Quincy
Jones
Programme
3 - radio script final draft
Score
[A]
A Lionel Hampton & Orchestra – AIR MAIL SPECIAL
3.30
Commentary [B] With Score A playing underneath
Blackness. From Lead Belly to Miles Davis, from John Coltrane
to Bootsy Collins, the vast history of black music in America
is more at our CD-skipping finger tips than ever before.
The sound of blackness – from the most primitive blues
to the wildest free jazz – is available in pure and
unadulterated form. This is in marked contrast to how black
music in the States first started, when black music was
isolated, segregated and ghettoized. But while we can now
savour this incredible range of styles on CDs, our access
to blackness on the movie soundtrack is not so easy. And
the recouping of a black sensibility in the cinema has been
and remains far more difficult.
Historically, cinema is a hybrid created by cross-fertilizing
the music publishing industry with motion picture technologies.
In fact, the Tin Pan Alley era of song publishing predates
the cinema. Prior to cinema and recorded music, pop ditties
were peformed and sung by the consumers themselves when
they bought sheet music and took it home. There was no clear
sense as to what image should accompany a song, nor was
the performer or singer a purchasable commodity. Once movies
became popular throughout both the silent and sound eras,
movies were deemed an ideal promotion vehicle for songs.
This resulted in songs being visualised in terms of scenarios
and performers. And while many of the Tin Pan Alley era
of songs were in the black vernacular of jazz and blues,
there was no holistic space for African Americans to perform
their music in the cinema. Things could sound black, but
they had to look white.
This resulted in a visual homogeneity, thickened by successive
layers of conventions, icons and clichés. Racial,
ethnic and regional differences which musically could thrive
as characteristic stylings were either rendered absurd or
harshly suppressed when film images came into play. Where
the sound of blackness enjoyed a pervasive presence as music
alone, it consequently paled on the white screen –
and would continue to do so for many decades to come. Or
at least until Qunicy Jones appeared in 1964 with the score
to Sidney Lumet’s THE PAWNBROKER.
Score [C]
C 1. THE PAWNBROKER – Main title 3.43
C 2. THE PAWNBROKER – Rack ‘Em Up (*) 2.40
Commentary [D] With Score C.2 playing underneath
Reflecting a developing black consciousness, Quincy Jones'
score for THE PAWNBROKER is among the first dark drops which
would eventually become a gushing sea of shiny oil. Jones'
background was as a band arranger and studio producer. This
meant he could combine an urban sensibility with a studied
and perfected European-style mode of orchestration. Many
moments in THE PAWNBROKER deftly slide between the two.
While
the score bears tonal shades reminiscent of the brassier
moments in Duke Ellington's breathy jazz score for Otto
Preminger's 1959 film, AN ANATOMY OF A MURDER, Quincy Jones
pushes THE PAWNBROKER past jazz into a a wider net of styles.
Ellington's score is a seamlessly woven jazz text which
embodies the film's narrative wholly. Jones' score declares
its displacement clearly – like a Jew in Spanish Harlem
(a la Rod Steiger's character) or a black on the Hollywood
soundtrack. The main title's use of vibes, celeste, harpsichord
and harp tantalisingly cast semi-jazz clusters against a
monophonic semi-blues line played by thickened strings.
It's like hearing Duke Ellington and George Gershwin simultaneously.
It's black; it's jazz; and all the space between.
In another sense, THE PAWNBROKER is also funky. Not as in
the percolating rhythms we normally associate with funk
music, but 'funky' in the deeper African-American sense:
a heady brew of extreme contrasts and polyglottic textures
which celebrates Otherness. Throughout THE PAWNBROKER, that
'melting pot' of which American culture is so proud is alive,
breathing and sweating. Latin percussion, fusion-style alto
sax solos, be-bop double bass, freestyle drum kit bursts,
atonal organ lines - all capture the mulatto melodiousness
of the real and mythical New York street. No aural homogenisation
is apparent; multiple instrumental voices are allowed their
distinctive presence in the arrangement and the mix.
