Jazz and Cocktails. Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager (2017)

Jazz music, performed on stage in bars, juke joints or jazz clubs in film noir very early held a deeply negative, though seductive image, states author Wager.
Although music for some twenty years has been an integral part of movies, jazz music in films of the 1940s had a very peculiar function.

She concludes that these: “… smoky clubs uniformly represent the dangers of otherness, of erotic desires and deadly femininity, of uncontrollable urges leading to destruction. […] The lesson in … [a number of films noirs] is that the jazz musician, the jazz club, and the music are licentious an uncontained and will lead to trouble of the deadliest sort. The lesson was so powerful that jazz still retains an association with the films of the noir years, the early 1940s to the late 1950s, even though music played by jazz musicians relatively rarely graces the soundtrack of these films.”

Partially this is also related to the very few appearances of black actors playing black jazz musicians or musicians playing themselves. Until the 1950s black actors hardly ever appeared in mainstream Hollywood productions outside stereotypical roles such as porter, chauffeur, or cook. This did not change much when this stereotype was in part given up, only to make room for new stereotypes such as black musician or dancer. Moreover, often screen appearances of black entertainment stars were merged into the plot in a certain way, so they could easily be removed/cut by Southern distributors on demand, who had little interest in showing black actors on screen; this was a common practice until the 1950s.

Jazz as diegetic sound (sound that is part of the movie, and that is heard by all characters) thereby is synonymous with danger, states Wager, and is connected “with the urban realm and otherness, an illusion of reality evoked by just the sound of a saxophone.” While in the late 1950s, mainstream jazz influenced film scores as nondiegetic sound and became a common feature.

The main emphasis throughout this study is put on the role of jazz as both extradiegetic and diegetic sound in early film noir, while there is an interesting chapter on jazz performers (providing diegetic music) in Kiss me Deadly and The Blue Gardenia, when the combination of jazz music and a white main actor briefly seems to change his outlook and function. An he appears as an outsider in a basically all-black environment such as the jazz club. Further chapters deal with the Miles Davis soundtrack to Elevator to the Gallows, Chico Hamilton’s and John Lewis’s work as film music composers and jazz music in the movies Odds Against Tomorrow, Out of the Past and Anatomy of a Murder. Even if the title suggests an analysis of films noir in general, the attention here is on just a few American noir movies from the 1950s (with the exception of Elevator to the Gallows, which was made in France).

Professor Wager has previously published on film noir; she coordinates Cinema Studies at Utah University. Interestingly enough, she is not a music specialist nor has she received classical musical training but convincingly argues for the important and at times independent role of jazz music as connecting link to the extra-movie world.
This small book is a good study of one rather neglected topic in film noir research, since there are hardly more than just a handful of titles and articles that explicitly deal with the jazz soundtrack of the film noir genre. Highly recommended reading.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2017

Jans B. Wager. Jazz and Cocktails. Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir. University of Texas Press, 2017, 163 p.