It was a challenging and demanding period for the pianist.
This soundtrack session is not even included in the Jazz Discography Project where no July recording dates are detailed between a June 4th date in New York City that would result in 5 By Monk By 5 (Riverside, 1959) and an October 20th date in San Francisco that would eventually become Thelonious: Alone In San Francisco (Riverside, 1959). Kelley, while still remaining historically murky in that Monk sort of way that all reportage about the pianist seems to be. The period surrounding Monk's recording Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960, July 27, 1959, in New York City's Nola Penthouse Sound Studios was confounding in the respect that it is very well documented in the superb liner notes to the Sam Records/Saga release by notable personalities Laurent Guenoun, Alain Tercinet, and Monk biographer Robin D.G. And this is where the story get interesting.and complicated. Introduced to Monk's music by producer Marcel Romano, Vadim was immediately smitten and wanted Monk to provide a score for his new film Les Liaisons Dangereuses, based on the 18th-century epistolary novel written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
Les liaisons dangereuses thelonious monk movie#
The use of jazz in the mentioned films acts a thread passed through these works, uniting them with something quintessentially fresh, American, exciting, a not just a little decadent.Ĭoming off his success with Sait-On Jamais, director Roger Vadim remained interested in using jazz as a movie score. I can only hear this use of period of jazz music as sound track as an adult, imagining of how it must has sounded 60 years ago. The use of jazz as a soundtrack was both forward thinking and sensible, foreshadowing the use of popular music in film and television soundtracks thereafter. And, perhaps the most famous jazz score to a film was that of Miles Davis who was picked to provide a score for Louis Malle's Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud ( Elevator to the Gallows) (1959). Benny Golson scored Edouard Molinaro's 1959 Des Femmes Disparaissent ( Women Disappear), performing the compositions with what may have been the best lineup of the The Jazz Messengers. Marcel Carne's Les Tricheurs ( Young Sinners) (1958) featuring performances by Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, and Coleman Hawkins.
These included Roger Vadim's Sait-On Jamais (1957) ( We Never Know), renamed No Sun in Venice for which John Lewis wrote the score and his group, The Modern Jazz Quartet, performed. In the late 1950s, a group of young French movie directors sought out these and other African-American jazz artists to score the soundtracks for their films. Attracted by the comparative lack of racism, enhanced employment and recording opportunities, and the superior French appreciation for jazz, artists including Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, and Don Byas, as well as Lucky Thompson, Johnny Griffin and Arthur Briggs made their homes there abroad for long periods. And, in that, there is a truly American story, clothed in a French chansone.Īfter the ends of World Wars I and II, many noted African-American jazz musicians (as well as other prominent African American artists) moved to France to practice their trade. Monk's contributions to the film have never been available as a stand-alone movie soundtrack. It is not that one could not already hear the music presented on the Sam Records/Saga Records release Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 one could. Likewise is the present diamond unearthed in a most circuitous way. The last unheard Monk commercially released was Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note, 1957, released 2005), and it caused a big stir at the time. While Monk has been well documented, any new previously unheard or unreleased performances are worthy of attention and consideration. When considering the enigma and iconoclast that is Thelonious Sphere Monk, one element of romance lay in any previously unknown recorded material. How precious would be any one of the biographies, spoken of only sotto voce, be to read. Yet his visage beckons like Ahab from the back of the Great White Whale. He did exist, but exists now only as a phantom, a heat apparition rising from a dusty dirt road in some God-forsaken Third-World corner of these United States.
He produced 29 shellac sides in the late 1920s that had immeasurable influence on American folk music after and then he disappeared. Take the entire myth of blues singer Robert Johnson. Few things are as infused with as much romance as are those thought lost.
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