Leith Stevens: Jazz Scores

Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com

West Coast jazz of the early 1950s had its own laid-back sound but it also had a casual style. Musicians wore open shirts and sports jackets, T-shirts, short-sleeved shirts and chinos—replacing chalk-striped suits and wide ties found more often in the east. Many also had gaunt, hollow faces and hungry, pained eyes—a stark contrast with the smiles and merriment of earlier jazz entertainers. This casual, dangerous feel of Los Angeles jazz musicians was captured in the images of William Claxton, Bob Willoughby, Dave Pell and other photographers. Artists like Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Hampton Hawes seemed like bruised outsiders struggling to find themselves. Their lean, troubled looks on album covers and in magazines soon caught the eye of the movie industry, which began to cast young actors like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando to play damaged, misunderstood types. [Photo above: Leith Stevens]

One Hollywood composer in the early '50s who brought the music and image together successfully in movies was Leith Stevens. A handful of composers prior to Stevens had integrated jazz into scores, including Lynn Murray (The Big Night), Alfred Newman (Panic in the Streets) and Alex North (A Streetcar Named Desire). But Stevens [pictured above] was first to use West Coast jazz to illustrate the mood of Los Angeles—its darkness, its deviance, its yearning and its kicked-to-the-curb feel.

Stevens' best scores performed a transplant of sorts. While Hollywood's screenwriters began creating characters who went their own way and often wound up at odds with society's norms and authority figures, Stevens' scores enhanced this feel by weaving in the progressive sound of West Coast jazz. Among Stevens' jazz-tinged scores were The Wild One (1953), Private Hell 36 (1954), Crashout (1955), Mad at the World (1955), World Without End (1956), Great Day in the Morning (1956), The James Dean Story (1957), The Careless Years (1957) and Violent Road (1958).

His first two of this genre—for the filmsThe Wild One and Private Hell 36—are particularly interesting. Stevens' scores for the two films were orchestrated by Shorty Rogers and featured many of the best musicians on the West Coast at the time. For example, one ensemble included Shorty Rogers and Maynard Ferguson (tp), Bud Shank (fl,as,bar), Bob Cooper (ts), Jimmy Giuffre (cl,ts,bar), Russ Freeman (p), Carson Smith (b) and Shelly Manne (d).

Stevens had a unique take on Hollywood and the West Coast jazz world. Fresh Sound's Jordi Pujol quotes Stevens from 1955 in his liner notes to Jazz Themes from The Wild One and Private Hell 36, a CD that combines the two albums...

"The accepted way [to score a film] is to duplicate the emotional and dramatic content of what is on the screen. This, carried to an extreme, is called Mickey-Mousing a picture...some composers were able to prevail upon producers and directors to allow them to get away from this detail and take an entire sequence and develop it musically...jazz today is becoming more and more intellectual and therefore stimulating more interest. There is an entirely different group of people interested in jazz today than there was a few years ago."

While these two movies made selective and faint use of Stevens' scores, the LP adaptations fully exploited the music, and Rogers' orchestrations are among the finest of the period, before glossier composers and orchestrators made the sound cliche.

JazzWax tracks: You'll find Jazz Themes from The Wild One and Private Hell 36 (Fresh Sound) here.

JazzWax clips: Here's Beetle from The Wild One...

Beetle

Here's Easy Mood from Private Hell 36...

Easy Mood

JazzWax film: Here's the film Private Hell 36...

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Used with permission by Marc Myers