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GMUR0141-18961547-7304Journal of Musicological ResearchResearch, Vol. 27, No. 2, March 2008: pp. 1–25 JAZZ EXOTICA AND THE NAKED CITY

JazzPhil FordExotica and the Naked City Phil Ford

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Noir fictions tend to a binary form of representation in which society is shown divided into light and dark sides, with the latter casting its shadows onto the former. Key to this discussion is Irving Howe’s notion of the city as a narrative device for representing society in all its contradic- tions and fractures. In film noir, the abstract notion of “society” is trans- formed into a concrete spatial schema: the Naked City, a ground where dispossessed groups congregate and interact with “straight” society. The city becomes a locus for (and geographic metaphor of) the idea of a fallen world hidden just behind the façade of bland social harmony. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the music written for films that explore this trope of representation was often a cinematic version of jazz. More exactly, it is music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it. In its traffic in filmic image, cinematic jazz resembles exotica, a kind of pop music that deploys a code of standardized musical gestures to evoke imaginary exotic paradises. But jazz exotica replaces jungle settings with images of the “Naked City,” which narrate motion across the borders separating the light and dark sides of film noir’s divided America.

It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived

Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty- Fifth Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City. She wouldn’t think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marihuana joints, the narrow fox faces 114 Phil Ford

watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.1

In this passage from Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe has been arrested by a pair of brutal, corrupt cops who are trying to intimidate him into abandoning a case. The sing-song cadence of the first paragraph, with its series of simple short sentences and its keening repetition of the word “nice,” is a mocking evocation of a children’s book’s innocent perspective. It is brutally undercut in the next paragraph, with its hard-boiled patter of underworld slang and its inventory of criminal types. Chandler’s stylistic opposition reaches toward something like a social critique; literary texture mirrors the basic distinction in Marlowe’s world, between the realm of the “nice” and its opposite, all that is not-nice.2 Nice society is represented by the nice part of town, with its nice jail, nice blue bay, and the nice girl who lives on a nice street. Not-nice society gathers on the other side of town, and it comprises alienated beings living at the margins of society—African Americans and Mexicans, detectives and criminals, hustlers, hipsters, homosexuals, washed-up boxers, and show-business bottom-feeders. This side of the nice/not-nice binary divide might simply be called noir. This article deals with noir, a term that has variously been taken to refer to a style, a mood, a genre, a cycle of works, a genealogy, and a mode of gender discourse.3 Whatever noir really means has yet to be resolved and probably cannot be resolved, at least on the simple level of semantic defi- nition. I will talk only about one limited aspect of noir: its schema of a society divided into its light and dark sides, and the literary images gener- ated by that schema—of violence behind a placid facade, wickedness behind the pretense of virtue, madness behind the mask of rationality.

1Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1943), 144. 2This is not by any means the only time Chandler used this imagery. “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler’s essay on the aesthetics of the detective story, concludes with an extended Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 and poetic elaboration of this schema of social relations. Chandler, “The Simple Art Of Murder,” in The Chandler Collection, vol. 3 (London: Picador, 1983), 191. 3For a summary of the divergent perspectives of noir that have emerged in the past fifty years, see James Naremore, “The History of an Idea,” in More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 9–39. Naremore argues—rightly, I think— that noir, like many period and style designations, cannot be defined in terms of a semantic inter- pretation that holds that the word refers to a unitary, definable thing. Rather, he argues that the word can be used to denote a branching system of associations between related concepts. The looseness of some of these associations, and the inability of any one perspective to account for them all, is a function of their history. History introduces the unpredictable, contingent variations that accrete to any living tradition of image or expression. This view is summed up in an epigram Naremore borrows from Nietzsche: Only that which has no history is definable. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 115

