The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music Through Jazz
Gretchen L. Carlson
(University Press of Mississippi; Jackson, Mississippi)
Miles Davis improvising the soundtrack for Elevator to the Gallows
On December 4, 1957, Miles Davis made cinema soundtrack history. At Le Poste Parisien studio in Paris – along with musicians Kenny Clarke, Pierre Michelot, René Urtreger, and Barney Wilen – Davis created a fully improvised film soundtrack for French director Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows). On this now-historic evening, Davis and the ensemble recorded the entire soundtrack while watching rough cuts of the film on-screen. In fascinating staged footage released on the special features of the 2006 Criterion Collection DVD version of the film, we see a depiction of this soundtrack production; Davis stares intently at a large projection of actress Jeanne Moreau wandering forlornly yet seductively through the Champs-Elysées at night, searching for her lover, who she believes has abandoned her. As Davis watches he appears to be spontaneously creating the accompaniment to Moreau’s troubled and lonely wandering. His illuminated eyes shift from side to side, surveying the scene, as we hear him improvise a poignant, languid melody punctuated with gravid moments of silence. His bluesy and mournful-sounding phrases emulate Moreau’s exasperated sighs and painful recognition of abandonment yet also suggest a sinuousness that heightens Moreau’s on-screen seductiveness – her slight raise of an eyebrow, the fluid motion of her hips as she walks, her haunting, pain-filled eyes.
Improvised film soundtracks such as this – in which musicians improvise to a film (or script) – are rare. Despite improvisation’s central role in silent film soundtracks in the early twentieth century, its presence in synchronized-sound film scores has been limited. Davis’ aforementioned score was one of the earliest known examples, a cinematic harbinger of the French New Wave movement. The New Wave was an aesthetic reaction against Hollywood’s domination of the postwar film industry and its commercial film conventions, as well as against the classic “tradition of quality” in French cinema.
Along with those involved in the Italian neorealist movement and American independent cinema, New Wave filmmakers sought to introduce new ways of creating movies that challenged the studio-determined, script-driven commercialism of mainstream filmmaking trends. They pursued alternatives to traditional narrative style, emphasizing fragmentation, abstraction, and improvisation over fixed rigidity and overdetermined production. These critical practices resonated with midcentury modernist trends in art, literature, and music, including abstract expressionism, Beat literature, and bebop jazz, all of which emphasized personal creativity, spontaneity (improvisation), and subjective interpretation.
It was in this milieu during the late 1950s and early 1960s that improvisation enjoyed a brief moment of prominence among independent filmmakers. Several New Wave and independent American directors utilized jazz soundtracks in their films, many featuring improvisation. In addition to Davis’ score for Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, examples include John Lewis’ score for Roger Vadim’s Sait-on jamais (1957), Martial Solal’s score for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959), and Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey’s collaborative score for Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses (1960). In America a proliferation of jazz-influenced film scores was spearheaded by Alex North’s innovative soundtrack for Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and expanded through Elmer Bernstein’s scores for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Duke Ellington’s score for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Charles Mingus’ score for John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1960).
Yet New Wave filmmaking, abstract expressionism, beat poetry, and bebop are now all historic movements – they no longer represent the contemporary artistic milieu and cultural criticism in the United States and Europe the way they did during the immediate postwar era. The impetus to use improvised scores now no longer aligns with the ideological and aesthetic motivations evinced by late 1950s independent filmmakers. At present, films featuring fully improvised scores are virtually nonexistent.
Within the last forty years, a sprinkling of films have utilized soundtracks featuring jazz improvisation, yet very few of these are fully improvised. Instead, they highlight brief moments/passages of improvisation against the backdrop of precomposed scores. One example is Ornette Coleman’s free improvisation over Howard Shore’s orchestral score in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991). Here, Coleman’s frenetic, squealing saxophone improvisations evoke the disorienting hallucinations of character William Lee in the eccentric and disturbing milieu of the Interzone – reinforcing cinematic associations of jazz (particularly free jazz) with anxiety, unpredictability, and chaos. Another example is Dave Grusin’s jazz-based soundtrack for The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), which features a significant amount of improvisation, but within the context of previously composed tunes and ensemble orchestrations. This film focuses on the musical and personal experiences of two jazz-pianist brothers, primarily the more talented (and troubled) of the two, Jack (played by Jeff Bridges). Improvisational passages, as well as the holistic jazz-based score, reflect Jack’s career as a jazz musician, in addition to his own exploration of individuality and expression throughout the course of the narrative. It is worth noting that a significant portion of the improvisation that happens in this soundtrack is featured diegetically, corresponding to moments of “visible” improvisation in the film. As such, these musical components are fulfilling specific diegetic functions that relate to the plot of the narrative. Such circumstances, in which jazz improvisation appears on soundtracks to support diegetic moments, account for the vast majority of improvisation (and jazz, for that matter) in film in recent decades. Examples include films such as Round Midnight (1986), Bird (1988), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Kansas City (1996), Whiplash (2014), and La La Land (2016), among others. It is filmmakers’ utilization of improvised jazz scores in non-jazz films that is especially uncommon, particularly when the scores are improvised in their entirety.
