Abstract
Jazz has gone through many transformations in its relationship with screen scoring: from being the uninflected popular music of the day, through embodying sleaze, corruption and a restrained and/or criminal sense of ‘cool’, to becoming the historical and geographical marker of a vanished era. Another, perhaps less explicable, part of its screen appropriation has been as expression of an idiosyncratic dysfunctionality sometimes tipping over into madness. If Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Jailhouse Rock (1957) offered explicit turning points in the reputation of jazz in film and the feasibility of its unmarked screen-score usage, then certain later films have capitalized on this and the subsequent increasing marginality of the music within the wider marketplaces of the real world. Calling on examples from the 1960s to the early 21st century (Repulsion, The Pawnbroker, The Conversation, Naked Lunch, Anchorman and Homeland), this paper traces the contours of such screen characterization and typecasting in order to draw conclusions about the ongoing viability of employing jazz as a semantically rich musical resource with which to score the moving image