Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Ellington Created Soundtracks for Noir Films & TV

When we think of film noir, we tend to think of a mood best set by a look: shad­ow and light (most­ly shad­ow), grim but visu­al­ly rich weath­er, near-depop­u­lat­ed urban streets. You’ll see plen­ty of that pulled off at the height of the craft in the movies that make up “noir­chae­ol­o­gist” Eddie Muller’s list of 25 noir pic­tures that will endure, which we fea­tured last week. But what will you hear? Though no one com­po­si­tion­al style dom­i­nat­ed the sound­tracks of films noirs, you’ll cer­tain­ly hear more than a few sol­id pieces of crime jazz. Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, writ­ing about Rhi­no’s epony­mous com­pi­la­tion album, defines this musi­cal genre as “jazzy theme music from 1950s TV shows and movies in which very bad peo­ple do very bad things.” She links to PopCult’s col­lec­tion of clas­sic crime jazz sound­track album cov­ers, from The Third Man to Cha­rade (the best Hitch­cock film, of course, that Hitch­cock nev­er made), to The Man With the Gold­en Arm, all as evoca­tive as the music itself.

“Pre­vi­ous­ly, movie music meant sweep­ing orches­tral themes or tra­di­tion­al Broad­way-style musi­cals,” says PopCult. “But with the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of bebop and hard bop as the sound of urban cool, stu­dios began latch­ing onto the now beat as a way to make their movies seem grit­ty or ‘street.’ ”

At Jazz.com, Alan Kurtz writes about the spread of crime jazz from straight-up film noir to all sorts of pro­duc­tions hav­ing to do with life out­side the law: “In movies and TV, jazz accom­pa­nied the entire sor­did range of police-blot­ter behav­ior, from gam­bling, pros­ti­tu­tion and drug addic­tion to theft, assault, mur­der and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” Get your­self in the spir­it of all those mid­cen­tu­ry degen­era­cies and more with the tracks fea­tured here, all of which will take you straight to an ear­li­er kind of mean street: the theme from The M Squad, “two min­utes of may­hem by Count Basie and his mob of heav­ies”; Miles Davis’ “Au Bar du Petit Bac,” impro­vised by Davis and his Parisian band against Louis Malle’s Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows; and Ray Antho­ny’s “Peter Gunn Theme,” a “quick­ie cov­er” that “beat Hen­ry Mancini’s orig­i­nal to the punch.”

And final­ly we have Duke Elling­ton’s score for Anato­my of a Mur­der, direct­ed by Otto Pre­minger in 1959.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Noir Films

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.