Blue Notes & Mean Streets: Jazz Meets Noir

 

I’m a writer and avid reader of hardboiled detective fiction, crime drama and noir. I’m also a jazz aficionado … on vinyl, of course. For the record (pun intended) my collection long predates the recent resurgence in the media. To me, those two interests have never felt separate. Noir and jazz simply belong together; artistically, culturally and emotionally. They speak the same language, a language whose grammar is improvisation and tension and whose vocabulary is that of longing, grit, betrayal and loss.

The more I read noir and hardboiled fiction, in fact, the more I actually hear jazz in the prose. Take Chandler, for example, the godfather of lyrical, hardboiled writing. At times, his prose swings. It moves with the same balance of precision – Chandler is famous for working and re-working his stories until they were just right – and improvisation. It’s the same kind of balance you hear in any great jazz solo. In The Big Sleep, for example, the iconic P.I., Phil Marlowe declares – “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.” Cool, economical and utterly rhythmic; the line lands like brushes on a snare drum.

Chandler’s dialogue feels especially jazz infused and jazz inflected. The characters riff off of one another. They feint, misdirect and return to themes the way musicians deftly trade phrases in a small combo. Reading Chandler often makes me think of Thelonious Monk’s album, Misterioso. At one point during the track, “In Walked Bud,” the saxophonist Johnny Griffin can be heard saying, “I got it, I got it,” as he picks up the melody once again after a blazing Monk solo.

This same type of byplay, of give-and-take, occurs over and over again in Chandler’s novels. Once again, from The Big Sleep, the youngest Sternwood daughter says to Marlowe, “You’re tall, aren’t you?” The detective replies, “I didn’t mean to be.”

It works somewhat differently in Hammett, but the connection is still there. His prose is leaner, less bebop and more very early big band. Hammett’s work demonstrates how silence matters in both jazz and noir. In Red Harvest, the violence builds with an almost mechanical momentum. Still, there’s a rhythm in the repetitions, the clipped exchanges and, most prominently, in the numerous pauses between the action. What isn’t played – and what isn’t said – carries enormous weight in both genres.

It’s worth remembering too, that jazz and noir basically emerged from the same historical reality. Both came of age, as it were, in urban America. Both inhabit the night world haunted by neon and smoke where loneliness and desperation linger like the final notes of the baritone sax on Gerry Mulligan’s rendition of “Wee Small Hours” – beautiful, aching and unwilling to fade. 

In their own ways, therefore, both genres are inseparable from cities. Jazz, from neighborhood bars and basement clubs. Noir, from rain-slick streets and cheap rooming houses where venetian blinds slice dusty shadows across the walls like zebra stripes.

The art forms are similar as well because both reject certainty and wrestle instead with ambiguity and contradiction. Jazz is often joyous and melancholy at one and the same time. Noir, too, can be cynical and romantic simultaneously. Both understand that beauty and corruption – good and evil – often exist side-by-side and reside in the same individual.

Maybe the best example of that duality is the work of James Ellroy. His Los Angeles is a place of glamour, wealth and promise … but also a city of moral depravity, unbridled ambition and violence. Ellroy’s characters reflect this same dichotomy. Consider, for example, LAPD Officer Bud White in L.A. Confidential. Brutal and, at times downright sadistic, he’s also a man starved for intimacy and capable of great gentleness.

Ellroy’s prose itself offers another point of connection between jazz and noir. His sentences are staccato and fractured, reminiscent of aggressive post-bop and as such, prone to short bursts and sudden, jarring cuts. What results is nothing short of syncopation through language, through narrative. Which brings us to the music itself in noir narrative …

To start with, jazz clubs are archetypal settings in noir fiction and film. They’re the perfect liminal spaces – public yet private, glamorous yet often dangerous. Affairs begin and end in jazz clubs. Deals are made at the tables in a jazz club and betrayals occur in their dark, smoky corners. Sax solos are as likely to accompany success and redemption as they are seduction and doom in such places. That’s part of the charm, after all.

Film noir seems to have understood all this from the beginning. The examples are legion, so only a few will have to suffice.

… In his score to Anatomy of a Murder, Duke Ellington didn’t merely provide background music, he transfused jazz directly into the film’s bloodstream. The music alternates between unease and swagger, thereby reinforcing the story’s ambiguity at a visceral level.

… The score to Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour L’échafaud) was written by Miles Davis in one night and may well be the purest marriage of jazz and noir ever consummated. Davis, in fact, famously composed while watching projected scenes from the film. It’s as though the muted horn narrates (and precipitates) the film’s moral collapse as it happens.

… Worth a quick mention is the way that jazz – particularly the music of saxophonist, Art Pepper – becomes a persistent motif in Amazon’s popular series, Bosch.

… And sticking with television, there’s the soundtrack to the series, Peter Gunn composed by Henri Mancini. The music is iconic because it sounds exactly how noir feels – cool, dangerous, ultra-stylish. The walking bassline effectively invents a tonal vocabulary for every detective series that follows. No exaggeration.

All of that notwithstanding, what really intrigues me about the connection between noir and jazz, however, is that both idioms reward close attention. Casual listeners of jazz seek melody and are often put off by the way that, when they do find it, the melody is quickly disassembled and “liberties” are taken with its elements. More serious listeners revel in the tension of that deconstruction, in its phrasing, timing and restraint … or exuberance.

Casual readers of noir see crime stories. Aficionados see existential inquiry; how does compromise define us? Can integrity survive the corruption that seems to engulf it? Who are we, really, when stripped of all those comforting illusions that we cloak ourselves in? Those are essentially noir questions, but they’re fundamentally jazz questions as well.

Don’t believe me? Listen to Billie Holiday’s late album, Lady in Satin. Hear the obvious fractures in her voice, yet the emotional truth that nevertheless sounds through (and maybe because of) that imperfection. That’s noir. Pick up a Ross Macdonald novel and watch as his detective, Lew Archer, uncovers the sins and secrets of a family’s generational tragedy beneath the thin veneer of suburban respectability. That’s jazz.

I guess that’s why the connection between the two genres is so clear to me. Neither promises clean resolution. A jazz performance ends, but the final chord hangs in the air. Noir ends with answers, maybe, but rarely with genuine closure and even more rarely with comfort. A killer may be identified, the mystery may be solved, yet something almost always remains broken, unfinished.

That lingering dissonance, after all, is the point. Jazz and noir both understand that life seldom resolves itself to major chords. Invariably, it lands on something ambiguous, on something complicated … on something ‘to be continued next week’.

And so, at night, when the streets are quiet, I pull a record from the shelf. Maybe Miles, maybe Monk, maybe ‘Trane. I open Chandler. The needle drops. The blue notes of a sax or a trumpet emerge from the speakers. Somewhere in the gray shadows of the room I imagine a detective with his feet up on his desk. He lights a cigarette and blows smoke toward a ceiling fan that wobbles overhead. His phone rings, or someone knocks on the office door … soon, he hits the mean streets … and the magic begins.