The two sides of noir’s social imagination are opposite, but complemen- tary. The noir is in dialectical opposition to the nice, something that not only lies contrary to it but whose continued existence pervades and colors it. The noir exists because of the nice, not in spite of it. Nice society is erected on a foundation of taboo. Its citizens are forbidden certain pleasures, which are provided by those who are cast out of nice society, and in so doing become ever more untouchable. Cowboy, the heroin dealer in Jack Gelber’s 1959 play The Connection, understands his trade in these terms: “I believe that anything that’s illegal is illegal because it makes more money for more people that way.” 4 Noir representations are above all about exposing the contradictions between the sun-dappled façade of the official social order and the shadowed underworld it conceals but can never entirely suppress. Noir relies on the irony that arises from perceiving these two sides as part of an integrated whole, their rifts exposed and unhealed. In literature, film, and music, this rather abstract idea has been persis- tently embodied in the city: Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, David Lynch’s Lumberton, William S. Burroughs’s Interzone, and so on. It should be clear even from this short list that this representational trope, while dominant in noir, is not exclusive to it. For example, the city is also the central figure in several travel articles Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about America in the mid-1940s.5 Sartre uses the city as a stage for his Americans, trapped in the “great external apparatus” he calls Americanism and rebelling against their enforced inauthenticity by escaping their “pure white” apartments and delving into the noir:

There are a thousand taboos which proscribe love outside of marriage—and there is the litter of used contraceptives in the back yards of co-educational colleges; there are all those men and women who drink before making love in order to transgress in drunkenness and not remember. There are the neat coquettish houses, the pure-white

4Jack Gelber, The Connection [1960], dir. Shirley Clarke (Montauk, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 1983), videocassette. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 5For an account of Sartre’s postwar visits to the United States, see Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon, 1987); for a discussion of their political context, see Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Trans- formed American Culture Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). My point here is not to enlist Sartre as a neutral observer of midcentury American mores, but as a literary imag- ination participating in tropes of literary representation absorbed from watching American movies and reading American novels, not least those of Dashiell Hammett. Sartre cheerfully admitted that the America he was presenting in the pages of Le Figaro was not really real, but rather something conjured out of American novels and films and mapped onto personal experi- ence. “In any case, I will be honest with my dream: I shall set it forth just as it came to me,” he wrote. Jean Paul Sartre, “Individualism and Conformism in the United States,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 97. 116 Phil Ford

apartments with radio, armchair, pipe, and stand—little paradises; and there are the tenants of those apartments who, after dinner, leave their chairs, radios, wives, pipes, and children, and go to the bar across the street to get drunk alone.6

My essay follows a line of thought pursued by Irving Howe in his essay “The City in Literature”—that the city becomes a narrative device for representing the contradictions and fractures of modern society, and a template within which marginal social types find literary representation.7 In noir fictions, the abstract notion of “society” is transformed into a concrete spatial representation: the Naked City, a ground where straight society confronts its distorted reflection in those it has cast out. The city becomes a geographic metaphor for the idea for a fallen world hidden just behind the façade of bland social harmony. The noir hero is one who is plugged into the Naked City and whose dark power flows from it. He could be a detective (Philip Marlow in Lady in the Lake), a newspapermen (J. J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success), a cabbie (Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver), or a musician (Johnny Ingram in Odds Against Tomorrow)—anyone who can cross the internal boundaries of the Naked City. He can go anywhere in the city without fear, and his knowledge of it gives him his power. But the city is dirty, and so is the knowledge drawn from it; he can go anywhere but cannot stay anywhere, least of all in polite society. The noir hero is a free agent, unmoored from fixed identity within the city, drifting between the regis- ters of society and mediating between them. He is a liminal figure, like Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, who is “on the threshold, of the city as of the bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed him; in neither is he at home.”8 What I would like to argue here is that the schema of the Naked City, and the agency of its hero, is registered in the jazz scoring written for noir and urban thriller films of the 1950s and 1960s, and enjoys an artistic afterlife in Angelo Badalamenti’s music for David Lynch’s revisionist noirs. This is music that accompanies the hero as he plunges into the Naked City, going to get drunk in the bar across the street or delving into Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 the city’s deeper reaches in search of a clue. In short, it is music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde perennially associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it.

