Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack

Specvlvm Mvsicae

Ede ndum Curavit

Roberto Illiano

Volume XXXIV

Publications of the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini

Pubblicazioni del Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini
Publications du Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini
Veröffentlichungen des Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini
Publicaciones del Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini
Lucca
 Cinema Changes:
Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack

edited by
Emile Wennekes and Emilio Audissino

F
turnhout
mmxix
 © F 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2019/0095/91
ISBN 978-2-503-58447-8
Printed in Italy
 Contents

Emile Wennekes – Emilio Audissino

Prologue: A Reel Jazz Survey ix

Rendition / Reception

Emile Wennekes
Out of Tune? Jazz, Film and the Diegesis 3

Phillip Johnston
Jazzin’ the Silents: Jazz and Improvised Music
in Contemporary Scores for Silent Film 19

Luca Stoll
Cinema: A Privileged Way of Acquiring
Intimacy with Jazz Standards 33

Marida Rizzuti
Play, My Fiddle, Play!
Jazz and Klezmer at the End of the 1930s 51

Randall Cherry
Ethel Waters and the Search for Racial Redemption 67

Jazz and National Cinemas

Emilio Audissino
The Multiform Identity of Jazz in Hollywood:
An Assessment through the John Williams Case Study 85

Nicolas Pillai
Rhythms of the Everyday:
An Alternative History of the British Jazz Film 99
Philippe Gonin
Jazz and Cinema: Which Jazz for Which Movies
in France from 1945 to the early 1960s? 115

Julio Arce – Celsa Alonso

From the Chotis to the Charleston:
Jazz in Spanish Films prior to the Civil War 133

Roberto Calabretto
Jazz Music in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Films 153

Willem Strank
When Jazz Meets German Cinema: A Brief Overview 169

Jason R. Hillebrand
A Song Helps Us Live: The Narrative Function of Jazz
in the Soviet Musical Film Jolly Fellows 189

Case Studies

Francesco Finocchiaro – Leo Izzo

The Sound of the Nightmares:
On the Jazz Music in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis 203

Ryan Patrick Jones

Dignity in the Twilight of Minstrelsy: Race, Nuance, and Aspiration
in Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life 219

Adam Biggs
The Blues and Dissonance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up 239

Armando Ianniello
Umiliani, Trovajoli, and Rota: The Jazz Film Score of Boccaccio ’70 253

Marcel Bouvrie
Synergetic Jazz Score: The Narrative of the Relation between
the Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music in Whiplash 275
Mervyn Cooke
‘The Same Goddamn Songs the Same Goddamn Way’?
Makin’ Whoopee with The Fabulous Baker Boys 291

Abstracts 307

Biographies 315

Index of Names 321

 Abstracts

Emile Wennekes, Out of Tune? Jazz, Film, and the Diegesis

In this chapter, three film sequences which profile jazz music are discussed: Blazing Saddles (Mel
Brooks, 1974), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Duke Ellington’s film debut, Black and Tan
(Dudley Murphey, 1929). I argue that many jazz soundtracks offer rich referential sources that are widely
underestimated by unquestionably qualifying them as sheer ‘source’ or ‘diegetic’ music. Even when
performed diegetically, cinematic jazz performances (both with and without lyrics) furnish filmic sequences
with suggestive subtexts, subsequently inspiring camera operations and narrative set-ups. The other way
around, the cinematic circumstances of such performance may accommodate a more comprehensive
understanding of the content and context(s) of the pieces featured. As early as his first appearances on
screen, Duke Ellington not only presented sophisticated soundtracks employing Modernist collage
techniques by incorporating quotes from the classical music canon, he also joined forces with avant-garde
film makers, turning his musical subjects into astute assemblages. By analyzing the final sequence of
Black and Tan, I propose that the function of the music here is ‘syn-diegetic’: synthesizing plural diegetic
expressions. The concept of a sheer, singular diegetic interpretation is insufficient, even poverty-stricken.
With this in mind, the maverick jazz sequences in both Blazing Saddles and Schindler’s List are subsequently
re-evaluated.

Phillip Johnston, Jazzin’ The Silents: Jazz and Improvised Music in Contemporary Scores for Silent Film
The vernacular jazz language significantly entered film scoring in the 1950s. It has continued to
evolve, and to shed its original associations with poverty, sex, drugs and working-class settings — as
well as its early role as diegetic music — traversing the stylistic range from trad jazz to the avant-garde.
Recent films such as Birdman (2014), Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016) continue to demonstrate the
relevance of jazz to film scoring. But the paradox inherent in the use of jazz in film music has always been
that jazz is essentially an improvisational form, and film music requires meticulous correlation between
sound and image. However, the proliferation of contemporary scores for silent film has opened the doors
to the use of improvised music in film scoring. Contemporary silent film scores by musician/composers
as diverse as Bill Frisell, Don Byron, John Zorn, and Ken Vandermark have featured improvised music
as the foundation for much or all of their scores. The large amount of score time, the freedom from the
oversight of a living director, and the influence of 1960s independent cinema and multimedia/happenings,
have provided an environment in which scores that make significant use of improvisation take maximum
advantage of the spontaneity and group creativity of improvised music as part of a kinetic live performance
event. This chapter employs examples from both the author’s own silent-film scores and those of others
to illustrate strategies in which jazz improvisation and improvised music can function effectively as tools
for the contemporary silent film score composer.

