All That Jazz: 5 Great Jazz Scores

Amidst the praise of Whiplash (now on Blu-ray and DVD) comes a contemplation of music in film, specifically that fantastically dynamic, American genre called jazz. Throughout cinema history, jazz has been employed to pervade films’ settings with an eclectic range of sounds that induce various moods. Jazz scores often feature a sound spectrum containing excitingly loud brass, dreary solo melodies, up-beat drum grooves, hip bass-lines, tension-filled dissonance, intoxicating orchestration, and more. Often used in film-noir to summon the constant progress of urban atmospheres, but employed in many landmark ways outside of that context, the sounds of jazz have been fondly intimate friends with cinema across its lifetime.

Black Orpheus (1959) | Score by Luiz Bonfá, Antônio Carlos, and Jobim João Gilberto

This samba score by Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa is the delightfully groovy love-baby of Portuguese, African, and Indian cultures. The film captures Brazil’s synthesis of cultures by spiritually connecting its subjects through music. With its score and grandiose long shots of dancing crowds Black Orpheus tells the classical myth, which is a testament to the power of music, in a way that instills an inspirational desire to bust into the screen and dance along with its characters.

Bullitt (1968) | Score by Lalo Schifrin

Steve McQueen does not say much in this film, as he knows that the jazz score will do the talking for him. Lalo Schifrin’s score reflects the cool, calm demeanor of McQueen’s Frank Bullitt, an attitude that is juxtaposed against the ferociously realistic action-sequences. The score expresses this contrast with moments of tonal stability and laid-back harmonic rhythm, interrupted by rapid swing-beats that will make bullets and cars fly. Then there are those atonal moments of dissonance, which conjure the uneasy tension that comes with the attempt to catch the underworld’s kingpin.

Taxi Driver (1976) | Score by Bernard Hermann

Bernard Herrmann’s final score speaks to its listeners as much as Scorcese’s direction does to its viewers. It revolves around various different sounds, which work together and against each other to display the ambiguous complexities contained in this simple story. The trudging boom of the tympani-drums reflect the foreboding events that are inevitably bound to come. The lazy-boned solo-saxophone over melancholic piano chords conveys Travis’ daily, isolating discontent in the scum-ridden urban-world. Herrmann’s signature clashing tones of woodwind, brass, harpsichord, and timpani drums to convey the psychological distress of the disturbed Travis Barker. There is a mass amount of material for the viewer to derive from this cute, little noir-crime-horror, and Herrmann is largely responsible for vitalizing the appropriately mundane nightmare’s waking life.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) | Score by Elmer Bernstein

The film-noir is as American a genre of cinema as jazz is of music. It then makes sense that these powerfully American art forces should collaborate to bathe viewers with an all-American production of paranoia, romance, violence, and capitalism. The soundtrack by Chico Hamilton and Elmer Bernstein has that classic production sound, armed with big-band brass sounds that will obnoxiously welcome the the viewers to film’s urban setting. One of the film’s characters is a jazz guitarist, which leads to affords the movie some diegetic music that allows contemporary viewers to access an escape within a cool, 1950s jazz-club.

Chinatown (1974) | Score by Jerry Goldsmith

Polanski has seen his share of film-noir classics, and though his film is a neo-classicism, he knows that any great noir-film comes with a brilliant jazz-influenced score. After producer Robert Evans rejected Phillip Lambro’s musical efforts, Jerry Goldsmith miraculously wrote and recorded this hugely dynamic soundtrack. Mastering the big-production noir spirit, Goldsmith’s oeuvre of music for this film features many different atmospheric vibes throughout: Some moments are seductively relaxed in demeanor, others are exotically heady with ethnic melodies, and then there are those deeply paranoid piano hits accompanied by dark, damp percussion. How one captures the disquietingly mysterious, intrinsically sexy, and delicately romantic aura of a film so well in ten days is nearly as mind-blowing as the film and soundtrack itself.