“They made music to represent an adults-only movie…There are very advanced harmonic conceptions present. “ Anatomy of a Murder is music made when Duke and the band were very mature,” wrote Wynton Marsalis in his essay for the 1999 soundtrack reissue. “I like playing with music and its relationship to the theatre-and particularly in the supporting role.”īut Duke’s score was certainly no mere supporting player. And that’s it and they just leave it that way.” But “I love the idea” of composing for film, he said. Preminger felt that hiring Ellington would “produce a freshness which an experienced film composer might no longer possess.” When asked in an interview why “a man of your long standing in the motion picture world” hadn’t composed for the screen, Ellington replied, “I believe most people think of me as a bandleader and at the same time they sort of remember and recognize the fact that I’ve had good fortune with some hit songs, but I think primarily they think about me as a bandleader and when they think in terms of doing for a show or a picture or something like that, they feel that, well, Ellington’s got his band and I am sure that he wouldn’t give that up for anything, you know. The film starred James Stewart as a small-town lawyer hired to represent a soldier (Ben Gazzara) accused of killing a local bar owner who had raped his wife (Lee Remick). But it wasn’t until 1959 that Ellington, at the ripe old age of 60, was offered the opportunity to compose his first feature film score for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. Beginning with the 1929 short, Black and Tan Fantasy, Ellington and his Orchestra appeared in films throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In a career that spanned over 50 years, Ellington performed in over 20,000 concerts and composed some 3,000 songs, many of which have become standards. To this day, the name Duke Ellington (1899-1974) is synonymous with the best in American jazz. This month in our continuing look at “Jazz Score,” we focus on three legendary performers-arguably the three most public faces of jazz in the 20th Century-who took a break from their regular gigs to parlay their love of jazz into composing for the screen. First published in Film Score Monthly Online
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