State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 10025 Krin Gabbard Associate Professor Comparative Literature 212 749-1631 18-May-1994 10:45pm EDT FROM: KGABBARD TO: Remote Addressee ( [log in to unmask] ) Subject: Extradiegetic jazz, continued I thank Gloria Monti, Abigail Feder and Peter Feng for taking the time to respond to my request for discussion on extradiegetic jazz in movies prior to the 1950s. By extradiegetic, I mean music that is usually written by a Hollywood composer, acknowledged in the opening credits, and that is, as Claudia Gorbman has written, "invisible" and "inaudible"--in other words, the music is not intended to interfere with the narrative but rather subliminally to "anchor" the images with familiar musical codes. I am looking for the moment(s) when something we can reasonably call "jazz" enters into Hollywood's reservoir of acceptable codes. My goal is to write a kind of pre-history of jazz on the soundtrack so that I can contextualize more recent films in which the jazz score is less "inaudible." I am especially interested in the extraordinary scores that Duke Ellington wrote for films such as _Anatomy of Murder_ (accurately described by Abigail), _Paris Blues_ and _Assault on a Queen_, not to mention the music for Spike Lee's films, first by Bill Lee and more recently by Terence Blanchard. In this sense, Spike Lee's films continue to be especially provocative, resonating somewhere between an avant-garde, Brechtian aesthetic and classical Hollywood. Although he has prominently used rap in his films, his music is usually rather conservative and conforms to standard Hollywood practice. (Yes, he turns up the volume on the extradiegetic music now and then, but so did Mike Nichols when he used Simon and Garfunkel records for the soudntrack of _The Graduate_.) Lee's His controversial use of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" in _Mo' Better Blues_, for example, almost succeeded in reducing that music to "invisibility" and "inaudibility." Compare Lee's use of jazz on the soundtrack to an overtly avant-garde director like Shirley Clarke using Dizzy Gillespie's group throughout her _The Cool World_ (1963). Krin Gabbard SUNY Stony Brook