Luca Stoll, Cinema: A Privileged Way of Acquiring Intimacy with Jazz Standards
Drawing from fresh interviews with leading performers, this chapter evaluates cinema’s capacity
to inform a jazz musician’s relationship with the Great American Songbook. I begin by delineating the
components that give a song its distinctiveness. These can be found in published sheet music, and while
performers tend to agree that the melody is paramount, the harmony contained in the piano part may be
 Abstracts

considered problematic if used in a jazz context. Films are likewise a useful source because in them songs
often receive a fairly literal treatment, and I ask if cinema may have impacted the formation of a repertoire
of standard songs to be used by jazz musicians. In the second part, I examine how the cultural, narrative
and emotional facets that film can add to a song may influence a musician. I consider the possibility of the
transferral of these cognitive and emotional factors to an audience even through an instrumental rendition
of a song, and treat the related question of the role lyrics can play in the same process. If we understand
film viewing as an experience akin to real life situations, then cinema provides powerful templates that
allow a musician to generate emotion and meaning in their performance of a song. In the last section I use
‘Young at Heart’ as a case study to exemplify some of the phenomena discussed earlier. I end by asking
why hearing a song for the first time in its original context, when it was written specifically for a film, can
be such an exhilarating moment.

Marida Rizzuti, «Play, My Fiddle, Play!» Jazz and Klezmer at the End of 1930s
The season of Yiddish cinema springing in Hollywood, New York, Vienna and Poland represented
an important moment both in the history of American cinema and for the identity issues within the
phenomenon of mass emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States of America, occurring in the
Jewish communities since the beginning of the 20th century. Through the analysis of some case studies,
namely two films made between 1936 and 1938, it is possible to reflect on the phenomenon of Yiddish
cinema, investigating which were the different trends featuring such a framework. I elaborate on how
the musical styles of the Yiddish theatre have been adopted in the Yiddish film; beside this, the way they
merged into the mainstream sound film are taken into account: the characteristic elements of Klezmer
began thereby to combine with jazz. Not only it represented the mere inclusion of some musical traits,
but also the assimilation and reworking of musical structures and harmonic textures. As exemplary cases
are the films Yiddle with His Fiddle (1936) and Mamele (1938) by Joseph Green with Molly Picon and music
by Abe Ellstein. These films are important because they came ten years later than The Jazz Singer and they
are renowned as two of the most important works in Yiddish cinema. Also, they are two of the first films
establishing a particular musical connection between Klezmer music and jazz style.

Randall Cherry, Ethel Waters and the Search for Racial Redemption
Ethel Waters (1896-1977) was adulated as a ‘Race Star’ and a ‘Race Hero’ primarily on account
of her blues and jazz-inflected singing on ‘race records’ and mainstream pop recordings, in the 1920s
and 1930s, followed by her pioneering work as a leading black artist on Broadway and in Hollywood.
However, over time, her successful stage and screen career began to obscure the fact that Waters had been,
in terms of her fame and artistic influence, undeniably the peer of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.
What is more, even her inimitable acting and singing, whether in early short films made especially for
black audiences, such as Rufus Jones for President (1933) and Bubbling Over (1934), or the feature release
Cabin in the Sky (1943), came to be viewed derisively for the racial clichés in which her performances
were framed. In this chapter, due regard is given to the perniciousness of the racial stereotypes conveyed
in some of Waters’s film-based songs, but the overriding aim is to put Waters’s film work into proper
perspective: first of all, it is shown that Waters’s performances invariably stood out for her uncanny ability
to instil them with not only a unique brand of theatricality and a deep intelligence but also with an assured,
irrepressible sense of racial pride — against the backdrop of a prejudiced and segregated entertainment
industry. In the second section, writings by militant authors are discussed, ranging from Jeanne Noble and
Sam Dennison to LeRoi Jones, James Baldwin and Angela Davis, whose focus on racial identity politics, in
regard to Miss Waters, has unfairly obscured the impact of an artist who was once proclaimed «the greatest
artist of her race and of her generation».

308
 Abstracts

Emilio Audissino, The Multiform Identity of Jazz in Hollywood: An Assessment through the John
Williams Case Study
John Williams is best known for such large-scale symphonic works as Star Wars, Superman, the
Indiana Jones series and the like. Yet, his musical roots are also (and strongly) in jazz. In his formative years
he had the opportunity to be in touch with some of the finest performers. In the 1950s, while studying
‘legitimate’ piano music at the Juilliard School in New York, he tickled the ivories in the city’s jazz clubs.
In the early 1960s, while working in Hollywood as a pianist and an orchestrator, he arranged albums
for Mahalia Jackson and Vic Damone. When Williams firmly established himself as a film composer the
mid-1960s, he brought in his jazz background as a perhaps less noticeable but yet fundamental component
of his style. After a quick introduction about the relation between cinema and jazz in Hollywood history
in order to contextualise Williams’s film career, the chapter focusses on the Williams film scores in which
jazz episodes emerge from beneath the otherwise symphonic texture — for example, ‘Cantina Band’ in
Star Wars (1977), ‘Swing, Swing, Swing’ in 1941 (1979), ‘The Knight Bus’ in Harry Potter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban (2004) — and on film scores in which jazz is central to the film’s narrative: for example, Catch
Me if You Can (2002) and The Terminal (2004).