6Jean-Paul Sartre, “Americans and their Myths,” The Nation, October 18, 1947, 402–3. 7Irving Howe, “The City in Literature,” in Selected Writings, 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 302–17. 8Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the World,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott and ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 156. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 117

This music is known to collectors of obscure vinyl as “crime jazz.”9 But not all crime jazz belongs to crime films: Crime-jazz-scored films like Arabesque and television programs like Mission: Impossible deal with international intrigue; The Pawnbroker, which Quincy Jones scored, is about a holocaust survivor. Neither is it always used in noir pictures: Indeed, as David Butler notes, none of the original 1940s noirs used jazz scoring.10 Nor is crime jazz found in every jazz-scored film: Aside from a Beatnik dancing to Mozart’s E-flat piano quartet (with bongos), the appallingly bad MGM adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans has a straight-ahead jazz score by Andre Previn and performed by Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Art Pepper, Russ Freeman, and Red Mitchell, improvising to the same degree, and in much the same manner, as they did on their own records.11 Finally, not all crime jazz belongs in films, or indeed in any explicitly narrative medium, as we will see. For these rea- sons I have coined the more inclusive term “jazz exotica” to describe this music, a kind of pictorial music that is filmic, whether or not it is actual film music. Like the pop exotica of Les Baxter, it paints a picture of an imaginary, exotic place with conventionalized “natives.”12 But instead of Baxter’s lost jungle cities and savage tribesmen, jazz exotica conjures up the Naked City and its low-life flâneurs. The various pieces of music that

9See the two volumes of Rhino Records’ crime jazz anthology; their liner notes, by Jimmy Botticelli and Skip Heller, offer a useful introduction to this music. Various artists, Crime Jazz: Music in the First Degree (Rhino 72912); various artists, Crime Jazz: Music in the Second Degree (Rhino 72913). 10David Butler, Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from The Phantom Lady to the Last Seduction (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002). 11The Subterraneans is an eccentric film, but it serves to demonstrate that even the most shameless of exotica representations—in this case, something we might call “Beatsploitation”— do not necessarily rely on exotica scoring. For an overview of jazz in film see Krin Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Peter Stanfield, Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927–63 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Krin Gabbard, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 12I have elsewhere defined exotica most broadly as a mode of representation that, in transforming human lives into spectacle, absorbs the real into the imaginary and erodes the boundaries between them. Phil Ford, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica,” Representations 103 (Summer 2008), forthcoming. Other studies that touch on exotica include David Toop, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999); Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (New York: Pica- dor, 1994; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Timothy D. Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2001); Philip Hay- ward, ed., Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music (Sydney: John Libbey, 1999); John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics, and the Culture Industry (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Philip Bohlman, “World Music at the ‘End of History,’” Ethnomusicology 46/1 (Winter 2002), 1–32. 118 Phil Ford

I call jazz exotica are united by certain conventions of musical representa- tion that cohere in a certain sound. Since I want to think of “crime jazz” as a species of exotica, I’ll begin my discussion of its musical aspects with Les Baxter’s Quiet Village, which Rebecca Leydon has aptly called the “anthem of exotica.”13 It is a cut from Baxter’s Ritual of the Savage, a suite of thematically interconnected move- ments that depicts a generalized exotic paradise, with sonorities drawn from Latin and American pop and jazz, early twentieth-century art music, and film music. Indeed, Ritual of the Savage might sound to us like the score for a nonexistent film. Baxter’s exotica is pictorial in the same way film scores are, relying on well-worn musical codes to signify places, character types, and emotions. Although some of Baxter’s techniques, like the gong blasts and pentatonic melodies of “Hong Kong Cable Car,” seem to be cued to specific places, Leydon is right in asserting that for the most part this music relies on musical codes that are exotic in a generic sense—they are immediately understood as non-Western without belong- ing to any specific place.14 Leydon argues that Baxter signified otherness primarily through a layered texture undergirded by ostinatos. For its first forty-seven measures, Quiet Village comprises three layers: Latin percus- sion (a guiro and shaker); a bass ostinato paraphrased from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; and a string chorus of planing chords in the Debussy style (see Example 1a). Thereafter, the texture sorts itself into four planes: percussion, bass ostinato, a middle-register chordal ostinato, and a very “Hollywood” string melody (see Example 1b). Leydon calls this stratified texture a “signature device for Baxter’s music,” and offers the interesting suggestion that its interlocking ostinato planes are musical inscriptions of body movement.15 Like the Afro-Cuban jazz to which it is obviously indebted, the gestural language this music encodes is that of groove rather than swing—a way in which jazz exotica and the modern chamber jazz it seeks to evoke tend to differ. And in 1951, the year Ritual of the Savage was released, the complex multilay- ered groove is already an all-purpose symbol of the exotic, a connotation it retains as it later becomes a stylistic fingerprint of jazz exotica. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 Both Quiet Village and the main title music from Orson Welles’s 1958 film noir Touch of Evil use a complex multilayered groove to conjure a

