BLACK
HOLES ON THE SOUNDTRACK: Part 1
Scoring Cross-Town Traffic
published in The Wire No.166, December,
1997, London
Blackness.
From Andre Williams to Sun Ra, from John Coltrane to Blow Fly,
from Roland Kirk to Bohannon - we now have an endless supply of
musical ebonomic documents whose hi-res bit-mapping engraves the
grooves of blackness in all its potpourri complexity. The isolation
and segregation of 'race music' in America through the first half
of this century has to a large degree been retrospectively stitched
together by so many CD re-issues, granting responsive ears the
luxury of repeated listening to get closer to those outer satellites
of the black planet. Most would agree that to ignore this history
when it is so readily available amounts to aural discrimination.
Yet what of blackness on the movie soundtrack? The recouping of
a black sensibility in the cinema has been and remains far more
difficult.
Historically,
cinema is arguably the mutant offspring of the Recording Industry,
genetically created by cross-fertilizing music publishing with
motion picture technologies. The mutation effect lies in the ways
in which cinema had attained a monstrous degree of normalisation
by the 20s, generating populist mythologies faster then the pacing
of its pop fiction. The visual became monstrous. Pop tunes from
the Tin Pan Alley era could become infectious and whistled across
America, but the audio-visual burn of fusing music with images
in so-called silent movies left many psycho-social scars. Anonymous
yet broadly interpreted tunes were tyranized by image codes and
socially acceptable standards of what could be depicted and what
was deemed unsuitable for exhibition or documentation. The result
was a leaning toward a visual homogeneity, thickened by successive
layers of conventions, icons and cliches. Racial, ethnic and regional
differences which musically could thrive as characteristic stylings
were either rendered absurd or harshly suppressed when images
had to be tracked to their recordings. Where the sound of blackness
enjoyed a pervasive presence through its invisibility as music,
it consequently paled on the white screen - and would continue
to do so for many decades to come.
Yet
blackness - as much a virulent, adaptable amoeba as a clear, potent
essence - can be felt as muted sub-sonic waves on the soundtracks
of Hollywood's classical cinema. From the smeared jazz of gangster
movies to the mottled R'n'B of Broadway musicals, African-American
musics squirm like dancing insects under Hollywood's Euro-Caucasian
blanket of fiction. Rather then be dismissed as unauthentic tracings
of 'true' black music, the irksome pseudo-jitterbuggery which
peps Hollywood film scores through the 30s and 40s should be regarded
as Hollywood's inability to suppress the sono-musical swell that
is black music: offensive to the cultured taste-drums of the time
yet too impressive to be aurally absented.
Blackness
first oozes from its suppressed depths through the cracks deliberately
engineered in social conscious cinema of the late 50s and early
60s. Reflecting a developing black consciousness that equally
affected black and white America, Quincy Jones' score for Sydney
Lumet's THE PAWNBROKER (1965) is among the first dark drops which
would eventually become a gushing sea of shiny, funky oil. Jones'
background as a band arranger and studio producer is integral
to his combining of an urban black sensibility with a studied
and perfected European-style mode of orchestration. Moments in
THE PAWNBROKER deftly slide between the two. While there are tonal
shades highly reminiscent of the brassier moments in Duke Ellington's
breathy and powerful score for Otto Preminger's AN ANATOMY OF
A MURDER (1959), Quincy Jones composes and conducts his score
like an unwelcome alien, an ill-fitting being. Ellington's score
is a seamlessly woven R'n'B/jazz text which embodies the film's
narrative wholly. Jone's score - like a Jew in Spanish Harlem
(a la Rod Steiger's character) or a black on the Hollywood soundtrack
- declares its displacement clearly. The main title's use of vibes,
celeste harpsichord and harp tantalisingly cast semi-jazz clusters
against a monophonic semi-blues line played by thickened strings.
It's like hearing Ellington and George Gershwin simultaneously.
It's black and it's jazz and all the space between.
In
another sense, it is also funky. Not as in the percolating rhythms
which mix erotic down beats with lazy syncopation into those pulsations
we normally associate with funk music, but 'funky' as in a heady
brew of extreme contrasts and polyglottic textures which celebrates
Otherness. Throughout THE PAWNBROKER, that 'melting pot' of which
American culture is so proud (so long as they don't drink from
it themselves) sweats and breathes. Latin percussion, fusion-style
alto sax solos, be-bop double bass, freestyle drum kit bursts,
atonal organ lines - all played by authentic players of Jones'
choice - capture the mulatto melodiousness of the real and mythical
New York street. No aural homogenisation is apparent; multiple
instrumental voices are allowed their distinctive presence in
the arrangement and the mix.
