Feature photo courtesy of Universal Music The fact that musicians love film should come as…
Tatsu Aoki (Photo by Ken Carl)[/caption]
Movies came from my hanging out with my biological father, who was a movie producer in Japan. When he would come to the house, I watched movies with him. I watched The Birds when I was in kindergarten! It scared the shit out of me! I went to see Mothra vs. Godzilla when I was like 3 years old, right? My grandmother and my mother would take me to kabuki and other theater, and to traditional musical presentations, and my father would take me to professional wrestling and movies. So all these theater places were my hangouts.
When I was 6 or 7 years old, I had a standard 8-millimeter movie camera. I shot things like monster movies and some phony Western movies. We had a projector at home, we had a tape recorder, and we had of course the record player, where I would listen to my mother’s Duke Ellington albums. So the movies and the music and everything else kind of intertwined in my life. The music came with me when I was born — I had this weird life trained in Japanese classical music and listening to jazz music — and the movie apparatus came to me as I grew up.
As a teenager, I got involved in Tokyo underground art, and a lot of experimental movies, independent movies, a lot of literature. I just did whatever I wanted to express myself, but music came to me much smoother. And there’s an interesting thing in film that relates to jazz a lot. Filmmaking is an organized approach to the work: Nothing in film is really on the spot, because even if you shoot things randomly, you’re going to have to edit and organize them to make a piece. A filmmaker like John Cassavetes shoots all these things as he goes, but he somehow structures them into an interesting story. So it’s organizing the latent image, even if the image was shot randomly. At the end, it really lands as an organized work. And that really is like music: You can do all this stuff on the spot, but at the end, when you listen to the piece, it’s very settled into some form.
I think the big difference, is that the sound, the music, is uncertain with relation to your location — because you can imagine about where you are by listening to it. With the visual media, your imagination actually goes with what you’re seeing. The location is whatever the visual provides, whether it is abstract or concrete. But with music, the sound creates a very interesting transformation of the space, as you listen and you put yourself in the space. So I think that’s a fundamental difference between the two.
SONNY ROLLINS
Sonny Rollins, universally hailed as the last 20th-century jazz giant, turned 90 in September. But he still loves the memory of films he saw as a youngster, while regretting the one that got away: Bernard Tavernier scouted Rollins, among others, for the role of Dale Turner in the film ’Round Midnight, which went to Dexter Gordon instead. (“I didn’t have Dexter’s looks,” he says now.) Rollins has often spoken about how the cowboy-themed serials he watched in the 1930s inspired his iconic 1957 album Way Out West, but of course the movie musicals of the ’30s and ’40s left their mark, too.
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Bengt Nyman/CREATIVE COMMONS[/caption]
We used to go to the movies regularly, and in my day, the movies were the television of the day. So every week I’d go to the movies and we’d see an adventure story, and each week they’d have a different chapter, each week they’d end with the hero or the heroine falling off a cliff, and then next week you’d find they had a branch they held on to — so they didn’t fall off after all. I was a big fan of the chapters.
My first movie heroine that I fell in love with was Ginger Rogers. One of the first movies I remember of hers was Swing Time, with Fred Astaire. And it had of course that great Jerome Kern music — he is still one of my favorite composers — and I think I was around 6 years old when I saw that, and had a big crush on Ginger Rogers. She was something else. My mother used to laugh at me. She’d say, “Oh, here’s Sonny’s girlfriend.” And I remember films where Louis Armstrong made a cameo appearance and lit up the screen, and that was always a big highlight for me. And Cabin in the Sky was a great movie, where I also had a chance to see some of the people that I was following. Duke Ellington was in that movie, Buck and Bubbles were in it, and of course Lena Horne and Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson — and they were doing a lot of these Harold Arlen songs for that film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8ZXkoRTI3Q
I remember one movie that I liked very much, in the ’40s, called Brute Force. It had Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn. It was a prison movie, and Hume Cronyn was this sadistic guard: If the prisoners did anything, they’d be taken to his place and he would beat them. And his favorite music was Wagner, so if the prisoners heard this music when they were taken there, they knew were going to get beaten up. His character’s name was Munsey. So one time, I was coming back to New York on the shuttle from Boston, and Hume Cronyn was on the plane. And I missed an opportunity. I wanted so much to pass by and say “Munsey! Munsey!” [laughing] I knew he would have known [the reference].