Nicolas Pillai, Rhythms of the Everyday: An Alternative History of the British Jazz Film
This chapter aims to have a transformative effect upon the way in which the history of jazz
in British cinema is told. Where previous accounts have focussed on feature films produced from the
1950s onwards, and have allied these with major film movements such as social realism, I argue that this
excludes vast swathes of British film-making — neglected areas by jazz scholars such as silents, animation,
public information and experimental short films. I contend that this neglect is due to instilled prejudices
within jazz writing that define the music narrowly and ahistorically. Three representative case studies
are presented: Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935), produced for the General Post Office Film Unit; the Free
Cinema films of Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson in the 1950s; and emerging black
representation in British Transport Films and Lloyd Reckord’s Ten Bob in Winter (1963). A case is made
that each of these contributes to an ongoing popular discourse in British culture regarding the cultural
status of jazz, characterised here as a discussion that extends beyond the confines of jazz fandom. By
considering these films in relation to broader notions of entertainment, education and community, we
gain a stronger understanding of how jazz is positioned within British cinema as a sound of the everyday. I
conclude with a call for jazz studies to widen its gaze towards types of film-making other than the narrative
feature. By doing so, scholars may correct the current distorted and partial picture that we have of the
presence of jazz in British cinema. The chapter ends by inviting further work that will unsettle and unseat
the stability of the current feature-centric histories, generating new work attentive to the diversity and
nuance of films that have been ignored.

Philippe Gonin, Jazz and Cinema: Which Jazz for Which Movies in France from 1945 to the Early 1960s?
Drawing a line between the jazz avant-garde and a popular aesthetic seems easy: on the one hand
the Nouvelle Vague (including the thrillers by Melville or Molinaro) with modern jazz (Davis, Blakey,
Monk, Modern Jazz Quartet or the new wave of French musicians — Solal, Hodeir…) and on the other
hand a more popular jazz, including the renaissance of the old-school (Claude Luter, Sidney Bechet)
and the legacy of the pre-World War ii music-hall tradition (Ray Ventura). If we often present Jean
Painlevé’s Le Vampire (1945) as the first time jazz was used as an original movie soundtrack in France (and
undoubtedly, this short film inaugurated a new kind of relation between jazz and cinema), things are not
as simple as they seem. In fact, we can see that if a ‘popular’ jazz is still represented in the soundtracks next

309
 Abstracts

to the new jazz schools (Third Stream, bebop or cool), the boundary between those who used the first or
the second is not as clear as it seems.

Julio Arce – Celsa Alonso, From the Chotis to the Charleston: Jazz in Spanish Films prior to the
Civil War
The arrival of jazz in Spain contributed to modify some customs and forms of leisure in the
process of modernisation of the country. Jazz was not just to listen, enjoy and dance, it was also to watch,
becoming a powerful iconographic theme. This explains the presence of jazz in silent film. Until well into
the 1920s, filmmakers in Spain initiated a hard-fought battle with popular musical theatre, particularly
zarzuela (Spanish operetta), that showed a great capacity to absorb and disseminate foreign musical fads,
including jazz music, sharing the stage with cuplés, zambras, tangos, flamenco, chotis and pasodobles. The
presence of jazz rhythms (providing a visual landscape through dance) along with native music made the
assimilation of jazz more natural. After the arrival of sound films, Spanish Republican cinema continued
with the popular genres of the previous decade, including adaptations of zarzuelas and folkloric musicals.
However, comedies and musical comedies with an American taste were also very successful, articulating
discourses of modernity and cosmopolitanism. As in the 1920s, modernity could and should coexist with
traditional elements of Spanish popular culture, which explains the relevance of popular music in films,
from copla to jazz. Famous theatre and zarzuela composers ( Jacinto Guerrero and Francisco Alonso) or
jazz musicians such as Daniel Montorio became film composers, while jazz found an appropriate place in
Spanish comedy.

Roberto Calabretto, Jazz Music in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Films

The chapter is focussed on the presence of jazz-related formulae and style traits in the films by
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director who loved this music to the point of making it a common
denominator for his soundtracks. Skilfully adjusted by the hand of Giovanni Fusco, jazz music features
prominently starting with the very first documentaries, namely N. U. (1948), to his first feature film,
Cronaca di un amore (1950), where a languid blues marks the meeting between the two protagonists, and
L’avventura (1960), where Antonioni embraced the Hellenic-style jazz. It is, however, with La notte (1961)
that Gaslini’s jazz music became the actual centre of gravity in the soundtrack, most notably in the second
half of this movie. It was then the turn of Blow up (1966), featuring the debut of a very young Herbie
Hancock. This rich kaleidoscope of situations is unique in the history of Italian cinema in the first years
after World War ii, when directors still tended to rely on commonplace and outdated stereotypes. In this
regard, Antonioni’s film production provides a particularly significant case study.

