That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part III: The Beat Goes On: Jazz Appreciation 101
� Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud: Miles Davis and a group including drummer
Kenny Clarke and three European players improvised the moody,
brooding score that perfectly suits Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud (1958), a
black-and-white French film directed by Louis Malle. Recorded around
the same time as Davis’s Kind of Blue album, the soundtrack is symbolic
of the fact that many famous modern American jazz musicians have
been more celebrated in Europe than at home. After all, Davis wasn’t
commissioned to score any American films.
� Blow Up: Miles Davis’s protégé, pianist Herbie Hancock (see Chapter 8),
composed the music for this French film (1966) by Michel Antonioni.
� Breathless: Another great example of jazz combined with an electrifying
film is Martial Solal’s score for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960),
about a young couple on an adrenaline rush of a road trip. Solal’s music
was inspired by great jazz pianists such as Erroll Garner, Thelonious
Monk, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Lennie Tristano.
� Taxi Driver: Famed film composer Bernard Herrmann, best known
for scoring Hitchcock films like Vertigo and Psycho, also wrote the jazz
score for Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and the spare saxophonecentered
music is the perfect accompaniment to the main character’s
unraveling mental state as he cruises the seedy underside of New York
City in his Checker cab.
� Rosewood: More recently, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (see Chapter 10)
composed a score for the John Singleton film Rosewood (1997), about
the 1923 torching of a black town in Florida by a mob of white people.
The combination of jazz with prejudice makes a telling combination.
Among the many soundtracks, no one else has produced as many jazz soundtracks
as Woody Allen. He’s famous (among other reasons) for using jazz in
his films. Composer, arranger, and jazz pianist Dick Hyman serves as his
musical director for Zelig (1983), Stardust Memories (1980), Radio Days (1987),
and Sweet and Lowdown (1999).
Sean Penn starred in Sweet and Lowdown as the jazz guitarist character partly
based on the great Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Reinhardt
and French violinist Stephane Grappelli were famous for their performances
together in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They made the Hot Club of France
famous, and popular swing revival bands today like the Hot Club of Cowtown
(from Texas) pay homage to Django.
For many years no trip to New York City was complete without a stop to hear
Woody playing clarinet on Monday nights, most recently at The Carlyle at
Madison Avenue and 76th Street. Allen is a decent musician, and you can also
see him perform on film in the documentary Wild Man Blues — named for the
famous tune written by Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.