In the mid-’60s, Rollins had his biggest commercial success when he wrote and performed the music for the film Alfie, punctuated by the swaggering “Alfie’s Theme.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW2aDwXO7Dg
I was leading a band in Europe, and it might have been the first time that we played in London, at the original Ronnie Scott’s club. We had a great engagement and a lot of celebrities came by, and one of them was a famous movie director, Lewis Gilbert. And his son John came to the club often, and finally he said, “Sonny, I’m doing a film with my father, and when I hear you playing, you remind me of the character that we’re portraying in the film — this guy Alfie.” I thought, “Great! A chance to do a film.” So I would stay in the club at night, after everybody had gone home, and compose the music I wanted to play for Alfie. Not having seen the film, I didn’t realize that Alfie was not someone that one would want to be identified with. And when I saw the film, when we were putting the music to it, it was more or less funny. I said to John Gilbert, “Look, man, I didn’t realize that’s what you thought about me.” We had a pretty good laugh about it.
BILL FRISELL
Many reviewers have likened Bill Frisell’s music to soundtracks for movies not yet made, but his connections to film are far more concrete that that. His guitar work has appeared in films ranging from the 1995 Italian film La Scuola to 2000’s Finding Forrester (starring Sean Connery), to the half-dozen or so documentaries he’s scored to two TV specials based on The Far Side cartoons of noted jazz lover Gary Larson. And, in 2016, Frisell released When You Wish Upon a Star, an album of movie music. His very first attempt at “scoring” came in the early ’90s, when he was asked to make music for silent films by one of the medium’s first comic geniuses, as documented on the 1995 album Go West: Music for the Films of Buster Keaton.
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Bill Frisell (Photo: Courtesy the artist)[/caption]
That was tricky, in a way, putting music to an image. I had no idea what I was doing, and there were no rules. I was presented with this opportunity. St. Anne’s Church in New York had this idea for me to perform live music with films by Buster Keaton, and I felt that it was OK, because there wasn’t any “official” music that was attached to the film, so I didn’t feel like I was stepping on anybody’s toes. It felt like this open slate, and I’d never done it before.
I really felt like a kindergartener with finger paint, just throwing anything at the wall, and it was an amazing experience — but it was terrifying at the same time. I just sort of went for it. I just tried anything: When there was something fast going on, I played something slow … . And you know, doing it with electric guitar/bass/drums sort of made it wrong to begin with [laughs]! But it sort of broke the ice for me. I guess it was the first time when I actually had to consider how I could deal with these two things, music and film, going together.
I mean, I must have been conscious of that already. I can’t remember how long I’ve been such a fan of all the Alfred Hitchcock films with Bernard Hermann’s music; that’s like way up at the top of my list of favorite music. Or the way that the music and the film are just so married together, along with Nino Rota’s music for Fellini, and Ennio Morricone’s writing. I love that music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnthwfIOxAo
I do see it being said [that my music is rather cinematic], but it’s not a conscious thing that I’m trying to do. But I’m conscious, when I put things together, of the process that I go through. When I record, I usually don’t have a fixed plan for what is going to happen. I go in and I start recording, and one thing leads to another. It’s kind of random. I’ll play one song and then I’ll say, “Well, now I think we should play” … kind of like on a gig. But then at the end, maybe that’s where I’m thinking more about trying to make an album. I still think of an album like an album, not just a bunch of individual tracks. I’m trying to make it into some sort of story line, or make it a narrative that goes through the music when I put all the pieces together.
When I was a little kid, I used to draw a lot, like rocket ships, or hot rods or dinosaurs or whatever, and I really feel like the music comes from that same instinct that humans have to make something — to bring your imagination out to the surface. That’s where it feels the same. With the music, I’m trying to stay in touch with that, and I can really feel the connection between drawing and music.
CHARLES MCPHERSON
Veteran bopster Charles McPherson has had one notable on-set experience: That’s his alto saxophone playing you hear in various spots on Bird, the 1998 Charlie Parker biopic directed by Clint Eastwood (for which McPherson also acted as musical consultant). But he has an abiding interest in film noir of the ’40s and ’50s, replete with troves of arcane knowledge, such as the many films featuring Fred Clark (who?) or the fact that tough-guy actor John Ireland had a long-lived friendship with the revolutionary jazz bassist Oscar Pettiford.
