By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.
Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?
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