Along
with THE PAWNBROKER, other scores by Quincy Jones like MIRAGE
(1965), THE SLENDER THREAD (1966), IN COLD BLOOD & IN THE
HEAT OF THE NIGHT (both 1967) form a cluster which typifies the
emerging 'sound of the city' as a brash, harsh, violent urban
environment where racial and/or criminal tension is tauter than
any violin a soundtrack could record. Strains, glimmers and blasts
of soul, R'n'B, blues, jazz and funk are blended into a beautiful
African-American sonorum which mark Jones as a key - yet ignored
- figure in wrenching the film score from its Wagnerian cave and
slamming it down in the midst of cross-town traffic. And just
in case you can't hear it on those soundtracks, just listen to
Jones inimitable theme for the first hip 'street crime' TV show,
IRONSIDE (1967), complete with synth and squealing trumpets copied
in numerous TV shows and films throughout the 70s.
Did
someone mention the 70s? Try 1971. Best Academy Award for Theme
Song - Isaac Hayes' penultimate SHAFT (1971, directed by Gordon
Parks). Some may find it hard to listen to this score devoid of
the retro revisionist parodies based on the iconography the score
so perfectly stylized. Try it, anyway: you'll hear that the score
embodies many of the urban traits Jones had developed throughout
the 60s. Hayes himself had enjoyed an impressive career as arranger,
producer and composer prior to this score, and his funky and soulful
sensibilities are articulated with care and ease in the many moods
and colours encapsulated by the ornate sectioning of the main
theme as it rolls along the wah-wah wickey-wacky of its sexy rhythm.
The
flutes, trombones, hi-hats, guitars and piano of SHAFT crop up
in the explosive sound of the black city that is Blaxploitation:
a rapaciously anti-white world imaged by and predicated on a black
experience of the collapsed metropolis which no Mr-Brady-in-a-frizz-hairdo
could architecturally set right. But listen up: this isn't the
spooky black-of-night where noir meets crime in the meld of pulp
fiction. The domain of Blaxploitation is brightly lit, loudly
coloured, sharply focussed and garishly situated. Clothes are
vulgar, dialogue is grotesque, comedy is offensive, sex is delicious,
speed is noisy, guns are desirable, drugs are food, money is oxygen.
And the music is so black, so funky, so potent that it is hard
to find a more aggressive period in the history of film scores.
This is not a ground-breaking view: listen to rap music from the
fifteen years and the it is painfully apparent that Hip Hop is
an urban musical culture projected through the dark prism of Blaxploitation
in all defiant irresponsibility. The excessiveness in the audio-visual
carnivals of Blaxploitation movies are a jubilant celebration
of image being returned to sound - imagery which Hollywood had
commenced suppressing in the 20s. Blaxploitation movies carry
the intensity of blackness in high detail and sharp relief, shining
like ebony under arc lights, ignited by the chants of "Burn, Hollywood!
Burn!"
The
scores are too numerous to list in full (my research indicates
around 115 Blaxploitation films were made between 1971 and 1977)
but it is worth noting that key soul and funk artists threw their
grooves into the melting pot after the explosive success of SHAFT:
Quincy Jones (HONKY, 1972); James Brown (BLACK CAESAR, 1972 &
HELL UP IN HARLEM, 1973); Curtis Mayfield (SUPERFLY, 1972); Solomon
Burke (COOL BREEZE, 1972); Marvin Gaye (TROUBLE MAN, 1972); Bobby
Womack & Peace (ACROSS 110TH STREET, 1972); The Impressions
(THREE THE HARD WAY, 1973); Osibisa (SUPERFLY T.N.T., 1973); Isaac
Hayes (TRUCK TURNER & TOUGH GUYS, both 1974); Willie Hutch
(FOXY BROWN, 1974). Screaming fuzz-wahs on every instrument and
killer beats all over the place - by the middle of the 70s the
action film soundtrack had been recolonised by a deafening blackness
that could only be ignored through prejudice. It is embarrassing
to note how much this period was actively dismissed and is still
today presumed separate from the realm of 'real' film scores (prejudices
against which Quincy Jones fought for most of his tenure in Hollywood).
Yet if one tracks the consequences of ignoring this, one will
inevitably follow the funky soundtracks that thrive despite such
critical segregation - from the racially reclaimed orchestrations
of Spike Lee's films to the carnal throb of Hip Hop on the soundtracks
to new skool Blaxploitation movies.