Score [E/F]
E THE PAWNBROKER – Death Scene 5.01
F 1. THE DEADLY AFFAIR – Main Theme version 1 2.11
F 2. THE DEADLY AFFAIR – Main Theme version 2 (*)
3.06
Commentary [G] With Score F.2 positioned underneath
It might sound like cheesy cocktail jazz but it isn’t.
It’s Quincy Jones’ score to Sidney Lumet’s
1967 film THE DEADLY AFFAIR. Like so many Hollywood composers,
Jones covered everything from soul to rock to bossa nova.
But his orchestrations and arrangements reveal an advanced
musical ear. Jones knew how to breathe life into any popular
idiom.
Jones was one of the few black composer/arranger/conductors
of a serious bent who dreamed of the concert hall but found
cinema to be a more accessible stage. Yet while he occupies
a clear position within Jazz especially and the recording
industry specifically, his role as a black composer of film
scores needs to be put in context. Jones himself stated
the problem clearly: He said, “Blacks couldn’t
write string dates. They wouldn’t let you. You could
only write for big bands.” So for Jones and many other
black composers, orchestrated film music was unofficially
deemed a pursuit for those with clear European heritage.
This Euro-version of black music has its own history in
Hollywood. Not allowed but incapable of being suppressed,
blackness is felt as muted sub-sonic waves on many soundtracksfrom
the 30s and 40s. From the smeared jazz of gangster movies
to the mottled R'n'B of Broadway musicals, African-American
music squirms like dancing insects under Hollywood's Caucasian
blanket of fiction. Many dismiss these early scores as unauthentic
tracings of 'true' black music. But the irksome pseudo-jitterbuggery
which peps those scores should be regarded as Hollywood's
inability to stem the sono-musical swell that is black music:
offensive to the cultured taste-buds of the time yet too
impressive to be aurally absented. This is the ‘blackness’
that fuels Quincy Jones no matter how pale the music appears.
Score [H/I/J]
H THE DEADLY AFFAIR – Mendal Tails Elsa ; Tickets
to “S”
(NOTE – start this track 1 minute in from beginning
and edit out the ‘break’ that occurs halfway
through.) 4.00
I IN COLD BLOOD – Perry’s Theme 2.15
J IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT – Peep-Freak Patrol Car
; Cotton Curtain (*) 4.14
Commentary [K] With Score J playing underneath
Richard Brooks’ 1967 film IN COLD BLOOD. A groundbreaking
movie in its depiction of the fatal arc that shapes the
outline of an unbalanced and violent crime. Jones’
score is a rarity both then and since in its sympathetic
portrait of the one of the film’s disturbed killers,
whose background includes child abuse, orphanages and juvenile
hall. Jones in this film employs the multi-voicing of jazz
to represent schisms and contradictions in the killer’s
psychological make-up. A pathological and uncontrollable
force, the killer is also a child trapped in an aberrant
mind. Jones conveys this not through atonality, but through
a discomforting simultaneity, expressing the irreconcilable
differences operating in the modern social mind.
You’re listening to Traces of Soundtrack with Philip
Brophy. Today, the music iof Qunicy Jones.
In the 9 years between 1964 and 1972 alone, Quincy Jones
composed music for 40 films. This was his most concentrated
period. It also is an era that defined an emerging 'sound
of the city'. In crime films of the time, the city is a
harsh, violent environment, where racial and criminal tension
is tauter than any violin a soundtrack could record. Jones
was pivotal in defining this ‘sound of the city’.
Strains, glimmers and blasts of soul, R'n'B, blues, jazz
and funk are blended into a beautiful din in his urban scores.
The city for Qunicy Jones is neither location nor myth.