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Charles McPherson (Photo by Joan Abella)[/caption]
One reason I like those films of the ’40s is they remind me of my childhood, when I was like 10 or 11 years old, and some of those movies were just coming in. And secondly, that’s the end of the Swing Era and the beginning of bebop. So musically, to me, the ’40s were really compelling.
I especially like film noir. I just like the movies themselves. I think a lot of the writing is great. And then there’s a point in time where a lot of the Russian composers emigrated to America, and they were thoroughly educated with the Russian classical music tradition — like Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, that whole gang. And there were great composers from Eastern Europe, like Schoenberg. Those guys came over here and they went to Hollywood, and you can hear the manifestation of that harmony in some of those old movies. As a musician, this is where the harmonies became really interesting to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egga1aB05nA
When I go to movies, I’m always very much aware of the score — as much as I am of the actors, and what they’re saying, what they look like. Being a musician, when I hear the orchestra doing certain things, I’m very much aware of what the composer did, what chord he used — whether it’s a half-diminished or a diminished chord, or a dominant 7th with a flatted nine — to describe the particular emotion that’s being expressed by the actors. Chords basically are the soul of the emotionality you want the audience to feel when the characters are saying these words. If it’s a sad dark scene, you don’t write, as a composer for that scene, a great big fat major 7th chord sounding like you’re the happiest guy in the world. You have some dark chord that expresses the vibe of that emotion.
And [even when not writing for film] you should be doing the same thing when you compose your own music, because as an artist, you’re using music as a physical medium through which you are expressing yourself. But when we do what we do, we are talking about the human condition. So we are expressing it through music, somebody else through film, somebody else through architecture, whatever. It’s about the muses, it’s about feeling — hate, love, mystery, eros, agape; it’s about great joy, great sadness. You are dealing with emotions and you’ve got to know how to write for that, unless you’re just some kind of mechanic. So if I’m writing something and I want deep dark sadness for this moment, you’ve got to know what kind of chords you need to express that; it’s not just anything. So when I go to movies, I’m aware of that.
TIERNEY SUTTON
ScreenPlay, the latest album from the band led by nine-time Grammy-nominated vocalist Tierney Sutton, reveals her love of movies and movie music, covering nearly 20 songs that encompass a half-century of film history. Sutton has gained an inside view of the movie-music sphere through her long friendship with Alan and Marilyn Bergman — the oft-awarded lyricists for dozens of what have become standards — for whom she has sung demos and supervised production. And one of the Tierney Sutton Band’s signal achievements remains the soundtrack they wrote for Clint Eastwood’s 2016 film Sully starring Tom Hanks.
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Tierney Sutton (Photo: Courtesy the artist)[/caption]
Clint was sort of a fan of the band for many years, and in 2015 or so he started to just appear at our gigs and at gigs I did by myself. One week we were doing a run at [the Hollywood jazz club] Catalina’s, and he came two nights in a row. And the next thing I knew, he called me up and said that he had used some stuff of mine, and some of Christian Jacobs’ piano playing, in the temp[orary] music on a project he was working on. We had no idea what it was, we just thought he was asking to license a couple of things.
But then he had a screening and he invited Christian and me to see the film with the temp music laid in, and then he invited the band to score the film! It was a really great experience. Because the band has been playing together for over 20 years, we were able to work really quickly. So as we went through the film, it was like, “What if we took the interlude that we do on ‘blah-blah-blah,’ and we do a thing with that and then modulate it, that kind of thing — so we had ideas. Christian wrote two beautiful new songs. We met with Clint and agreed to do the score on a Thursday morning, and by Saturday we were in the studio putting tunes to picture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGpSZQ_ZuU
Everyone in the band has a long connection with film. We’re a Los Angeles-based band, and we’ve all played on a bunch of movies, and being in L.A., these things just come up from time to time. Because of that, we knew what they would want and also what they would not want. We’ve all done enough stuff in film that we knew to be really detached about what was going to make it in, and what wasn’t — [as opposed to] other people I know who have worked on soundtracks, and who were so disgruntled that all this beautiful music they wrote didn’t get into the film.
What made it so cool was that Clint just entered our process. He would say, “Oh, try that again and start with just bass,” or “Try that again, but Tierney should start high instead of low.” It was really magical.