JAZZ/NOIR


The Sweet Smell Of Success - real. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957

"The connections between jazz and the classic American film noir are complex and dynamic, but relatively uncharted. In contradiction to the late romanticism of the traditional Hollywood film score, jazz was used to critique cinematic illusionism and to position the spectator to view and hear film noir as a modernist art-genre with roots in German expressionism, gangster films, hard-boiled crime and proletariat fiction, French poetic realism, Italian neo-realism and Edward Hopper's painting. (...)


The Blue Dahlia - real. George Marshall, 1946

Ralph Ellison observed that much in American life is 'jazz-shaped'. Jazz colours so many facets of the contemporary condition: poetry, dance, painting, film. Jazz, in its turbulent history and various genres (Chicago Style, Hot, Swing, Kansas City Style, Bop, Modern, Cool, West Coast, East Coast, Mainstream etc), has had a palpable impact on modernist art forms. It is also both a popular and a political idiom. In Malcolm X's and Martin Luther's oratory, or Muhammad Ali's boxing-dancing, the jazz reference represents the double edged strategy of making cultural expression political or of making political expression palpable as culture". (John Conomos, Sonic Darkness: Notes Towards on Aesthetic of Jazz in the American Film Noir)

(2009)