There's a moment in just about every great 1970s crime movie where the plot stops mattering and the saxophone takes over. Think of the lonely horn drifting through the rain-slicked streets of "Taxi Driver," or the jittery, coked-up brass that shadows Gene Hackman through "The French Connection." That sound - crime jazz, as fans and scholars have long called it - is the subject of a new retrospective program, "New Hollywood, New Noir: Crime Jazz in 1970s American Cinema," which turns a spotlight on the unlikely marriage between post-bop jazz and the grimy, disillusioned crime pictures that defined the era.
The series makes a convincing case that the music wasn't just decoration. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, Hollywood was undergoing a seismic shift. The old studio system was crumbling, a new generation of film-school-educated directors was taking over, and the movies they made - darker, more ambiguous, more willing to stare at the ugliness under the American dream - needed a soundtrack that matched. Enter jazz. Specifically, the kind of jazz that had grown up in the same cities and nightclubs as the criminals these films were obsessed with.
From Bebop to the Big Screen
Crime jazz itself wasn't born in the 1970s. Its roots stretch back to the 1950s, when composers like Elmer Bernstein and Henry Mancini started threading cool jazz through film noir. But the 1970s version was a different animal - rougher, funkier, and often recorded by musicians who came straight out of the jazz world rather than the film-scoring establishment. Lalo Schifrin's work on "Dirty Harry" is a prime example: dissonant, restless, and built around a prowling bass line that seems to be casing the joint right alongside Clint Eastwood's inspector. Schifrin had already proven his crime-jazz bona fides with the "Mission: Impossible" theme, and his 1970s scores pushed that vocabulary into stranger, nastier territory.
Then there's Quincy Jones, whose score for "The Getaway" crackles with a tense, bluesy energy that suits Steve McQueen's laconic thief perfectly. And Marvin Gaye's oh-so-smooth "Trouble Man" - a soundtrack that's arguably better remembered than the film it accompanies - showed how the sound could bleed into soul and funk without losing its noir edge. The retrospective treats these scores as works of art in their own right, not just background noise.
The Sound of a City Coming Apart
What makes the crime-jazz boom so fascinating is how tightly it's bound to a specific vision of American urban life. These films were shot on location in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and the music reflects that. The horns sound like traffic and sirens. The drums mimic footsteps. Thelonious Monk's angular piano and Charles Mingus's restless compositions were obvious touchstones for composers trying to capture a world where nothing feels stable.
Directors of the New Hollywood - Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Alan J. Pakula - were serious music fans, and many of them used jazz not as a conventional score but as source music, pumping it out of car radios and bar jukeboxes. When a jazz record plays diegetically in a 1970s crime film, it's usually telling you something about the character who put it on: their taste, their mood, their loneliness. That's a far cry from the sweeping orchestral cues of classic Hollywood, where the music was designed to be invisible.
Why It Still Hits
The retrospective arrives at a moment when crime jazz is enjoying something of a quiet revival. Vinyl reissues of these soundtracks have become collector's items, and contemporary composers - from the folks scoring moody prestige TV dramas to indie filmmakers working in neo-noir - keep circling back to that 1970s template. It makes sense. The sound is atmospheric, cheap to produce compared to a full orchestra, and instantly evocative of a particular kind of American grit.
But the deeper appeal, as the series makes clear, is philosophical. Jazz is improvisational, unpredictable, and often a little chaotic - exactly the qualities New Hollywood filmmakers prized in their stories about cops, crooks, and the morally fuzzy space between them. A criminal in a 1970s movie isn't a cartoon villain; he's a guy making it up as he goes along, and the music mirrors that. It's the sound of nobody being fully in control.
For anyone who's ever watched "Chinatown" and wished they could live inside that dusky, brooding mood for a couple more hours, this retrospective is basically a license to do exactly that. It's a reminder that some of the most memorable characters in 1970s cinema weren't on screen at all - they were hiding in the horn section, waiting for their cue.
Source: Indiana Public Media