West Coast jazz of the early 1950s had its own sound but it also had a particular look. White T-shirts, open shirts, tan chinos, hollow features and a hungry look replaced chalk-striped suits, wide ties and the twinkling eye of an entertainer. The casual, dangerous feel of Los Angeles jazz musicians was celebrated in the photography of William Claxton, Bob Willoughby, Dave Pell and others. Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Hampton Hawes and others in those images seemed like bruised outsiders struggling to find themselves. Their lean, rebellious look soon motivated the movie industry to cast young actors like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando to play damaged, misunderstood types.
Among the first Hollywood composers to truly grasp this movie prototype and marry it to music was Leith Stevens. Plenty of composers before Stevens had integrated jazz into scores, including Lynn Murray (The Big Night), Alfred Newman (Panic in the Streets) and Alex North (A Streetcar Named Desire). But Stevens [pictured above] was first to capture the mood of Los Angeles jazz—its darkness, its deviant yearning and the kicked-to-the-curb feeling that the music instantly conjured up.
Stevens' best scores performed transplants of storts. While Hollywood's screenwriters began creating characters who did their own thing butting heads with authority, Stevens' scores stimulated this feel by weaving in the sound of jazz. Among Stevens' jazz-tinged scores included The Wild One (1953), Private Hell 36 (1954), Crashout (1955), Mad at the World (1955), World Without End (1956), Great Day in the Morning (1956), The James Dean Story (1957), The Careless Years (1957) and Violent Road (1958).
His first two of this genre—for the filmsThe Wild One and Private Hell 36—were among his best. Stevens' themes for the films were orchestrated by Shorty Rogers, and albums featured the music used the cream of the West Coast jazz scene at the time. For example, one of the ensembles featured Shorty Rogers and Maynard Ferguson (tp), Bud Shank (fl,as,bar), Bob Cooper (ts), Jimmy Giuffre (cl,ts,bar), Russ Freeman (p), Carson Smith (b) and Shelly Manne (d).
Stevens had a unique perspective. Fresh Sound's Jordi Pujol quotes Stevens from 1955 in his liner notes to Jazz Themes from The Wild One and Private Hell 36, a CD that combines the two albums...
“The accepted way [to score a film] is to duplicate the emotional and dramatic content of what is on the screen. This, carried to an extreme, is called Mickey-Mousing a picture...some composers were able to prevail upon producers and directors to allow them to get away from this detail and take an entire sequence and develop it musically...jazz today is becoming more and more intellectual and therefore stimulating more interest. There is an entirely different group of people interested in jazz today than there was a few years ago."
While these two movies made light use of Stevens' scores, his LP adaptations fully exploited the music, and Rogers orchestrations and are among the finest of the period.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find Jazz Themes from The WildOne and Private Hell 36 (Fresh Sound) here.
Among the first Hollywood composers to truly grasp this movie prototype and marry it to music was Leith Stevens. Plenty of composers before Stevens had integrated jazz into scores, including Lynn Murray (The Big Night), Alfred Newman (Panic in the Streets) and Alex North (A Streetcar Named Desire). But Stevens [pictured above] was first to capture the mood of Los Angeles jazz—its darkness, its deviant yearning and the kicked-to-the-curb feeling that the music instantly conjured up.
Stevens' best scores performed transplants of storts. While Hollywood's screenwriters began creating characters who did their own thing butting heads with authority, Stevens' scores stimulated this feel by weaving in the sound of jazz. Among Stevens' jazz-tinged scores included The Wild One (1953), Private Hell 36 (1954), Crashout (1955), Mad at the World (1955), World Without End (1956), Great Day in the Morning (1956), The James Dean Story (1957), The Careless Years (1957) and Violent Road (1958).
Stevens had a unique perspective. Fresh Sound's Jordi Pujol quotes Stevens from 1955 in his liner notes to Jazz Themes from The Wild One and Private Hell 36, a CD that combines the two albums...
“The accepted way [to score a film] is to duplicate the emotional and dramatic content of what is on the screen. This, carried to an extreme, is called Mickey-Mousing a picture...some composers were able to prevail upon producers and directors to allow them to get away from this detail and take an entire sequence and develop it musically...jazz today is becoming more and more intellectual and therefore stimulating more interest. There is an entirely different group of people interested in jazz today than there was a few years ago."
While these two movies made light use of Stevens' scores, his LP adaptations fully exploited the music, and Rogers orchestrations and are among the finest of the period.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find Jazz Themes from The Wild
This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
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