13Rebecca Leydon, “Utopias of the Tropics: The Exotic Music of Les Baxter and Yma Sumac,” in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, ed. Philip Hayward (Sydney: John Libbey, 1999), 57. 14Leydon, “Utopias of the Tropics,” 48–51. This part of Leydon’s discussion relies heavily on Carl Dahlhaus’s discussion of exoticism in nineteenth-century music. See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 304–6. 15Leydon, “Utopias of the Tropics,” 59–60. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 119

Example 1a. Les Baxter, Quiet Village (1951), measures 1–11. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014

Example 1b. Les Baxter, Quiet Village (1951), measures 49–55.

locus of the imagination, the former an object of desire, the latter of fear. Touch of Evil begins with a famous three-minute crane shot that opens on a ticking time bomb and follows the car in which it has been hidden as it winds its way through the dark streets of a Mexican border town. 120 Phil Ford

Here Henry Mancini does with a complex multilayered groove what the camera does in images, striking the film’s tone of menace, its looming promise of interest to be paid on an accumulated debt of wicked deeds. This film distills the noir trope of the Naked City in this opening scene, which adumbrates the literal and figurative borders that a Mexican narcot- ics investigator and his American wife will cross and recross throughout the film: the boundaries between countries and cultures, and the boundary that lies between their as yet unsullied private world and the darkness beyond it. As Orson Welles remarked to Peter Bogdanovich, the whole story is in that shot.16 When Universal Studios stripped Welles of control over this film, it threw out his original sound design for the opening shot, which sketched narrative motion through the labyrinth of city streets by playing overlap- ping and discontinuous sound effects and source music cues as they would appear from the camera’s roving perspective. Welles had proposed this idea in a memo to a studio executive:

As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican border town, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers—the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out its own tune by way of a “come on” or “pitch” for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture.17

But Mancini’s music accomplishes something similar through the progressive layering of ostinatos and by building up a fierce rhythmic drive that complements the swooping, panoptic camera. We are pulled through the city by the camera and, just as irresistibly, by the music. After a unison fanfare that hammers out the tonic, a taunting percussion osti- nato begins, at first slowly and then locking into a groove. At measure 16 the first ostinato line enters in the saxophones (see Example 2a); at Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 measure 30, a new line enters in the trombones, accompanied by a new bass ostinato (see Example 2b). Then, at measure 42, the texture splits into five layers: the percussion, the bass ostinato, a baritone sax ostinato, the trombone line (now doubled in the trumpets), and a new ostinato—a leering figure in alto and tenor saxophone (see Example 2c). In addition

16Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 308. 17Orson Welles, memo to Ed Muhl, published in Touch of Evil (Universal Studios, 2000), DVD. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 121

Example 2a. Henry Mancini, main title, Touch of Evil (1958), measures 16–22. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014

Example 2b. Henry Mancini, main title, Touch of Evil (1958), measures 30–36. 122 Phil Ford