Willem Strank, When Jazz Meets German Cinema: A Brief Overview

German cinema has always had a particular relationship to jazz — the vivid national tradition that
has been well-connected to its US-American roots and its European peers throughout most periods of
German history was rarely mirrored in German films and, if it was the case, has not achieved broader
international recognition. This chapter is divided into four sections dealing with an introduction to the
(inter)national situation of jazz in German cinema, the general challenges of jazz film historiography, a
brief overview of German jazz film history and three short case studies of Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen
(2009), Jazzclub – Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm (2004) and Aber das Hund bellt ja nicht (2011) meant to
exemplify a few unsorted ideas that may be beneficial for a better understanding of contemporary German
jazz film.

310
 Abstracts

Jason R. Hillebrand, A Song Helps Us Live: The Narrative Function of Jazz in the Soviet Musical
Film «Jolly Fellows»
Some ten years after jazz music was first performed in the Soviet Union, on 1 October 1924, it
became the most dominant genre of popular music in the country. In the middle of this ‘Red Jazz Age’
(1932-1936), director Grigorij Aleksandrov released Vesële Rebâta ( Jolly Fellows, 1934), a musical film in which
the protagonist Kostâ Potehin, a shepherd somewhere in the Soviet countryside, moves to Moscow to seek
fame as a jazz musician. In this chapter, it is argued that the music in the film serves a narrative function akin
to Richard Taylor’s hypothesis of the move from periphery to centre (Moscow) in Aleksandrov’s narratives
through an analysis of the song ‘The March of the Jolly Fellows’, which appears in multiple arrangements
throughout the film. Additionally, the film’s songs and their arrangements serve personal narratives: character
development, as well as ideological narratives, such as the glorification of the Soviet state.

Francesco Finocchiaro – Leo Izzo, The Sound of the Nightmares: On the Jazz Music in Fritz Lang’s
«Metropolis»
Gottfried Huppertz’s score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is distinguished from other contemporary
film music accompaniments in its use of sophisticated compositional techniques of a Wagnerian origin.
Huppertz makes use of complex harmonies, chromatism, enharmony, and employs whole tone chords
and scales. He also has the gift of a cantabile quality and uses it to elaborate a dense network of leitmotifs,
which constitute the connective tissue of the score. In the musical vocabulary employed by the composer,
however, there are also, and not without surprise, dance music pieces, which tend to constitute separate
stage-music numbers. In two of these scenes –– both set in the Yoshiwara, the nightclub of Metropolis ––
jazz takes on a peculiar significance. Towards the end of Act i, jazz music accompanies the astonishing
vision that, during a trip by car, the worker Georgy has of the Yoshiwara hall. In Act ii, a foxtrot rhythm
accompanies the seductive dance of the android with the features of Maria. In these scenes, which we
can fully appreciate thanks to the complete reconstruction of the film carried out in 2010, Huppertz
alludes to contemporary dance music through syncopated rhythms, jazz harmonies, the sound of the
saxophone, etc. In the pseudo-Wagnerian style of Metropolis, the jazz of Yoshiwara represents a true and
proper discovery. The two scenes above give us an entirely new idea of Huppertz’s music, which now
appears to be richer and more complex. Beyond the stylistic and compositional aspects, however, there
is something else. The use of jazz, indeed, proves fully consistent with the intentions of the narration.
In Metropolis, jazz is associated with irrationality: an expressive means suitable for evoking a condition of
sexual ambiguity, racial promiscuity, and corruption of moral values. The jazz music, thus, acquires an
intentionally symbolic value with countless resonances in the cultural universe of the 1920s-Europe.

Ryan Patrick Jones, Dignity in the Twilight of Minstrelsy: Race, Nuance, and Aspiration in Duke
Ellington’s «Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life»
In 1935 Duke Ellington released his second film short, Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life
(Fred Waller), a sleeker improvement over the successes of his earlier Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy,
1929) owing to rapid advances in the burgeoning field of cinematography. While it revisits many of
the experimental visual techniques Ellington had trailblazed with Murphy, Symphony in Black further
extended the composer’s thoughtful, progressive investment in tackling racial themes as an important part
of his early output. Representations of blackness range from dignified characters to period stereotypes
as Ellington navigates contemporaneous audience expectations to elevate his African American subjects
beyond simple minstrel tropes. Placed it in the context of his running, career-long interest in race and
music, this chapter explores the variety of ways in which Ellington’s sophisticated setting cleverly expands
the African diasporic music tradition — what Wynton Marsalis once described as «a new system of

311
 Abstracts

harmony based on the blues» establishing «whole music forms that have yet to be imitated». Ellington’s
masterful fusion of styles ultimately carves out a hybrid space in which both his black and white audience
may glimpse balanced racial treatment unfettered on film at a time when neither group could yet envision
the fanciful ambitions of a Civil Rights Era still a quarter century away.

