Rabbit Holes

Jazz and film have long sustained an intimate creative relationship. Jazz is a cinematic art form because it is intuitive, improvisatory, and embedded in the moment. The aural imagery of jazz is perfect for insinuating shifts of mood. No wonder jazz is often used in film scores. No wonder there are so many jazz interpretations of movie themes. The three excellent new albums discussed below are cases in point.

Dave Stryker's career spans 40 years and 37 albums. But he has never attempted anything as ambitious as Stryker with Strings Goes to the Movies. It employs 30 musicians, including a jazz quartet, 17 strings, five trombones, and several featured soloists, most prominently Stryker on guitar. The arranger in charge of this massive ensemble is Brent Wallarab.

Stryker says, "When I suggested my idea for this record to Brent, he said, 'Man, those are my two favorite things: music and movies!' Brent and I both grew up in the golden age of movies. Most of the themes on this record are from films that had a big impact on me. I went back and watched every one of them again. I felt all those amazing melodies again. For an improviser, it's always about the melody."

Wallarab's charts leverage a gigantic arsenal of available orchestral resources: colors, counterlines, counterpoint, layered backgrounds, sweeping power when the whole ensemble cries as one. But even within the vastness of an arrangement like Cinema Paradiso, Wallarab opens a space for Stryker to meditate at length upon Ennio Morricone's haunting melody. The theme from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, composed by Bernard Herrmann, embodies the ominousness of the night streets of New York. We are drawn into Taxi Driver's dark domain of awareness by Wallarab's looming orchestral forms and by Stryker's rapt, probing solo.

Thomas Marriott of Seattle is living proof that not all the best trumpet players in America live in New York. Marriott credits pianist Orrin Evans with giving him the impetus for his album Screen Time: "We were kicking around ideas for tunes and Orrin said, 'I've always wanted to record "It's Such a Good Feeling," the Fred Rogers song. Whenever I play it on gigs, it instantly puts a smile on everybody's face.' And I thought, 'That's the effect we want in music, right? What's it for, if not for that?' We decided to base the album on songs from movies and TV."

The piece that Evans recommended from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is the gentlest and sweetest of ditties. But Marriott's muted trumpet interpretation is moody and smoldering. The tension between the original and the cover is stark. On "Summer Night," from the 1936 film Sing Me a Love Song, there is more sharp contrast. Everyone from Guy Lombardo to Miles Davis has done "Summer Night" as a ballad. Marriott, displaying his lethal chops, makes "Summer Night" a flat-out burner. He lights it up, in streaks of flame. "Dexter's Tune" is a forgotten wisp of melody from Penny Marshall's 1990 film Awakenings. Dexter Gordon, the great tenor saxophonist, had a small nonspeaking part in the film, as one of the patients in a psychiatric hospital. In rescuing this deeply touching melody, composed by Randy Newman, Marriott reveals the value of a project like Screen Time. He makes us live again the aching sadness of that film.

The third album here has a backstory. Peter Erskine was the drummer in the seminal fusion band Weather Report. Once, around 1980, Joe Zawinul, the band's keyboard player, was killing time at a sound check. Erskine says, "Joe slowly picked out one of the loveliest melodies I had ever heard." When Erskine learned it was by an Austrian classical composer, E. W. Korngold, it sent him on a lifelong mission to find more music by Korngold. Along the way, he discovered another Austrian, Max Steiner.

In the 1930s, Korngold and Steiner became Hollywood's greatest film composers. Korngold wrote scores for early epics like The Adventures of Robin Hood starring a young Errol Flynn. What did Steiner write? Only the music for King Kong, Casablanca, and Gone with the Wind.

In early 2024, Erskine organized a project in Vienna that became Vienna to Hollywood. He brought together 11 highly capable Austrian musicians to interpret film music by Korngold and Steiner. American Danny Grissett, who now lives in Vienna, played piano. He and Erskine wrote the arrangements. Several American musicians dubbed in parts from their home studios. Erskine played drums. The outcome is a revelatory album. "Tara's Theme," Steiner's immortal melody from Gone with the Wind, becomes a hook for ass-kicking jazz. It swings like crazy. The melody that Joe Zawinul played for Erskine, which is from Korngold's Second Violin Concerto, is here, in a gorgeous vignette by a Viennese string quartet and Judd Miller on "EVI" (Electronic Valve Instrument). Steiner's biggest hit, "A Summer Place," that intriguing, keening song, is newly poignant.

The centerpiece of the album is Grissett's arrangement of Korngold's String Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major, which Erskine describes as "a piece with strange, perilous intervals." Grissett's hard-edged piano trio maneuvers within lush, shifting sonorities created by four quick string players. Korngold's majestic music is rendered in the interwoven languages of classical music and jazz.

These three albums honor films from our cultural heritage by reimagining music that entered the world with those movies