P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
MoMA's Affiliation with P.S.1
Visiting P.S.1
Comprising a film retrospective, a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion, Jazz Score celebrates some of the best original jazz composed for the cinema from the 1950s to the present. The film retrospective opens on April 17 with a weeklong theatrical run of Arthur Penn's Mickey One, and continues with fiction features, experimental and animated shorts, and documentaries from countries as far ranging as France, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, and the U.S.
In 1951, Alex North's music for Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire opened up jazz scoring to a new generation of composers, including Elmer Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Bernard Herrmann, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini, and Lalo Schifrin. Significantly, this jazz renaissance coincided with the breakup of the Hollywood studio system and the emergence of independent film directors, including John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, and Herbert Danska. These directors experimented not only with diverse film styles and techniques, but also with more improvisational forms of jazz like hard bop, modal jazz, and Afro-Cuban jazz. This was equally true of European and Japanese New Wave filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s—Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, and the American expatriate Joseph Losey among them—who enlisted such legendary artists as Gato Barbieri, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and Tôru Takemitsu. Jazz continues to be used in diverse ways in contemporary cinema, whether to evoke a writer's paranoid fantasies in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991; music by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman) or the tragic devastation of the city that gave birth to jazz itself in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006; music by Terence Blanchard).
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film. Subtitling services provided by Sub-Ti Ltd.
The exhibition is made possible by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art and by the Nicholas Martini Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Polish Cultural Institute, New York, and by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
Related Events
Upcoming
Past
Martial Solal in Concert
Solal, who was born in Algeria in 1927 and settled in Paris in 1950, got his start performing with Django Reinhardt and the American expatriates Sidney Bechet and Don Byas in the 1950s. Soon after, he began composing film scores for such master directors as Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Carné, Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles, and Godard. As Nate Chinen of The New York Times put it, "Martial Solal has few peers among jazz pianists. Strictly speaking, probably none. He's a probing modernist with a mercurial touch...and a virtuoso technician often cited as the heir to Art Tatum." Solal is also represented in the Jazz Score film retrospective with two of his finest scores: for Breathless and for Jean Becker's Échappement libre (1964). Download the Jazz Score brochure in PDF format
Anatomy of a Jazz Score: A Panel Discussion
As one of the concluding events in the Jazz Score exhibition, this panel of celebrated composers, artists, and scholars explores the process of writing jazz music for the cinema. Participants include the Academy Award-winning composers Johnny Mandel (I Want to Live!, The Sandpipers, M*A*S*H, and Being There) and David Shire (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, All the President's Men, The Conversation, and Zodiac); the artist Stan Douglas, whose two-channel video installation Hors-champs (1992) examines the interplay and tension between free-jazz improvisation, film editing, and the construction of narrative; and moderator Gary Giddins, one of the leading jazz and film critics in America, who in 1998 received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his landmark work Visions of Jazz.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
Past
Mickey One
1965. USA. Arthur Penn. 93 min.
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)
1958. France. Louis Malle. 86 min.
Janine
1961. France. Maurice Pialat. 17 min.
Paris Blues
1961. USA. Martin Ritt. 98 min.
Begone Dull Care
1949. Canada. Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart. 8 min.
Anatomy of a Murder
1959. USA. Otto Preminger. 160 min.
Odds Against Tomorrow
1959. USA. Robert Wise. 96 min.
Tal Farlow
1950s/1980. New Zealand. Len Lye. 2 min.
I Want to Live!
1958. USA. Robert Wise. 120 min.
Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki (A Woman Ascends the Stairs)
1960. Japan. Mikio Naruse. 111 min.
A Streetcar Named Desire
1951. USA. Elia Kazan. 122 min.
The Servant
1963. Great Britain. Joseph Losey. 112 min.
Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit)