It is a living history of racial crossovers performed in
and beyond the name of Jazz. Jones’ collective works
embody the traffic coming from both sides of town. One can
hear the organic pointillism of Duke Ellington’s chords
laid across diverse instruments. One can also hear George
Gershwin’s symphonic transformation of slight blues
figures into epic jazz monuments. Quincy Jones lives in
their city – but colours it in wide-eyed black and
white. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his score to
Norman Jewison’s 1967 film IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT.
Score [L/M]
L IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT – No You Won’t ;
Shag Bag, Hounds & Harvey ; Give Me Til Morning ; Blood
& Roots 7.27
M THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS – Black Cherry (*) 2.16
Commentary [N] With Score M playing underneath
The sequel to IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT was released 3 years
later in 1970, directed by Gordon Douglas. Titled THEY CALL
ME MISTER TIBBS, it was a vehicle for both Sidney Poitier
as actor and Quincy Jones as composer. As with all his scores,
Jones arranged his music with specific performers in mind.
In place of national symphony orchestras, Jones’ music
is performed by ensembles of his selection and formation.
THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS is Jones at his funkiest, bringing
together an array of full-blooded session musicians whose
distinctive identities brand the score as jazz. It’s
a great example of Jones’ flexibility – composing
by producing, arranging by conducting, orchestrating by
performing.
Score [O/P]
O THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS – Main Title ; Side Pocket
; Why Daddy? 9.43
P 1. THE HOT ROCK – Miasmo 2.13
P 2. THE HOT ROCK – Sahara Stone (*) 3.00
Commentary [Q] With Score P.2 positioned underneath
THE HOT ROCK, directed by Peter Yates in 1972, is one of
near hundreds of heist movies made in the early 70s. All
heist films had the obligatory theft scene, usually played
out in tense silence and tantalizingly fragile music cues.
Jones was a key figure in creating the musical tension many
people identify with these films. His 20th Century ear borrowed
and reworked much from Edgar Varese’s impressionistic
studies of the American desert, where percussion embellishments
were brought to the fore. Varese was liberating percussion
from its non-musical status. But for Quincy Jones, percussion
needed no such liberation: it’s the pulsating blood
of Pan-African music.
Score [R/S]
R THE HOT ROCK – Slam City (*) 1.56
S DOLLARS – Rubber Ducky (*) 1.07
Commentary [T] With Score R and S positioned underneath
Richard Brooks’ 1971 film Dollar$ is another heist
movie with another score by Quincy Jones. But this is one
of his most idiosyncratic scores. It features the unclassifiable
Don Elliott Voices. In reality the dextrous and delirious
multi-tracking of a single singer – Don Elliott –
the Don Elliot Voices create a sound somewhere between the
Andrew Sisters and Gyorgy Ligeti. It’s a wholly unreal
sound, and one typically shaped by Jones and his sharp ear
for the style of playing his performers bring to his scores.
He succinctly described this approach: “My instrument
is playing the musicians.”
Beyond the traditional jazz format of merely spotlighting
soloists, Dollar$ exemplifies his archly modern take on
integrating the performer into both score and mix. As producer,
Jones has always controlled the phonographic aspects of
his recordings – more than most composers in both
classical and jazz traditions. Microphone placement, studio
acoustics and mixing technique are as equally part of his
craft as those skills normally associated with composing
music. The end result is a palpable energy that celebrates
both musicians and their instruments while creating music
that will exist only as a recording on the soundtrack.
Score [U]
U DOLLARS – Snow Creatures ; Candy Man ; Kitty With
The Bent Frame 8.31
Commentary [V] With Score Uplaying underneath
Film composer Qunicy Jones. Lost in history, but still living
in the grey zone between defiantly egocentric jazz improvisation
and the Eurocentric grandeur of tonal orchestration. Jones’
writing, arranging and orchestration belie an overlooked
complexity. With cool verve and bold respect, Jones wrenched
the film score from its Wagnerian cave and slammed it down
in the midst of cross-town traffic, where horns are sounded
by cor anglais and cadiallacs alike.
