What does film noir have in common with jazz?
It’s fascinating that jazz and noir have become synonymous, because there are no movies from the classic noir era (roughly 1944-1952) that have a jazz score. Orchestral scores in the classical European tradition are predominant. Jazz appeared within the films, however, typically in nightclubs, a setting that’s vital to these movies — it’s where the players in the urban American demimonde intersect, and jazz is the sound they swing to. In the forties, jazz in films was representative of two things: sex and the underworld. And both, of course, are essential to film noir. Q: Are there any threads you see connecting this particular half-dozen films and their soundtracks? A: They’re all from the 1950s, when cultural changes and studio economics led to jazz being accepted, on a somewhat experimental basis, as viable for film scores. Jazz is an essential component of the films in this series, rather than being used to define one aspect of the mise en scene. As a group, these films disprove t