Example 2c. Henry Mancini, main title, Touch of Evil (1958), measures 42–47. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 to this cue’s arrangement of ostinatos, it is also worth noting its timbre, which is hard-edged throughout. The saxophone and trombone ostinato lines are placed in a low register and doubled an octave below by baritone saxophone and bass trombone, and Mancini uses straight mutes to sinister effect. In a review of Mancini’s soundtrack for Peter Gunn, George Russell complained that “There is a bit more to modern jazz than a walking bass punctuated at pseudo-hip intervals by horns conveying strange sounds or screaming trumpet drops. This, like all TV jazz background music (and most jazz shows) is a caricature of jazz. I’d classify it as ‘ad agency Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 123

jazz.’”18 Despite its hostile intent, this is actually a pretty good descrip- tion of the jazz exotica sound. As Russell implies, this music is less jazz than something written to sound like jazz. The polarity between walking basses and the figures superimposed against them becomes a metonymic reduction of the jazz sound, something composers rely on to conjure up an image of jazz and all that is associated with it: shades and beret, a smoky club after dark, etc. What this suggests is that composers seeking to depict jazz rather than simply write it will intensify that polarization between bass line and horn figure, or, more abstractly, between figure and ground. And this is what Baxter does in “Blue Jungle,”19 by presenting a walking bass that snakes coolly around a simple recurrent pattern of tonic and dominant harmony, while Plas Johnson cuts hip figures out of the main tune above (see Example 3). Furthermore, Baxter salts Blue Jungle with “screaming trumpet drops”—for example, in measures 24–25—and his orchestration, like Mancini’s in Touch of Evil, relies on low-octave doublings to fashion a ground against which horn figures may stand out all the more dramatically. High-contrast figure-ground arrangements of this sort have entered the world’s musical lexicon as a signifier for jazz. Compare Blue Jungle to the music for the “red room” dream sequence from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which uses this style to mine a vein of retro-1950s hipness, albeit a hipness bracketed and estranged by its surreal setting. An FBI agent, dis- patched to a small town in order to solve the mystery of a young woman’s death, dreams he is sitting in a red-curtained room with the doppelgänger of the murdered woman. The enigmatic Man From Another Place speaks in riddles that turn out to be clues; one of them is the line (spoken back- wards by the actor and then played backwards on the soundtrack) “where I come from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.” This appears to be the cue for an unseen jazz combo to begin playing a distilled musical sign for the retro-1950s luxe moderne style that Lynch has fetishized throughout his career. Here the music is even more sche- matic, more reduced from its referent than Blue Jungle: The texture is bass and tenor saxophone (with finger snaps and brushes in the back- Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 ground), and the bass line, rather than being freely improvised from chord changes, simply repeats a chromatic ostinato in the “walking bass” style (see Example 4). This kind of scoring is analogous to the visual style of film noir, which commonly depended on high-contrast “mystery” lighting for its effects. Mystery lighting was a special interest of John Alton, a cinematographer who wrote a chapter on the subject in Painting with Light, his treatise on

18George Russell, review of the soundtrack for Peter Gunn, Jazz Review 2/5 (June 1959), 18–9. 19Les Baxter, Jungle Jazz (Capitol ST-1184, 1959). 124 Phil Ford Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014

Example 3. Les Baxter, Blue Jungle (1958), measures 1–26.

film photography. The most striking passage from this chapter is what James Naremore calls a “sort of extended haiku or imagist poem”20 in which Alton lists potential mystery lighting cues, all of which have in common an intensified contrast between figure and ground:

20Naremore, More Than Night, 173. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 125

Example 4. Angelo Badalamenti, “Dance of the Little Man,” from Twin Peaks (1991).

Ship-wrecked figures on a raft, in complete darkness, with only the phosphorescence of the ocean waves breaking the ink-black of the picture; in the distance, the fluctuating light of the lighthouse The effect of passing auto headlights on the ceiling of a dark interior Fluctuating neon or other electric signs The light of a passing streetcar on an otherwise dark street The hanging light on the ceiling of a cheap gambling joint Searchlights of prisons or concentration camps Flashes of guns in absolute darkness The opening and closing of a refrigerator that has a light inside, in a dark kitchen The well-known street lamp The hanging lamp swinging on a warehouse wall, on a stormy night The revolving light of a lighthouse Very effective is the light effect where, during a fight, the only visible light is on the blades of the knives.21

