Universal, bumped into producer Blake Edwards in the studio barbershop. Edwards invited Mancini to score TV’s Peter Gunn (’58-’61). Mancini’s theme for the suave detective quickly became a standard of cool jazz (and eventually surf rock) repertoire. One could easily compile two or three discs worth of Peter Gunn variations by artists as disparate as Quincy Jones and Art of Noise. In the show, Gunn hangs out in the jazz club Mother’s where a jazz group plays underneath the dialogue.
“The idea of using jazz in the ‘Gunn’ score was never even discussed. It was implicit in the story,” Mancini recalled in his autobiography Did They Mention the Music? (p. 87, Contemporary Books, 1989).
“It was the time of so-called cool West Coast jazz,” Mancini added. “That was the sound that came to me.”
Walking bass and drums, smoky saxophones, shouting trumpets were keys to the “Peter Gunn” sound, and the show also provided Mancini with his first opportunity to use bass flutes, an instrument that he used with great success throughout his career.
Peter Gunn was one of the first TV shows to receive a soundtrack LP release, which went to number one on the Billboard chart and held the position for 10 weeks — an astonishing feet for a jazz record as well as a soundtrack. It stayed on the charts for more than two years and eventually sold more than a million copies. All of this made Mancini a bankable recording artist and one of the few film or television composers to ever become a household name.
The Peter Gunn score was only the beginning of what would prove to be an immensely popular and influential body of work. The “chilled-out soundtrack” — as Steely Dan co-founder and jazz aficionado Donald Fagen called it (Premiere, ’87) — spawned two LPs and other related releases. Ten years later, Mancini scored the relatively unsuccessful Gunn ... Number One movie with a somewhat updated sound (check out the fuzz-tone guitar on “The Monkey Farm”).
While Peter Gunn was hardly the first show of its kind, its soundtrack helped to popularize the crime jazz genre through the biggest mass medium ever. Other shows of the era that touted hard-boiled brass were M Squad, 77 Sunset Strip, Mike Hammer, Perry Mason, Richard Diamond, Naked City and Staccato — the last of which features a Bernstein score.
If Staccato appeared to be a calculated response to Peter Gunn, its score was simply a reiteration of the sound Bernstein had already explored on the big screen. Johnny Staccato is a private eye who moonlights as a piano player in a jazz combo at a hip nightclub. Staccato’s theme aptly evokes an urban jungle’s sweltering atmosphere. The rhythm section prowls along like a panther on the hunt, while brass and woodwinds soar above in the canopy of night. The show didn’t enjoy Peter Gunn’s longevity, but its theme is nearly as iconic.
The Silver Age of film music began in the early ’50s when jazz, pop and rock started to influence film composers. It can be argued that Alex North’s jazz-tinged A Streetcar Named Desire (’51) is the first Silver Age soundtrack. But, in general, early jazz soundtracks accompanied movies and TV shows about crime and justice.
Prior to the Silver Age of cinema and Golden Age of television, the crime genre made its transition from pulp magazine pages to radio programs such as The Shadow and the movie serials like Dick Tracy’s G-Men. These hero-oriented productions were presented with rehashed orchestral scores only a few notes removed from 19th Century and early 20th Century classical works such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” In each case, robust orchestrations accompany the epic struggle between hero and villain as violins soars triumphantly.
By the mid ’50s, however, the line between good and evil became increasingly tenuous. Do-gooder crime fighters came with bad habits and dubious virtue. They didn’t always “get their man” and dames often proved to be more trouble than even the most corrupt criminals. For this new era of moral ambiguity the only music that would prove apropos was jazz.
In the ’50s jazz was still a fairly commercial music genre, though not nearly on the level of its dance floor incarnation better known as swing. To be considered a sophisticate in the post-WWII era often meant digging the sound of jazz whether one was a beatnik or not.
In the context of film noir and TV crime shows from ’50 to ’65, jazz perfectly accompanies the images of rain-drenched streets, smoky private eye consultations and backroom busts.
“(Jazz) represented something lean, tough, cynical, and intelligent — adjectives that applied easily enough to the detective heroes of these pictures. These guys weren’t well described by a soft violin. Instead, the metallic-yet-soulful saxophone summed up this brave new world,” wrote Skip Heller in the CD booklet notes of Crime Jazz: Murder in the Second Degree (Rhino, ’97).
That’s not to say that jazz and the crime jazz of film and TV productions is the same beast. For one thing, crime jazz is mostly scripted and arranged for big bands, whereas the stylistically similar “cool” jazz and bebop of that period favored small group improvisation and long solos. Many West Coast musicians played crime jazz for the paycheck, not for the artistry. In fact, it wasn’t until Johnny Mandel scored I Want to Live in ’58 that true jazz musicians were even granted an opportunity to compose a Hollywood score.
The composer who usually gets credit for introducing jazz to the silver screen is Miklós Rózsa for The Asphalt Jungle (’50). A Hollywood veteran since ’37, Rózsa had scored many films including Double Indemnity and Spellbound before scoring John Huston’s urban potboiler. While The Asphalt Jungle score contains jazz elements, it still leans heavily on the orchestral approach long favored by Hollywood studios. (It’s worth noting that Rózsa’s final film score — the noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (’82) — also favors the jazz sound.)
In ’51, a younger composer, Alex North, delivered a score that truly set the tone for iconic crime jazz. North, having written incidental music for the stage production of Death of a Salesman, followed its director, Elia Kazan, to greater success on the screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. On “Blanche,” sultry horns smolder against fiery strings, transitioning into a cooler mood where shadowy piano and furtive horn figures dance against a spare cymbal ride. Although most of his scores favor the traditional orchestral style, North’s contribution to the crime jazz genre proved inspirational to his younger colleagues, including Leith Stevens, Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein.
The following is an excerpt from the book Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979 (McFarland, 2008) by Kristopher Spencer, founder of Scorebaby.com.
Miles Davis, another jazz iconoclast, also scored in the crime genre — this time in Europe. Considering the immense popularity of jazz in France during the period, it comes as no surprise that filmmaker Louis Malle wanted to have an American jazzman provide music for his thriller Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold, ’58). Unlike most film music, Davis’ score was improvised in the studio. According to the soundtrack CD booklet notes, it was an informal gig for the trumpet player and his mostly French sidemen; in fact, the film’s star Jeanne Moreau played bartender in the studio while Malle screened selected scenes to the musicians. A rookie to the soundtrack game, Davis took little to no control over the selection of final takes for the film, letting Malle call the shots. Davis used a few tracks on his Jazz Track LP.