I argue that this dearth is directly related to the incompatibility between commercial filmmaking conventions and improvisation. As Krin Gabbard argued,“The improvising jazz artist, who answers to a private sense of which sounds are right for which moment, is almost by definition incompatible with standard film music practice.” In contemporary Hollywood, the rarity of these soundtracks results from institutional attitudes and policies concerning “risk,” governed by film companies’ commercial impetuses. With economic profit as the end goal, filmmaking decisions are primarily informed by conventional beliefs about what will (or will not) be successful among consuming audiences. Potential sources of risk can include any form of production uncertainty that might negatively influence the expected financial success of the film.
For many contemporary Hollywood filmmaking executives, improvised soundtracks are perceived as risky production ventures. Since improvisation occurs in the act of creation and is not developed before recording, such soundtracks pose a greater risk for “error” in meeting musical expectations during limited (and expensive) recording sessions. Jazz pianist and film composer Dick Hyman – who has extensive experience working in film and media industry recording settings – spoke to this phenomenon from his own experience. He stated, “You don’t improvise much in films. It has to be precisely the length to match the scene, or it has to be of such a length that it can be edited into the scene for ambience, and it has to be carefully planned. And more and more, it has to be put together in some form in advance, so that people can make judgments about whether it’s suitable.” If the director/producer does not approve of the outcome, the soundtrack must be rerecorded in order to meet expectations. Filmmakers do not want to deplete their limited budgets with rerecordings or to waste time (and thus money) requiring composers to redo their scores. They expect the music department to work quickly and productively and to achieve “the sound” they are looking for without much ado. As such, these potential complications have made filmmakers’ utilizations of improvised scores a risk many are not willing to take.
Nevertheless, there are a few filmmakers who invite the challenge. They are almost exclusively independent directors, whose work is primarily produced outside of the Hollywood studio industry. Specifically, I focus on the works of renowned filmmakers Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alan Rudolph, and their collaborations with jazz artists Antonio Sánchez and Mark Isham, respectively. These independent directors produce their films without the same constraints experienced by integrated film-industry professionals; accordingly, they experience more freedom and less restriction in the usage of unconventional storylines, film style, and production techniques – including utilizing improvised scores.
It is useful to contextualize Iñárritu’s and Rudolph’s positionality in Hollywood through the lens of the concept of the auteur. As discussed in the introduction, “auteur” – or author – is a designation for distinguished film directors who are recognized for having a distinct originality and artistic authorial signature that manifests in their cinematic works. They are often believed to push against established filmmaking conventions in new, experimental ways, thus paving the path for future cinematic development. Sociologist Howard Becker employed the term “maverick” to broadly distinguish such artistic individuals who “propose innovations outside the limits of what their art world conventionally produces. Film scholar Geoff Andrew employed Becker’s concept within the context of the film industry, understanding “maverick” as describing an “attitude or achievement” and identifying “those film-makers who, for some or all of their directing careers, have made movies which in one way or another stand outside the commercial mainstream.”
Both Iñárritu and Rudolph have been recognized as auteurs/mavericks. Both have distinctive independent filmmaking styles that have challenged mainstream conventions, and considerable film oeuvres that distinguish them within the contemporary film industry. Additionally, these directors have demonstrated a unique openness to production risk and creative experimentation. This context provides a crucial backdrop for analyses of their unique treatments of music, specifically improvised soundtracks.
While Birdman and Afterglow are very different films, with very different soundtracks, they share what I argue is the most important factor in recent jazz/film collaborations: a director who envisions jazz as an integral component of the film itself. To connect to the broader thread of this book, both Iñárritu and Rudolph understand jazz (specifically jazz improvisation) as representative of a particular form of “authenticity” that is fundamental to the messages of their films. As I examine throughout this chapter, Iñárritu associates jazz improvisation with “liveness” – the perceived authenticity of lived, unadulterated experience. Rudolph associates jazz improvisation with raw, genuine human emotion, the mainspring of his emotionally laden dramatic narratives. Despite the risks – or perhaps because of them – both these directors employ jazz improvisation as the sonic cornerstone of their film narratives.
It is my contention that these directors’ recognition of jazz improvisation as representative of a form of authenticity – an authenticity that has an essential function in their films – directly leads to heightened opportunities for their film composers’ (i.e., Antonio Sánchez and Mark Isham) creative agency and collaborative influence in the film production process. In other words, Sánchez and Isham, as the ostensible “sources” of authenticity (through the jazz they create), experience much greater opportunities for creative freedom within the “creative labor” structures of the film industry than the vast majority of film composers do. Accordingly, their respective improvised soundtracks challenge conventional production methods, collaboratively integrating musical score and film in groundbreaking, innovative ways.
© 2022 Gretchen L. Carlson. Used with permission