a little landmark

While Alex North's 1951 score for A Streetcar Named Desire is arguably the first recognizable modern jazz score, the 1958 noir masterpiece I Want To Live! boasts the first modern jazz score written by a card-carrying jazz composer/arranger and played by the guys whose jazz records you bought if you were at all a jazz consumer.

Johnny Mandel, at that point known almost exclusively as a West Coast jazz arranger, was called in to compose. The movie was a fictionalized account of the arrest and execution of Barbara Graham, a party girl involved in a 1953 murder that went down in Burbank. She became the third woman to die in the California gas chamber. When the film dropped in '58, the case was still relatively fresh in people's memories -- they still had memories in 1958 -- making this film its generation's Monster.

The importance of the music in this movie can't be oversold. Not only did it make the storyline feel more credible -- the score didn't sound like some type of thing the character would know, it was exactly the type of music she did know -- but it vested a great and realistic movie with exactly perfect musical punctuation, alternately stark, unhinged, ghastly, and harsh. The whole thing starts with a dissonant horn blast followed by a bongo roll that sounds like a coin rattling against a table as it falls. A truly spooky bassline follows, then finally an unforgettable recurring main theme that states outright, "This is so not gonna end well."

Johnny Mandel is certainly one of the classiest jazz composers of his generation, and this score launched him as a film composer -- "The Shadow of Your Smile", "Emily" and the famed MASH theme are all his. Also, he wrote the score for Caddyshack. As an arranger, he's worked with Joao, Sinatra, Diana Krall etc. He's still a giant.

Probably no score in the lexicon is better suited to its purpose than IWTL. As jazz scores go, I have to rate it with Chinatown, The Hustler, and Sweet Smell of Success. Except that I think it's a little ballsier.

It's almost impossible to write music that is from its first note perfect to its task, but this might be an example.