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Connections: jazz and the other arts

Among my great influences as a composer have been painting and literature. In particular, American Abstract Expressionist painters such as Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, and novelists such as William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry. From these artists I derived not only an enriched background but also some specific ideas about writing as well as some techniques. As the sculptor Anthony Caro said: 'It was better to go to painting than to old sculpture because painting gave one ideas of what to do but no direct instructions on how to do it.'

Many composers have been inspired by literature. Words offer some kind of inspiration which is often sufficient motive for a composer to start work. As the Australian composer Don Banks said: 'It's a start.' But there are degrees of inspiration. A composer may write a ballad and, stuck for a title, decide that 'Tess' is as good a name as any because he has vague memories of reading Thomas Hardy's book, or of seeing the film. It could be that calling a piece 'Tess' represents the composer's subconscious idea of what the piece is about. A title is often purely a labelling device which, consciously or subconsciously, can colour people's thinking. Whether it does represent the composer's subconscious or not, the very act of calling a composition 'Tess' will make its listeners think of Hardy's heroine. (I suspect most composers have had experience of adding an apparently representational title after the compositional process, in some cases quite cynically, and the composition then being described as being 'a perfect evocation' of the assumed subject matter!)

Obviously, it is much more valid for a composer to be inspired by the mood of a literary work. If 'Tess' has been composed as a direct result of a love of Hardy's work and the music is closely informed by what the composer has got from that particular novel, then the results usually reward that effort. (This is true of John Surman's 'Tess', which shows his usual sensitivity and connection between inspirational source and end result.)

However, with many such compositions, there is the suspicion that, even if 'a whole world can be seen in a grain of sand', it is difficult to see how a whole novel can be represented by one three-minute blues or standard song-form piece containing lots of straightforward improvisation. There are even one or two examples of a whole suite of such short pieces being 'named after' this novel or that series of paintings. The results have often been good stand-alone music where the titles could easily have been replaced by any other. As composer Django Bates has said: 'In my composition based on Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the book suggested certain instruments and each movement was closely tied in with an event or character in the book. When a composer produces a supposedly book-inspired suite which is just a series of 12-bar blues played by a quartet, they must have a totally different view of the 'purpose' of music in these situations.'

Language

There are other connections between jazz and words as well. Stand-up comedians such as Lennie Bruce and Robin Williams have always improvised, the beat poets Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and others were influenced by bebop and, in turn, had their effect on the development of west coast jazz. There is also, I feel, a direct connection of 'language' between some avant-garde jazz soloists and stream of consciousness writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, even though the writers were ahead of the jazz soloists by many years.

Take this sentence:
' - Or - was he dead ? Ah ha, watch the surgeon slit the foot of the dead man! What next, Nostradamus? Will blood appear? Or has it clotted, in some vital organ ? Bleed, dead man, bleed, set the poor surgeon's mind at rest, so that he won't have to get drunk and go through the jumps and the blind staggers; the horror of the rats, the wheeling bushmills, and the Orange Bitters; bleed, so that he won't find himself reflecting in summer that even Nature herself is shot through with jitteriness, the neurotic squirrel and the sparrows nibbling the dung where the octoroons, the creole and the quadroon have galloped past in black dust; bleed, so that he will not have to think how much more beautiful women are when you are dying, and they sway down the streets under the fainting trees, their bosoms tossing like blossoms in the warm gusts; bleed, so that he will not have to hear the louse of conscience, nor the groaning of imaginary men, nor see, on the window blind all night the bad ghosts - .'

Malcolm Lowry was born and educated in England, lived for a while in Mexico (site of his monumental novel, Under the Volcano) and spent much of his life in Canada. He has said that he 'learnt to write while listening to Bix Beiderbecke', and once spoke of trying to write a new kind of novel: 'something that is bald and winnowed, like Sibelius, and that makes an odd but splendid din, like Bix Beiderbecke'. Although his writing was rewritten and reworked incessantly, the result, as we can see from the example above, seems as freewheeling as the approach of any contemporary jazz soloist. Given that Lowry died in 1957, he could not have been directly inspired by contemporary players, but what Lowry got out of Beiderbecke, out of jazz, was a kind of oblique thinking. He speaks not only of Beiderbecke's 'odd but splendid din' but of Joe Venuti's 'wild controlled abandon'. He recognises the personal, highly individual, look at the world jazz musicians express when they are soloing. The extract, from his novella Lunar Caustic, the story of an alcoholic jazz musician, does have a kind of sense but can perhaps best be described as 'an odd but splendid din'.

Two quotations from Conrad Aiken, Lowry's mentor, are highly relevant in this regard. 'The initial stimulus, the stimulus which first set the language habit to work, is soon lost sight of in the wealth of other language associations which are evoked from the subconscious.' And: 'the purpose [of William Faulkner's sentences] is simply to keep the form - and the idea - fluid and unfinished, still in motion, as it were, and unknown, until the dropping into place of the very last syllable'. The British jazz critic Charles Fox described that process in jazz as 'the unexpected suddenly being transformed into the inevitable'.

Jazz as drama

This parallel of jazz language with literary language has been highly influential in the development of my belief that jazz is a 'dramatic' language not only in itself, but in its potential for meaningful inter-relationship with the dramatic arts.

That jazz possesses, in itself, drama in its performances and in the shapes created by its best compositions and arrangements has been commented on by many observers. The poignancy behind Charlie Parker's 1947 version of 'Embraceable You', recorded when he was very ill, possesses real drama. There is drama too in the passion behind performances such as Miles Davis's 1964 version of 'My Funny Valentine'.