Adam Biggs, The Blues and Dissonance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s «Blow-Up»

Herbert Hancock is credited as composer in the opening titles of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966
film Blow-Up. Only four years after his debut album Takin’ Off, and at the age of just twenty-six, one
could have been excused for missing the films acknowledgement to its young composer. Thus far in his
career, and to this day, he had been Herbie Hancock. But his full name is Herbert Jeffrey Hancock, and
he was «named after the American singer and actor Herb Jeffries». Born on 12 April 12 1940 in Chicago,
Hancock grew up to become one of the most respected musicians and composers of his generation. His
career is an eclectic mix of styles and formats. Member of the second great quintet of Miles Davis in the
1960s, electric albums that forged new ground in the early 1970s, acoustic trios and small ensembles, solo
piano, innovative approaches to new technology in performing and recording, exploring and creating
new standards with albums such as The New Standard (Verve, 1996), and River: The Joni Letters (Verve,
2007), Hancock has been at the forefront of Jazz music for more than fifty years. His music and career
is well documented in the literature (Waters 2005, Pond 2005, Gluck 2012, as well as Hancock’s own
autobiography Possibilities). But what is less considered; in fact, what is entirely absent from any scholarly
research is Hancock’s film oeuvre. This chapter looks in detail at Hancock’s score for the film Blow-Up
(Antonioni, 1966). Using transcriptions and detailed analysis of the compositions this article considers
the score and the original soundtrack album, focussing specifically on the score’s use of the blues and
the resonance those sounds had in London at that time, as well as the other compositional and stylistic
elements Hancock used in his score. This chapter reveals the score’s debt to the styles of hard bop and
soul jazz earlier in the decade, as well as the score’s context, both within the film, and more broadly in
late 1960s London.

Armando Ianniello, Umiliani, Trovajoli, and Rota: The Jazz Film Score of «Boccaccio ’70»
Boccaccio ’70 is in some aspects a particular movie. The screenplay sees a division of the entire film
in four episodes directed each by a different director. The narrative flow, that ranges from the ordinary
to the surreal, is accompanied by musical contributions by three of the most famous composers in Italian
cinema: Piero Umiliani and Armando Trovajoli, from the Italian jazz scene, and Nino Rota, composer
of purely classical education but known to the public especially thanks to his music for films. Umiliani
embodies and maintains in time the figure of the ‘pure’ jazzman, especially during the 1960s in which
there was much to deal with in terms of the evolution of English beat music. Trovajoli on the other hand,
after having directed the RAI jazz orchestra from the mid-1950s, departed, though not entirely, from jazz
experimentation to focus on music for films and musical comedies. This chapter focusses on the use of
jazz music as narration device for cinema, namely Rota’s music for the two central episodes of the movie,
Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio and Il lavoro. The writing of Rota’s music will be compared to those of the
jazzmen Umiliani and Trovajoli, respectively for Renzo e Luciana and La riffa.

Marcel Bouvrie, Synergetic Jazz Score: The Narrative of the Relation between the Diegetic and
Nondiegetic Music in «Whiplash»
The distinction between diegetic music (existing inside the story space) and nondiegetic music
(only perceptible by the audience) is pragmatic but can be insufficient when analysing how music functions
within the narrative of a film. There may be instances that fall in-between this rigid division, and several

312
 Abstracts

scholars addressed this issue by coining new concepts. Although these are valuable concepts to localise film
music, little research exists on how all the diegetic dimensions may interact with each other in order to
support or contribute to the narrative. In doing so, we approach the diegetic realms not as a distinction,
but as a relation in which interaction and transition are vital contributors to the narrative. In this way, the
diegetic worlds work together synergistically as a narrative vehicle. In this chapter it is demonstrated how
this synergy functions in the film Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014). Through audio-visual analysis, the
relation between the predominantly featured diegetic jazz music and the rest of the score is demonstrated.
There are two cases in particular where this relation provides a meaningful understanding of the film’s
narrative. First, the ‘double-time swing rhythm’ runs as a pivotal motif throughout the film, as it symbolises
the control that Fletcher has over Andrew. It is Andrew’s most difficult drum challenge and when the
rhythm is not diegetic, it is superimposed with an unsettling atmospheric sound. This represents the
control that the rhythm, and Fletcher, has over Andrew’s physical and psychological well-being. Second,
the film’s main theme provides a nondiegetic underscore of Andrew’s poignant introspective moments,
but appears diegetically when Fletcher plays it in a jazz club. The theme is now shared, which narrates
their intertwined pursuit of musical greatness. Furthermore, it represents Fletcher omnipresent betraying
personality, as he captures the theme we thought was Andrew’s.