Alton writes that mystery lighting will always be associated with states of fear, for “where there is no light, one cannot see, and when one cannot see, his imagination starts to run wild.”22 But to Alton, where there is light, there is hope, and the boundaries between literal dark and light map onto more figurative ones. “In the slightest light, be it that made by a per- son carrying a lantern or a group of people making up an ‘energy,’ what we might call today a live battery, the evil spirits lose their destructive Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 power. In the dimmest of lights, the ghosts disperse.”23 Alton’s 1955 film The Big Combo is a virtuoso etude in mystery lighting. In it, high-contrast noir lighting (including some of the above-listed cues) throws light and dark into relief, suggesting the familiar noir territory of nice and not-nice. The Big Combo is outfitted with a jazz exotica

21John Alton, Painting with Light (New York: Macmillan, 1949; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 47–8. 22Alton, Painting with Light, 44. 23Alton, Painting with Light, 45. 126 Phil Ford

Figure 1. The Big Combo, directed by Joseph Lewis (1955).

underscore by David Raskin, but the moment where visual contrasts seem most clearly mapped onto musical ones occurs in a scene of diegetic music, a recital performance of Chopin’s third Scherzo. This itself is a sharply dualistic piece, with demonic double-octave passages in C# minor bluntly juxtaposed to angelic chorales and showers of tintinnabulating fil- igree in the enharmonic major. This piece is the leitmotif of Alicia Low- ell, a classical pianist who has crossed some internal boundary from the angelic to the diabolical and has become the gun moll of the crime boss Mr. Brown. At the beginning of the concert scene, we see the pianist only as a thin silvery line of profile limned by a single spot raked across the stage; another spot picks out Alicia’s face in the box above the stage (see Figure 1). As the pianist plays a fortissimo D` major passage with the cho- rale reinforced in bass octaves, the detective-hero enters Alicia’s box (see Figure 2), and Alicia’s apparently impassive face, turning from the cam- era, is glistening with tears: There is something the music is saying that she cannot (see Figure 3). The# detective has come to ask her to leave Mr. Brown,` and as the demonic C minor octaves begin to boil back up out of Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 the D chorale, he turns up the heat. Pointing to a coat Mr. Brown has bought her, he asks “You think this is mink, Miss Lowell? You think these are the skins of little wild animals, sewn together for your pleasure? You’re mistaken. These are the skins of human beings, Miss Lowell. People who have been beaten, sold, robbed, doped, murdered by Mr. Brown.”24 And at the cadence of his speech, the camera cuts to the pianist’s hands, a furious blur as they beat out the return of the demonic octaves, the keyboard a slash of white against inky black

24The Big Combo [1955], dir. Joseph Lewis, Image Entertainment ID6146TVDVD (Image Entertainment, 2000), DVD. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 127

Figure 2. The Big Combo, directed by Joseph Lewis (1955).

Figure 3. The Big Combo, directed by Joseph Lewis (1955).

(see Figure 4). The scene shows a drastic polarization of lit figures on a

Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 ground of shadow, which mirrors the split of the femme fatale’s psyche— a split that will widen into the denouement of the film. And at this point we realize that the borders we cross in noir fictions are not always or only geographic ones. If the city is a narrative device for depicting an abstract social critique, it can also be used as a metaphor for the mind—as Freud did in Civilization and its Discontents—or as the mechanism by which the narrative subject comes into contact with the hidden registers of both society and himself.25 In noir narratives, journeys

25Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1930], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 16–8. 128 Phil Ford

Figure 4. The Big Combo, directed by Joseph Lewis (1955).

into the depths of the city become occasions for journeys into the self, often ending in the discovery of one’s own unsuspected capacity for crime or vice. Furthermore, films of the 1940s and 1950s commonly engi- neered scenes that engaged the Freudian schema of the conscious and unconscious minds.26 Jazz, that evergreen symbol of the id, was again pressed into service, this time depicting not just the layout of the city with its hidden and apparent parts, but of the mind similarly divided. Just as jazz marked the geographical border-crossings of films noirs like Touch of Evil or The Sweet Smell of Success, it would also mark journeys into the unconscious. In either case, jazz exotica serves a liminal function, arousing the uncanny emotions that accompany the transition from one state of consciousness or society to another. I Want To Live! is a melodrama about the execution of Barbara Graham, a prostitute convicted of an elderly woman’s murder. The sequence in which Graham has a nightmare about her impending execu- tion shows jazz exotica carrying a heavy narrative load. Instead of presenting the viewer with the sort of Freudian dream sequence that was

Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 already something of a cliché by the late 1950s, director Robert Wise chose only to show Graham asleep in her cell. The mounting horror of her dream is suggested by Johnny Mandel’s music alone, which begins with a low drone before breaking into a fast-moving multilayered groove (see Example 5). We hear the familiar texture of layered rhythmic ostina- tos, but the layers are disjunct (11 against 16) and the rhythmic drive is juiced by the addition of an irregular meter—another stylistic feature of

26Franklin Fearing, “The Screen Discovers Psychiatry,” Hollywood Quarterly [later Film Quarterly] 1/2 (1946), 154–8; Francis Bill Wickware, “Psychoanalysis,” Life, February 3, 1947, 98. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 129

Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 Example 5. Johnny Mandel, “Nightmare Sequence,” from I Want to Live! (1958).

jazz exotica perhaps most familiar from Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible theme. The figure-ground contrasts of sonority are intensified here in the polarity between an E` clarinet (playing a shrill distortion of Barbara’s theme) and a contrabassoon sounding five octaves below. The recording appears to have been assembled from several tracks, with brass lines dropped into the mix but standing outside both the meter and aural per- spective of the foreground parts. (My transcription is of the soundtrack 130 Phil Ford

album version of this track, which differs slightly from the film version.) Mandel creates a layered texture in which the layers do not quite cohere; like the figures of a nightmare, they swim in and out of focus. It was perhaps inevitable that Les Baxter would follow film composers in making the unconscious mind one of the exotic destinations of his listeners’ collective imagination, much as he did with the American mean streets. The Passions (1954), a series of six mood portraits for orchestra and soprano, claims to be a study of “a woman’s passions . . . violent, anguished, poignant, ecstatic.”27 In “Terror,” Baxter’s pictorial music offers a journey into a woman’s nightmare, following a musical narrative from consciousness to the unconscious. Like Mandel’s musical descent into the unconscious, Terror involves the distortion of a tune that has been established as a leitmotiv of a narrative subject’s conscious mind. In Terror, it is a rewritten version of the children’s song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which is sung in the manner of “a traditional ‘popular vocal,’ with its lush string background and simple harmonies.”28 This stands out for being one of the only passages in the entire album that Bas Sheva sings without extended vocal techniques; it is conspicuously, suspiciously “normal.” (Elsewhere she tries to outdo Yma Sumac, the reigning queen of exotica singing, with an array of moans, screams, growls, and mutters.) With its connotations of a child’s bedtime lullaby, “Twinkle” begins this composition in order to create a state of complacent repose that will splinter apart to reveal swarming depths of irrationality and fear. (In this sense this is similar to the way Raymond Chandler subverts the children’s book style of the passage with which this essay begins.) The tune is presented only to be harried by Bas Sheva’s voice, twisted into the shape of a similar tune (“The London Bridge is Falling Down”), and mutilated by the sorts of musical techniques Mandel used in the Nightmare Sequence music for I Want to Live!: thematic distortion, extremes of register, and the layering of nonintersecting planes of musical texture. A rattle signifies the onset of the nightmare, whereupon muted brass play a fragment of “Twinkle” against a swirling background of whole-tone harp arpeggios and string tremolos. As Bas Sheva’s voice becomes more and more frantic (culmi- Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 nating near the end in a shattering hi-fi scream), the tune continues to fragment, tossed around against a fulminating orchestral backdrop that remains hostile and alien to it. Mancini’s main title cue for Touch of Evil dramatizes the characters’ flight into the sinister depths of the city; Mandel’s nightmare sequence dramatizes Barbara Graham’s journey from consciousness to a terrifying subrational world. The Silencio nightclub sequence from David Lynch’s

27Les Baxter, The Passions (Capitol LAL 486, 1954), LP with booklet. 28Baxter, The Passions. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 131