Billy Strayhorn's 'Blood Count' (on Ellington's Strayhorn tribute album, And His Mother Called Him Bill) had inherent drama, and black humour in its titling, in that it was written in hospital during Strayhorn's final illness. Like so many of the compositions from the Ellington/Strayhorn canon, it has its own dramatic shape. Additionally, as Gary Giddings points out, it demonstrates that 'jazz is no less collaborative than cinema, and credit for the perfection of 'Blood Count' can be passed around to the writer (Strayhorn), the director (Ellington) and the star (Johnny Hodges)'.

Given its dramatic potential, jazz has been ill-served by the cinema. Its use as background music in films has almost always been assumed to have a specific role, restricted to a 'bright lights, big city' approach. There are exceptions: some European art movies and such scores as Alex North's for A Streetcar Named Desire and Quincy Jones' for The Pawnbroker. But the typical Hollywood reaction has been to only use jazz to accompany a car chase or be heard in empty streets late at night, or, even more commonly, in sleazy night clubs, particularly when drink and drugs are involved. This demonstrates a hackneyed use of genre which, due to over-familiarity, comes very close to being useless.

It seems odd to me that, in contrast, film-makers - and audiences - are programmed to constantly accept 19th century Romantic orchestral music as a suitable background music style for films set in periods as diverse as the present, the far future and the distant past. Orchestral washes of sound are seen as being in some way capable of suggesting any and every emotion while jazz, or to be honest, jazz of a certain kind, has generally been used in a very restrictive way.

On a personal note, I was once approached about writing the music for a series of films about a medieval detective. The obvious question was, why me, a jazz composer? The answer was 'instinct'; the producer felt there could be an affinity between a composer such as myself and the subject matter - 'individual sounds are what is important'. Sadly, the producer lost the rights and I lost my chance to prove my point. Although I did have another chance when, in a radio adaptation of Josef Skvorecky's novella The Bass Saxophone, set in war-torn Czechoslovakia, I ignored the jazz-as-swing requirements of the story. It would have been impossible to express, in the language of swing, the outpouring of frustrated anger which provides such a memorable climax. In Skvorecky's novella, a saxophonist who has attempted suicide returns to a terrible dance band who are entertaining the German occupiers. In what might be another suicide attempt, he decides to play the forbidden jazz style in front of the occupiers. 'Not playing with the oom pah pah. Above it. Like a dancing male gorilla or a hairy bird of legend, slowly beating its black wings. Playing against all the laws of music.'

There is rarely a valid reason for using music to depict an image that already exists on the screen. Fast jazz for a car chase and soupy strings for the love scenes are over-used and often worse than useless. Where possible music should be used to provide a different 'level of meaning', perhaps to represent what is happening off screen, in a character's mind. As Alfred Hitchcock said: 'It is in that psychological use of music, which, you will observe, they knew something about before talkies, that the great possibilities lie.' It is in this area that I believe jazz is highly qualified and able to participate as meaningful dramatic music in film and television as well as in theatre and radio.

Using jazz as an 'individual' music, a music whose major resource is the individuality of a jazz musician's approach, without the trappings of tempo, or a specific style, allows it to be used in almost any situation. A jazz player looks at things in a highly personal way and is capable of adding a personal interpretation to what is seen on the screen, much the way that any listener does, and in a much more individual way than is usually represented by film music.

This approach was taken to its ultimate in 1957 by Miles Davis when he was asked to compose the music for the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l'echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold). Davis improvised, reacting to what was happening on the screen, a method similar in many ways to that used by the pianists who accompanied silent films by playing live, in their case usually from pre-selected material. Davis had worked out some sketches for himself and the accompanying group and it is interesting to follow the process through on the CD of the complete takes, issued in 1988. The ideas Davis used were precursors of the modal thinking which led to Milestones in 1958 and Kind of Blue in the following year. As Ian Carr points out in his recently re-issued biography Miles Davis: 'Miles probably felt free to experiment so audaciously because he was producing applied music intended to point the action and atmosphere of a film.' Director Louis Malle said: 'Miles's commentary - which is of extreme simplicity - gives a really extraordinary dimension to the visual image.'

What Davis achieved was a close integration between himself and all the characters portrayed in the movie and this was developed further in the Arthur Penn's 1964 movie, Micky One. The music was provided by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz, the composer/improviser team responsible for the brilliant album Focus. Throughout the film Getz acts as a 'shadow' to the main character, played by Warren Beatty, representing his innermost thoughts as he loses everything when he falls foul of gangsters. In 'Micky's flight', Getz, playing the various themes, is overdubbed three times, resulting in a feeling of different levels going on in Mickey's mind. In 'Is there any word from the Lord', a wonderful, very short, scene, Mickey is in an evangelist church waiting for the food, which traditionally arrives after the service. The church music, a wry look at the genre, is accompanied by Getz's wailing 'commentary', representing Micky's inner thoughts and, in its total irony, gleefully undermining the 'real' music. In this instance Getz is as much an actor as anyone seen on the screen.

Critic Simon Frith pointed out in his discussion of the film music of Ennio Morricone (who is also a jazz trumpeter) '... both sorts of music-making depend on a precision of sound reference - the wrong note can damage the mood of an improvised piece or a film scene; both sorts of music depend on shorthand, on the economical production of emotional and musical cross-references'. Using jazz methods, especially improvisation, within film scores and other dramatic situations should be explored much more. There is vast potential and an exciting challenge for today's musicians - and film-makers.

As always comments and contributions to this debate are welcome. Email graham@jazzcontinuum.com

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