Mervyn Cooke, ‘The Same Goddamn Songs the Same Goddamn Way’? Makin’ Whoopee with «The
Fabulous Baker Boys»
Steve Kloves’s The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) is a jazz-milieu comedy drama which charts the
breakdown in the relationship between two sibling cocktail-lounge pianists after they decide to enhance
their tired two-piano routines by the addition of a feisty female vocalist. The film’s score, composed and
arranged by Dave Grusin, balances memorable diegetic jazz performances with original nondiegetic cues
in a post-bop idiom, and also incorporates pre-existing music by jazz greats such as Duke Ellington and
Benny Goodman. This chapter explores the intriguing ways in which this multi-layered movie engages
with well established musical and dramatic formulae drawn from a surprisingly wide range of filmic genres,
including comedy, romantic melodrama, the film musical, and film noir, and succeeds in melding them
into what critic Rita Kempley has aptly likened to «a beloved movie from the glory days of Hollywood…
It’s an American rhapsody».

313
 Biographies

A film scholar and a film musicologist, Emilio Audissino holds one Ph.D. in History of Visual and
Performing Arts from the University of Pisa, Italy, and one Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of
Southampton. His interests are film analysis, film style and technique, comedy, horror, and film sound
and music. He has published journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on the history
and analysis of films from the silent era to contemporary cinema. He is the author of the monograph
John Williams’s Film Music: «Jaws», «Star Wars», «Raiders of the Lost Ark» and the Return of the Classical
Hollywood Music Style (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), the first book-length study in English on the
composer, and the editor of the collection of essays John Williams: Music for Films, Television and the Concert
Stage (Brepols, 2018). His book Film/Music Analysis: A Film Studies Approach (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017)
concerns a method to analyse music in films that blends Neoformalism and Gestalt Psychology.

Celsa Alonso is Professor at the Department of Art and Musicology at the University of Oviedo.
Her research fields are 19th- and 20th-century Spanish music (song, musical theatre, film music, popular
music), nationalism and musical identities. She published the book La canción lírica española en el siglo xix
in 1998, and four collections of 19th-century Spanish Songs (between 1994 and 2005) which have led to
important recordings (by Teresa Berganza and Montserrat Caballé among others). Besides several articles
in academic publications and journals, in 2010 she was co-author and editor of Creación musical, cultura
popular y construcción nacional en la España contemporánea, and in 2014 she published the critical biography
Francisco Alonso. La otra cara de la modernidad. She has been adviser to the Latin Grammy Foundation
between 2013 and 2017. Since 2013 she is member of the Scientific Committee of Revista de Musicología
(published by the Spanish Musicological Society), and the leader of Research Group GIMCEL (Grupo de
Investigación en Música Contemporánea Española y Latinoamericana) at the University of Oviedo.

Julio Arce is Professor and Chair of the Department of Musicology of the University Complutense
in Madrid (Spain). He is the former director of the Centro de Documentación Musical de Cantabria and
adviser of the Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid. The primary focus of his studies
has been in the field of popular music and the relationship it shares with audio and visual media. He has
published various works, among them Mujeres en la escena, 1900-1940 (1996) and Música y radiodifusión
(2008). He has also participated in several collective books such us Music and Francoism (2013) and Made
in Spain: Studies in Popular Music (2013). Arce has been a contributor to RNE Radio Clásica, where,
alongside Belén Pérez, he has directed and co-produced the Audiovisión programme for the past two
years. He has also participated in educational projects for the Juan March Foundation and the Círculo de
Bellas Artes. Since 2017 he is member of the Scientific Committee of Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana
(published by the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales).

Australian Adam Biggs is pianist and music educator. He is Jazz Lecturer at Bath Spa University,
UK since 2012 and has lived in the United Kingdom. since 2003. Biggs completed his Masters Degree
in Jazz Piano Performance, at Bath Spa University, Bath in October 2011. His research focussed on new
 Biographies

repertoire and contemporary performative practice techniques. He has worked as a jazz pianist for nearly
twenty years. Biggs has played and worked with many musicians including — Iain Ballamy, Derek Nash,
Andy Sheppard, Clare Teal, Jamie Cullum and Geoff Simkins. In 2010 Biggs became a Roland Artist, and
currently plays and works on a Roland FP-5 Digital stage piano. Biggs leads the Jazz trio ‘Adam’s Apple’
with Ben Groenevelt on Double Bass and amazing Rob Brian on Drums/Percussion. They released their
first CD Love Unknown, a collection of Hymn tunes arranged for Jazz trio in November 2007. This led to
performances in the Bath Music Festival, Glastonbury Abbey, and Bath Abbey. In 2009 they released their
latest CD Be Still, which has been played on radio in the UK and Australia.

Marcel Bouvrie studied guitar and film scoring at the ArtEZ Conservatory Enschede before studying
Musicology at Utrecht University. His research topics include film music, 20th-century music, guitar studies,
film music, music and philosophy and the interaction between music and literature. He teaches guitar and
music theory and is currently working on a book about Fingerstyle guitarist Michael Hedges.