Mulholland Drive brings these registers of flight together. The film is divided into two sections, the one a sort of “alternate reality” of the other. It is left to the viewer to decide what relationship they might have to one another, but regardless, there is an obvious “cross-over point” where we begin to glimpse a hitherto hidden level of reality, and where the protago- nist begins to glimpse it, too. Her lover has awoken her and insists they travel through the streets of Los Angeles at 2:00 am to visit a strange nightclub called “Silencio,” where a sinister Master of Ceremonies repeatedly asserts that all is an illusion—and proceeds to prove it by sum- moning an old man in white who walks onto stage playing a trumpet, only to remove it from his lips as his solo continues to play on without him. (Incidentally, in a neat intertextual feint, the trumpet player is Conte Can- doli, a veteran of the Kenton orchestra and many a Hollywood soundtrack.) Again, jazz exotica marks the crossing of boundaries—not only into a strange, hidden corner of the city, but into a previously unsus- pected level of the narrative, and (as it turns out) into a previously unsus- pected level of the protagonist’s consciousness. A clarinet, muted trombone, and unmuted trumpet each take a turn playing a bluesy figure over a slow-moving bass ostinato (see Example 6); like the red room music in Twin Peaks, it is a simplified, schematic representation of figure-ground jazz texture. But like Mandel’s nightmare sequence music, its layers do not quite mesh: When the trumpet solo enters, it remains on a D-minor tonal plane that skitters unsettlingly outside the established tonal perspective of the cue. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014

Example 6. Angel Badalamenti, “Silencio,” from Mulholland Drive (2001). 132 Phil Ford

In popular consciousness, Lynch’s films are practically the embodi- ment of what David Foster Wallace has called, with some irony, “the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA.”29 But while Lynch continues to spin images from this representational trope, he did not invent it. Neither did the radi- cal intellectuals of the 1960s, whose images of American repression and hypocrisy found musical expression in Frank Zappa’s rock dada; even Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective fiction from the 1920s and 30s seems indebted to a yet earlier thread of intellectual history, the Marxist critique of bourgeois society. Warren Susman has pointed out the appar- ent paradox of this kind of critique appearing in the 1950s, not only in the minds of a few scattered and put-upon radicals and hipsters but in the minds of millions of filmgoers.30 But it is only a paradox when we assume that early Cold War culture was the homogenized product of an “estab- lishment” consensus behind a restrictive social order at home and impe- rial power abroad. More recently, Cold War scholars have tried to show how 1950’s hipsters and gumshoes are popular manifestations of a dyna- mism beginning to percolate in American culture at the precise moment it gives the greatest appearance of stagnation; this is what William H. Chafe has called the “paradox of change.”31 The Naked City that I have described is not exactly the same as Weegee’s Naked City, a 1945 album of New York photos that represents the city as circus—a whirling tide of love, death, pain, pleasure, humor, the grotesque, and the commonplace.32 But the words naked city capture something of the same midcentury dyna- mism that infected both Weegee’s photojournalism and film noir—the postwar pop-cultural urge to capture the raw energy of life without euphe- mism. The cultural artifacts that would later draw on the mythic resonance of Weegee’s title all share the promise of the world glimpsed whole, from the outside and without illusions.33 The Naked City is

29David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 205. 30Warren Susman and Edward Griffin, “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Repre- Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 sentations in Postwar America,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 19–37. 31William Henry Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). A particularly fine literary study that applies this notion to midcentury American culture is Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also an excellent collection of essays on Cold War culture, Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Burkhart Gilbert (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 32Weegee [Arthur Fellig], Naked City (New York: Essential Books, 1945). 33These would include a 1948 film, a television series from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and John Zorn’s jazz-punk from the late 1980s. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 133

kindred to Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”34 Naked City or Naked Lunch—either way it is naked perception, the view sub specie aeternitatis, or, in the hipster’s argot, knowing the score. Gumshoe and hipster alike share the pleasure, or consolation, of knowing, of knowledge paid for with alienation. Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014

34William S. Burroughs, “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” in Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1959, 2001), 199.