1956. Japan. Kô Nakahira. 86 min.
The Man with the Golden Arm
1955. USA. Otto Preminger. 119 min.
The Three Little Bops
1957. USA. Friz Freleng. 8 min.
OK End Here
1963. USA. Robert Frank. 32 min.
Pull My Daisy
1959. USA. Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie. 30 min.
Vertical Air
1996. USA. Robert Fenz. 28 min.
Dilemma
1962. Denmark/South Africa. Henning Carlsen. 89 min.
Adventures of an *
1957. USA. John and Faith Hubley. 10 min.
The Cool World
1964. USA. Shirley Clarke. 105 min.
The Connection
1961. USA. Shirley Clarke. 110 min.
Bridges-Go-Round
1958. USA. Shirley Clarke. 7 min.
How to Draw a Bunny
2002. USA. John W. Walter. 90 min.
Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water)
1962. Poland. Roman Polanski. 94 min.
Le Gros et le maigre (The Fat and the Lean)
1961. France. Roman Polanski. 15 min.
Le Départ
1967. Belgium. Jerzy Skolimowski. 97 min.
Sztandar (Banner)
1965. poland. Miroslaw Kijowicz. 7 min.
Blow-Up
1966. United Kingdom/Italy/USA. Michelangelo Antonioni. 111 min.
Herbie
1966. USA. George Lucas, Paul Holding. 3 min.
Sweet Smell of Success
1957. USA. Alexander Mackendrick. 96 min.
Touch of Evil
1958. USA. Orson Welles. 112 min.
The Gauntlet
1977. USA. Clint Eastwood. 109 min.
Bullitt
1968. USA. Peter Yates. 114 min.
The Criminal (The Concrete Jungle)
1960. Great Britain. Directed by Joseph Losey. 97 min.
Alfie
1966. Great Britain. Lewis Gilbert. 114 min.
"A Marriage Made in Heaven": Animated Jazz Shorts from The Hubley Studio, Featuring the Music of Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and Other Jazz Giants
A special evening devoted to the Academy Award–winning animation of John and Faith Hubley, and their wonderfully imaginative and innovative collaborations with jazz composers and musicians. Introduced by filmmaker Emily Hubley (John and Faith's daughter) and Ed Berger, Associate Director, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, and author of Benny Carter, A Life in American Music, the program features the world premieres of MoMA's newly preserved Adventures of an * (1957; music by Benny Carter, vibraphone solos by Lionel Hampton) and The Tender Game (1958; performances by Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson Trio). "There's something about jazz's bending of time within a rigid format that also applies to animation," Faith Hubley once observed. "That's why they work so well together. It's a marriage made in heaven."
A Bucket of Blood
1959. USA. Roger Corman. 66 min.
Pianissimo
1963. USA. Carmen D'Avino. 6 min.
The Pawnbroker
1964. USA. Sidney Lumet. 115 min.
In Cold Blood
1967. USA. Richard Brooks. 134 min.
The Wild One
1953. USA. László Benedek. 79 min.
The Organization
1971. USA. Don Medford. 106 min.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
1974. USA. Joseph Sargent. 104 min.
À Bout de souffle (Breathless)
1959. France. Jean-Luc Godard. 89 min.
Sait-on jamais... (No Sun in Venice)
1957. France. Roger Vadim. 97 min.
Taxi Driver
1976. USA. Martin Scorsese. 113 min.
Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris)
1972. Italy/France. Bernardo Bertolucci. 129 min.
Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus)
1959. France/Italy/Brazil. Marcel Camus. 106 min.
Repulsion
1965. Great Britain. Roman Polanski. 105 min.
On Fighting Witches
1965. Sweden/USA. Robert Shaye. 18 min.
Jack Johnson
1970. USA. William Clayton. 90 min.
On Animal Locomotion
1994. The Netherlands. Johann van der Keuken. 14 min.
A Man Called Adam
1966. USA. Leo Penn. 99 min.
Peter Gunn, "The Comic"
1959. USA. Blake Edwards. 24 min.
Staccato, "The Naked Truth"
1959. USA. Joseph Pevney. 24 min.
Blues for Trumpet and Koto
1962. Japan. Geoffrey Selden. 50 min.
Passing Through
1977. USA. Larry Clark. 104 min.
Plamuz (Music Art)
1973. Poland. Zbigniew Rybczynski. 10 min.
La Menace
1977. France. Alain Corneau. 117 min.
The Cooler
2003. USA. Wayne Kramer. 102 min.
Paris Blues. 1961. USA. Directed by Martin Ritt