Roberto Calabretto is Associate Professor at the D.A.M.S. (Arts, Music and Entertainment
Studies Department) of the University of Udine, where he teaches musicology. He also works with the
University of Padua. He is a member of the Board of Faculty for Research Doctorates in Audiovisual
studies: cinema, music and communications and the director of the Masters in Film Music Composition
of Udine University. He is part of the scientific committee of the research group on Musical Historiography
and Film Music of the Levi Foundation of Venice. He was coordinator of the Restoration of Soundtracks on
Disk project in partnership with the Bologna Film Archive and headed the local office of the Socrates
Grundtvig Programme. His work focusses on 20th-century Italian music and examines the issues connected
with the role of music in audio-visual language, particularly in cinema. He has published monographic works
on Robert Schumann, Alfredo Casella and Nino Rota, on music in the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto and in
the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Luchino Visconti, Alain
Resnais and other directors. He has edited The Sonorous Screen: Music for Films which was glowingly received.

A language instructor and freelance translator, Randall Cherry holds an M.A. in French Studies
from NYU and a Ph.D. in Anglophone Studies from the University of Paris-Denis Diderot. He holds a
dual French-American citizenship, and has lived in France for more than twenty years and teaches English
language and American Literature and Civilisation courses at various institutions of higher learning in
Paris, including the Sorbonne, the University of Paris-Dauphine, ENSAPM (École Nationale Supérieure
d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais) and the ISEG School of Marketing and Communication. He has published
a number of articles on singer and actress Ethel Waters, including ‘Ethel Waters: Voice of an Era’ in
Temples for Tomorrow (ed. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, Indiana University Press, 2001) and ‘Ethel
Waters: Long, Lean, Lanky Mama’ in Nobody Knows where the Blues Come (University Press of Mississippi,
2005). In addition, he has published numerous translation projects, including two books (Movement of the
Free Spirit and Art & Technology in the 19th Century), translated from French to English for MIT Press. He is
also the longstanding translator for a French think tank. In that capacity he has translated a wide array of
scholarly articles on behalf of noted French academics.

Mervyn Cooke is Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. The author of A History of
Film Music (2008) and editor of The Hollywood Film Music Reader (2010), he has also published widely in
the fields of Britten studies and jazz: his other books include Britten and the Far East (1998), several volumes
of Britten’s correspondence, and monographs on the same composer’s Billy Budd (1993) and War Requiem

316
 Biographies

(1996). He has edited Cambridge Companions devoted to film music, jazz, twentieth-century opera,
and Britten, and has published two illustrated histories of jazz for Thames & Hudson. His most recent
book on jazz is an analytical and contextual study of the ECM recordings of guitarist and composer
Pat Metheny (2017). He is currently co-editing, with Christopher R. Wilson, The Oxford Handbook of
Shakespeare and Music.

Francesco Finocchiaro studied Oboe at Catania Conservatory and Musicology (Ph.D.) at the
University of Bologna. His research interests focus on the points of connection between composition,
theory, and aesthetics in 20th-century music. He has dedicated his studies to the Second Viennese School
and has released the Italian edition of Arnold Schönberg’s theoretical work The Musical Idea (Astrolabio-
Ubaldini, 2011). He has also published extensively on film music, with a special focus on the relationship
between musical Modernism and German cinema (LIM, 2017, and Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has
taught at the Universities of Bologna, Milan, Florence and at Ferrara Conservatory, as well as at the
University of Vienna. Currently he is leading the FWF Research Project Film Music as a Problem in German
Print Journalism (1907-1930) at the University of Vienna’s Department of Musicology.

Philippe Gonin is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Burgundy Franche-Comté. His research
focusses on the creative process, analysis and reception of rock, jazz and film music. He has written books
on Magma, Robert Wyatt, The Cure, Pink Floyd and directed Focus sul le Rock en France (Delatour, 2014)
and Prog Rock in Europe: Overview of a Persistent Musical Style (Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2016). He is
also a guitarist and composer. His latest work, entitled A Floyd Chamber Concerto is available at <https://
philippegonin.bandcamp.com/releases>.

Jason R. Hillebrand received a Bachelors degree in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam
in 2016 and a Masters degree in Applied Musicology from Utrecht University in 2018. He has focussed
on subjects related to the 1930s Soviet Union in both his Bachelors thesis and Masters thesis. The latter,
in which the narrative function of music in the musical films by Grigorij Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyr’ev is
explored, forms the basis for this entry. Jason Hillebrand currently resides in Leiden.

Armando Ianniello graduated from the University of Pavia/Cremona with the thesis on Luchino
Visconti’s Il Gattopardo with Nino Rota’s music, focussing on the aspect that binds the musicological
research with multimedia technologies. He conducted independent research at the Fondazione Giorgio
Cini in Venice on the manuscripts of composer Nino Rota presenting several papers at International
Conferences (Lovere, Venice, Barcelona) and at the annual musicology conference organised by SIdM
(Lucca 2017). Currently he is a Ph.D. student at the University of Udine.

