Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.7 Sounds of the City: Jazz Soundtracks
Associated with the Weimar culture which pioneered the connections between
Expressionism and jazz, this type of music was predominant in film noir due to its
improvisational features and the fact that since the early twenties it has been linked with the
crime and dissipation found in most gangster-owned clubs of that time. 59 This combination
of jazz with an expressionistic décor can indeed be traced in the early Hollywood musicals
almost from their very beginning (Broadway, 1929; King of Jazz, 1930), especially at
Universal where this “Germanic” influence was most distinct. A strongly rhythmic music
of black American origin that emphasises interpretation rather than composition, jazz is
often connected with the notion of improvisation with, as Robert Porfirio states, “affective
qualities quite compatible with the expressionistic quest for deeper meanings that focussed
upon heigthened states and the unconscious in order to probe the secrets of the soul” (in
Butler 2002:67).
One of the most striking qualities of early jazz was its vocalised tone. Musicians
sought to make each instrument sing like a human voice, though it especially favoured
syncopation, displacement of the regular meter by stressing a normally weak beat. With its
origins in the black American demimonde, jazz is often connected with speakeasies, and by
association, with sex, violence and death. Hollywood soon took advantage of these
associations, emphasising the strident and aggressive aspects of the music over its warmer
and sentimental side and this prominence contributed to those popular jazz scores of the
mid-forties and fifties that gave aural significance to contemporary urban issues. The
tribulations of the jazz man’s life were gradually transposed to film noir as both forms were
preoccupied with telling tales of anxiety and disorientation or breakdown, which flourished
in America during the thirties and the postwar period. But it was Among the Living, a film
released in autumn of 1941, about the same time as The Maltese Falcon, that used the
59 Curiously, the gangster film did not make much use of jazz, and it remained for the next generation, and
particularly for the noir cycle, to promote that special relationship between jazz and urban violence.
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