The definition of “crime jazz” is usually applied to movies and TV shows of the 1950s and 60s such as Peter Gunn. But during the vibrant cinematic decade of the 1970s referred to as the New Hollywood era, crime jazz continued and evolved into a broader spectrum of musical sound, propelled by composers like Don Ellis, David Shire, Lalo Schifrin, and Herbie Hancock. In the next hour we’ll hear music from Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Chinatown, Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and other crime and suspense classics of 1970s American cinema. It’s “New Hollywood, New Noir: Crime Jazz in 1970s American Cinema”… coming up on this edition of Night Lights.
Jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson with the title theme from the 1972 movie Across 110th Street. Jerry Fielding before that with “Manipulation on the Center Divider,” featuring Art Pepper on saxophone, from the 1977 Clint Eastwood movie The Gauntlet.
As the 1970s began the Hollywood film industry was in the flux of change, with the old studio system’s tightly-controlled production approach having largely given way to the rise of young independent-minded directors making edgier films that appealed to contemporary audiences such as The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Easy Rider. The subsequent decade of American cinema is now seen as a golden age, dubbed “New Hollywood,” powered by rising auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, Billy Friedkin, and Martin Scorsese.
When these directors made crime and suspense pictures such as The French Connection and Taxi Driver, they often employed jazz in their scores, much as directors had done in the 1950s and 60s. But this was a different kind of crime jazz, drawing on new and evolving electronic instrumentation, generous use of percussion, and musical elements ranging from funk to atonalism and dissonance to evoke an existentially bleak urban landscape of 1970s America, with criminals seemingly operating at will and law enforcement paralyzed by corruption, incompetence, and bureaucratic overreach. Cities are portrayed as dangerous and rundown centers of economic and moral decline, in which solitary protagonists such as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson’s Death Wish vigilante, and Robert DeNiro’s cab driver Travis Bickle take justice into their own hands. The jazz scores for these films and many others, while sometimes suggesting the classic cinema of mid-20th-century Hollywood, more often created a new kind of noir that helped establish the troubled and anxious world being shown on screen.
We’ll begin with a film that is a seminal entry for both 1970s crime jazz and 1970s New Hollywood cinema in general, Billy Friedkin’s 1971 The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Schneider as a pair of not-by-the-book cops trying to take down a drug kingpin. Friedkin had seen trumpeter Don Ellis’ big band, famed for its use of unusual time signatures, at a concert in California, and thought Ellis could come up with an adventurous and bracing sound that would match the frantic and obsessive story Friedkin was going to tell. The ensuing score has been described as “the Stan Kenton orchestra on LSD,” a fairly apt and actually not-pejorative accounting, and expanded the sound of crime and suspense jazz—the new noir of New Hollywood.
Clint Eastwood’s iconic Harry Callahan, aka Dirty Harry, was a West Coast counterpart to Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection—a cop with a penchant for doing things his own way and contempt for his superiors, who, like other police bureaucrats depicted in 1970s American crime films are often more obstructive than helpful, more concerned with enforcing regulations than with catching criminals. Eastwood was a longtime jazz fan, and the Dirty Harry movies are filled with jazz-infused scores written primarily by Lalo Schifrin, who composed the popular theme for Mission: Impossible.
Another no-holds-barred box-office hero emerged in 1974 with Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson as an New York City architect who becomes a vigilante after the murder of his wife and the rape of his daughter. Pianist Herbie Hancock, coming off his well-received 1973 Head Hunters album, got the assignment for the score and drew heavily on his penchant for the rapidly-evolving world of 1970s electronic keyboards and synthesizers for the music. We’ll hear an excerpt from the title theme, following
Lalo Schifrin and his theme for Dirty Harry, on Night Lights:
Black jazz composers such as Hancock, the already-established Quincy Jones, and Oliver Nelson continued to make inroads into the Hollywood scoring scene in the 1970s, and we’ll hear some of their crime jazz in this next set, including Jones’ love theme for director Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 film The Getaway, based on a novel by hard-boiled writer Jim Thompson and starring Steve McQueen as a bank robber. I’ll begin with Oliver Nelson’s music for the 1970 film Zig Zag, starring George Kennedy as a terminally ill insurance salesman whose scheme to provide financial security for his wife takes a wrong turn. Nelson, who helmed the jazz masterpiece The Blues and the Abstract Truth and who wrote the theme for the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, was known for his exhaustive work habits and died of a heart attack five years after Zig Zag came out. Here’s the main title from the film Zig Zag, on Night Lights:
If you want to talk 1970s crime jazz in the movies, you certainly need to mention the blaxploitation genre, which had a heyday in the early 1970s spawned by the success of Gordon Parks’ 1971 film Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree as a self-assured, well-read and streetwise Black detective. While many blaxploitation films such as the 1972 Super Fly featured funk and soul-driven scores, they often incorporated jazz elements, and were sometimes written by jazz artists such as trombonist J.J. Johnson and vibraphonist Roy Ayers. In this next set we’ll hear some of Ayers’ music for the 1973 film Coffy, starring Pam Grier as a nurse who wages a private war against drug dealers and other criminals after her little sister becomes addicted to heroin—a plotline that anticipates Charles Bronson’s protagonist in the following year’s Death Wish. And we’ll begin with something from Shaft’s landmark soundtrack, almost entirely composed by soul icon Isaac Hayes, but helped out here by J.J. Johnson—“Walk From Reggio’s,” on Night Lights:
I’m featuring crime jazz of the 1970s on this edition of Night Lights, focusing on movies, with a future episode to be devoted to crime jazz on TV during the decade. Crime writer Raymond Chandler remains best known for his 1939 debut The Big Sleep, which was made into a classic 1946 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Chandler’s novels became a hallmark of 1940s and 50s crime fiction and the world of that time, but when director Robert Altman took on Chandler’s final novel, The Long Goodbye, in 1973, he decided to put the action in the present day, and to have actor Elliot Gould play Chandler’s iconic Phillip Marlowe PI character as an anachronistic eccentric making his way in a hazy manner through the cultural landscape of early-1970s California. He also asked composer Dave Grusin to come up with a single theme song that would play in different variations throughout the movie. We’ll hear one version with Grusin backing singer Irene Kral, followed by composer David Shire’s theme for the more conventional 1975 adaptation of Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum as Marlowe and set in early-1940s Los Angeles. First, Irene Kral singing the title song from The Long Goodbye, on Night Lights:
Both David Shire and Dave Grusin figure prominently in 1970s cinematic crime jazz scores. Shire, married to director Francis Ford Coppola’s sister Talia, was given the opportunity to score Coppola’s 1974 suspense film The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman as a saxophone-playing surveillance expert who’s drawn into a mysterious case that ends up feeding his sense of isolation and paranoia. Released the same year that Watergate culminated in president Richard Nixon’s resignation, it proved to be uncannily timed but was largely overshadowed by the other film Coppola released that year, The Godfather II—a movie he agreed to make in exchange for getting to do The Conversation.
Although electronic elements were an increasing element in 1970s film scores, Coppola asked Shire to write thematic solo piano sketches that evoked the lonely and anxiously inquisitive mindset of Hackman’s protagonist. Shire also scored the 1974 suspense film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, in which Walter Matthau plays a New York City police lieutenant negotiating with a band of criminals who have taken a subway train and its passengers hostage. For that score Shire drew on Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone compositional approach, using a tone row that consisted of only jazz intervals. Like other crime and suspense films set in 1970s New York City, the resulting score conveyed an edgy urban world gone wrong. David Shire and the theme music for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, on Night Lights:
Jazz pianist Dave Grusin became a prolific and renowned composer of film scores in the latter decades of the 20th century, penning music for The Graduate, Tootsie, On Golden Pond, and many other movies. In the mid-1970s he composed the music for two notable crime and suspense films: Peter Yates’ 1973 film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, starring Robert Mitchum as an aging criminal trying to avoid a return to prison, and Sydney Pollack’s 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a book-reading CIA employee caught up in a deadly internal agency conspiracy. The music Grusin created for these films also anticipates the smoother R & B/pop/jazz sound he would craft for later career projects, and serves as another example of the broad palette of 1970s crime jazz. Dave Grusin with the theme for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, on Night Lights:
I'll wrap up with the theme music from two more classics of 1970s American cinema, beginning with Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, starring Robert DeNiro as a troubled loner and late-night cab driver, and Roman Polanski’s 1974 movie Chinatown, in which Jack Nicholson plays a PI in 1937 Los Angeles pursuing a case that takes him into the heart of the city’s corruption. The Chinatown score was originally assigned to Phillip Lambro, but after it was rejected Jerry Goldsmith was brought in, with only ten days to compose and record a new one. That he succeeded is evidenced by the Academy Award nomination his score received—one of 11 for the picture overall—and the enduring popularity of the haunting theme he wrote, which we’ll hear featuring longtime Hollywood studio musician Uan Rasey on trumpet.
We’ll begin with the theme for Taxi Driver, written by the storied Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann, who had penned numerous renowned scores for films such as Citizen Kane, North By Northwest, and Cape Fear. Director Martin Scorsese insisted on hiring Herrmann to write the moody, atmospheric music that Scorsese wanted for his neo-noir film, and Herrmann finished recording the score on December 23, 1975. The next day he died of a heart attack at the age of 64, making Taxi Driver the capstone on a legendary career. Bernard Herrmann’s theme from Taxi Driver, on Night Lights:
“Love Theme From Chinatown” (end title)(2:03) (total: 4:18)
This edition of Night Lights is dedicated to Stewart Clark Johnson and the memory of Carole Fields Johnson.
Further reading:
Derrick Bang, Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen Since 1971
Andrew Rausch, The Taking of New York City: Crime on the Screen and in the Streets of the Big Apple in the 1970s
Outtake: