Review: Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music Through Jazz, by Gretchen L. Carlson

Book Review| March 01 2024 Review: Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music Through Jazz, by Gretchen L. Carlson Gretchen L. Carlson. Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music Through Jazz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. 212 pages. Arthur Knight Arthur Knight William & Mary Arthur Knight teaches Film & Media Studies, American Studies, and English at William & Mary. His research focuses on African Americans and American films, and his publications include Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Duke 2002) and the edited collection (with Pamela Wojcik) Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film & Popular Culture (Duke 2001). Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: [email protected] Journal of Popular Music Studies (2024) 36 (1): 160–163. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.1.160 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Arthur Knight; Review: Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music Through Jazz, by Gretchen L. Carlson. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 March 2024; 36 (1): 160–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.1.160 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Most scholarship on jazz and film has approached the intersection of these expressive forms through a cinematic lens. Gretchen L. Carlson doesn't mechanically reverse this pattern in Improvising the Score by organizing the book around case studies of the scores for a small but diverse group of narrative feature films. However, she does foreground the "creative labor" of a suite of jazz musician-composers in relation to the normative systems of commercial feature film production (11). Her driving questions seem to be: Under what conditions can what Ralph Ellison called jazz's "antagonistic cooperation" be deployed in the creation of narrative film to the satisfaction of a score's maker? How, then, does the score help create the meaning of the film it accompanies? And, very importantly for Carlson, does cinematic collaboration enable a jazz musician-composer to continue and expand upon their art? Carlson finds four illuminating cases that emerge from asking her... You do not currently have access to this content.