Leo Izzo achieved a Ph.D. in musicology in 2007 at the University of Bologna. His area of research
covers several aspects of twentieth-century music: the relation between jazz and contemporary music, the
study of music sketches, the presence of jazz in film soundtracks. During his master thesis he studied the
music of Jelly Roll Morton in the archives of New Orleans and Chicago. During his Ph.D. he studied
the soundtracks composed by Bruno Maderna for radioplays and movies, with a grant from Paul Sacher
Stiftung (Basel). He has taught history of jazz at the University of Bologna and at the conservatory of
Ferrara and wrote essays for Il Saggiatore Musicale and collection of essays. Currently he is working on the
genesis of Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique for the Paul Sacher Stiftung. He works as music educator in
secondary school and promotes an innovative teaching method through the use of technology.

317
 Biographies

Phillip Johnston has intertwined lives as a jazz musician, composer and academic. He is best
known as the co-leader of ‘The Microscopic Septet’ and ‘Fast ‘N’ Bulbous’. His film scores include
Kathryn Millard’s Shock Room (2015), Henry Bean’s Noise (2008), Paul Mazursky’s Faithful (1996), Philip
Haas’ The Music of Chance (1993) & Doris Dörrie’s Geld (1989). He has been creating original scores for
silent films since 1993, beginning with Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927). He completed his Ph.D. at
the University of Newcastle in 2015, and currently teaches at the Australian Institute of Music.

Ryan Patrick Jones is Professor of Music History in the Department of Music and Theatre Arts
at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. His research in jazz has traced the educational arc of Julian
‘Cannonball’ Adderley’s early training and career in music (Current Musicology, 2006), and examined the
challenges of Stan Kenton’s early Artistry in Rhythm Orchestra as its leader eschewed dance music from
the receding swing era to embrace concert presentations of jazz ( Jazz Research Journal, 2008). A contributor
to the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press), he also authored
the Instructor’s Manual accompanying both Jazz: Essential Listening (W.W. Norton, 2011) and the second
edition of its parent text, Jazz, by Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins. His recent publication, ‘“Catch as
Catch Can”: Jazz, John Williams, & Popular Music Allusion’ in John Williams: Music for Films, Television,
and the Concert Stage (Brepols, 2018), explores Williams’s use of jazz elements within his film scores.

Nicolas Pillai is a Research Fellow in the School of Media at Birmingham City University. He is
the author of Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (I. B. Tauris, 2016) and the
co-editor of New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (Routledge, 2017). He won a prestigious Arts
and Humanities Research Council Early Career Researcher Research Leadership Award for his project
Jazz on BBC-TV 1960-1969 and, for a general audience, has written liner notes for Blu-ray releases from
the British Film Institute and Arrow Films. He is currently developing a graphic novel account of his jazz
television production research with the artist Nick Prolix.

Marida Rizzuti obtained her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at IULM University in Milan,
with a dissertation on One Touch of Venus and My Fair Lady. She published books on Kurt Weill’s musicals
and several essays on history of musical from 1940 until 1990, film musical and musical TV series, theory
of adaptation and audio-vision. She won in the last years several grant by Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), The
Kurt Weill Foundation for Music (New York), and by Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice). Her current
research focusses on Kurt Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Stefan Wolpe, Hanns Eisler and Film Music, as well
as on Molly Picon and the Yiddish Theatre. She is Manager Editor of the Journal Gli spazi della musica,
held at the University of Torino. She is also part of the research group Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Periodicals: Between the Avant-Gardes and Postmodernism of IULM University. Since 2012 she has been
Adjunct at IULM University (Milan), teaching history of musical, history of drama, film music.

Luca Stoll is a Swiss jazz saxophonist. From 2004 to 2014 he lived in New York City and studied
with Branford Marsalis and Barry Harris. He has appeared in the USA, UK, Switzerland, France, Italy and
Japan with musicians such as Kenny Washington, Alvin Queen, Clovis Nicolas and Michael Kanan. Luca
Stoll is currently a D.Phil. student at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Eric Clarke. His
dissertation looks at Coleman Hawkins’s 1940s solo sides from the perspective of the dynamic tensions
between tradition and the individual creative voice. He has presented papers at international conferences
such as ‘Miles Davis and John Coltrane at 90: Retrospect and Prospect’ (Surrey 2016), ‘Re/Sounding Jazz’
(Amsterdam 2017) and ‘Jazz Voices’ (Graz 2018).

318
 Biographies

Willem Strank is Post-doc Research Fellow and Masters Coordinator (film & tv studies) at Kiel
University, co-founder of the Kiel Society for Film Music Research, co-editor of the e-journals Kiel
Papers on Film Music Research and Rock and Pop in the Movies and the annual book series ‘FilmMusik’. Apart
from numerous publications in the field of film music research he wrote his dissertation about Twist
Endings in films in 2013 (published in 2014) and is currently working on a book about representations of
capital and control in US-American and Federal German films with focus on the 1980s.

Emile Wennekes is Chair Professor of Post-1800 Music History at Utrecht University, The
Netherlands. He has published on a broad range of subjects, including a co-published book on contemporary
Dutch music available in six languages. His work has been published, among others, by Oxford University
Press, Routledge, Michigan University Press, and Brepols. One of his current research interests concerns
‘mediatizing music’. Wennekes founded and chairs the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) under the
auspices of the International Musicological Society. He coordinates its annual conferences.

319