Most scholarship on jazz and film has approached the intersection of these expressive forms through a cinematic lens. Gretchen L. Carlson doesn’t mechanically reverse this pattern in Improvising the Score by organizing the book around case studies of the scores for a small but diverse group of narrative feature films. However, she does foreground the “creative labor” of a suite of jazz musician-composers in relation to the normative systems of commercial feature film production (11). Her driving questions seem to be: Under what conditions can what Ralph Ellison called jazz’s “antagonistic cooperation” be deployed in the creation of narrative film to the satisfaction of a score’s maker? How, then, does the score help create the meaning of the film it accompanies? And, very importantly for Carlson, does cinematic collaboration enable a jazz musician-composer to continue and expand upon their art?
Carlson finds four illuminating cases that emerge from asking her...
University of California Press