Sir John Dankworth on his film scores

[julian_craster]

Jazz in 1960s British New Wave Cinema:
An Interview with Sir John Dankworth
by Frank Griffith

From: Journal of British Cinema and Television, Volume 3, Issue 2, Nov
2006.


Sir John Dankworth, the eminent English composer, conductor, bandleader and
jazz
musician has written in many genres, including composing over 20 film
scores. Of
these, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Criminal (1960), The
Servant
(1963) and Darling (1965) in particular, played a major role in bringing
about a new
sound in British film during the 1960s.1



The first major jazz-influenced score was penned in 1955 by Elmer Bernstein,
for
Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm. To the composer himself, the
kind
of music needed was obvious. As he put it:

There is something very American and contemporary about all the characters
and their problems. I wanted an element that could speak readily of hysteria
and
despair, an element that would localise these emotions to our country, to a
large
city if possible. Ergo - jazz (quoted in Prendergast 1977: 109).

Also worthy of note is Johnny Mandel's score for Robert Wise's I Want to
Live!
(1958) which featured Gerry Mulligan, Pete Jolly, Bob Envoldsen and other
fine LA
jazz players. The distinct feature of that score was that it actually used
improvisation
and the jazz was linked into the movie. It was a dark story, based on the
actual case of
a woman framed for murder, and helped to establish the frequent association
of jazz
with crime and the urban.

It was not surprising, then, that at the end of the 1950s, when a new wave
of
contemporary urban realism hit Britain, directors there too looked for
modern sounds
to match the mood and drama of their films. And what better music to
underscore this
reality than jazz, with its cachet as the music of the oppressed? When
directors sought
someone who could fulfil their need for this new music, John Dankworth,
already
Britain's leading modern jazzman, was playing the right music at the right
time.
Indeed, throughout the 1950s, his group, the Johnny Dankworth Seven, which
included vocalist Cleo Laine, had been paving the way for modern jazz in
Britain.



FG (Frank Griffith) Who were you influenced by when you first started
composing
film music?



JD (Sir John Dankworth) Funnily enough, before then I didn't really rate
film music
and I didn't really listen carefully enough to it or study it closely enough
to know of
anything I would like, anything I would say that I approved of very much.



FG You said in an interview in Jazzwise magazine in 2004 that at the end of
the
1950s movie producers were looking for something new, for different sounds
for
films, and that jazz just happened to be around.



JD Yes, I think that Elmer Bernstein's score for The Man with the Golden Arm
worked so well that almost every movie director or producer was looking in
that
direction to see whether something similar would suit their film equally
well. I guess
that's probably why Losey and Reisz approached me. I was at that time the
sort of


number one. I mean, if a non-jazz person was thinking of jazz in this
country,
probably my name would have come up in their minds before anybody else's.
The
Humphrey Lyttletons and Chris Barbers were of the other sort of jazz [trad],
but they
were definitely not looking for that. They were looking for something more
contemporary.2



FG Your first two scores involved a fair amount of improvisation, which I
think is a
real sign of a jazz piece. Many jazz film scores did not use improvisation,
including
some of your later ones.



JD Well, it does have its problems because a director wants each take of the
music to
be virtually identical, and that's difficult when something is improvised.
Or maybe it
doesn't quite synchronise, so you go back and do it again but paced slightly
differently. Or the director might say 'could we have that little rising
note?' or 'I did
like that instrument that came on there. Can we have a bit more of that?'
But if you're
improvising, you've got little or no control over those things. However, for
chases,
and for music where you religiously record and hope that every note is right
and
examine it carefully before you okay it, when you finally hear it mixed with
sound
effects and dialogue it's sometimes turned down so low you can barely hear
it!



John Dankworth's first film score was for We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959),
although
he and his band had played on two previous films: The Whole Truth (1958),
with
Mischa Spolianski's music, and Sapphire (1959), with Philip Green's.




FG In 1959 Karel Reisz invited you to compose the score for his documentary
We
Are The Lambeth Boys and the following year you scored his groundbreaking
film
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Could you describe how you originally met
up
with Karel Reisz, and how you started composing for films in the first
place?



JD Well, I can't remember exactly how he contacted me. When he first
approached
me I knew his name but I had no idea of what he was like. I always imagined
movie
directors in those days to be sort of cigar smoking Americans, well groomed
and
dressed in Rodeo Drive stuff. Only much more formal in those days, I guess.
So when
I went to meet him in an Italian restaurant in Soho I was all dressed up
with a collar
and tie, whereas I usually wore something much more casual; and he usually,
apparently, dressed up with a collar and tie but had dressed down quite
casually. So
there was me looking formal and him looking casual, instead of the other way
around,
and we got on together. In fact, we had quite a long friendship.

Karel obviously was a person who wanted to create new styles, rather than
follow
existing styles. He'd made a documentary, and someone had written a score
which he
didn't like it and which he rejected. I don't know what he did after that,
how he
replaced it. But he played this film, or part of it, to show me the sort of
music that he
didn't like. It wasn't at all bad, but it was traditional in that it used
the sort of effects
and sort of music you would expect. It wasn't trashy in any way, but he just
made it
very clear: 'That's what I don't want', he said, 'I just want you to sit in
front of this
film and think of something' But he certainly wasn't a particular jazz fan.
He may
simply have heard my records and liked what he heard.

Up to that time I'd had no interest in doing music for movies at all.
Rather the
contrary. I thought it was a compromise, in the same way that I also felt to
some


extent that opera and ballet were a compromise, in that something was
distracting the
audience when they should be listening to the music. So I wasn't very keen,
but he
persuaded me to see the film, which was called We Are The Lambeth Boys. I
watched
it on a clattery old Moviola which made more noise than an aircraft taking
off, so it
disturbed your train of thought till you got used to it. Anyway, I looked at
it and, all of
a sudden, something happened in my head, and I started hearing music which I
could
never have imagined myself doing before. The scene was so descriptive and
the way
it was shot, and the way the story was being told, was so sympathetic to
these rather
sad kids, who were never actually enjoying themselves even at work. But
something
hit me, and just made me feel that I could write something that was
different. So I
did, and I was very pleased with it.

Karel was right at the beginning of his career then. I remember that we
recorded the
whole soundtrack in one session at the National Film Theatre on the South
Bank. I
can distinctly remember Karel going to his car and getting out the
microphones, and
bringing them in. It was all done on a shoestring even though Ford sponsored
it and
you would have thought that they had plenty of money.



FG Karel Reisz has described your music for We Are the Lambeth Boys as
having a
'joyful astringency'. In your book Jazz in Revolution you state that you
felt that your
best collaboration with Reisz was in the documentary, and that Saturday
Night and
Sunday Morning didn't quite recapture the same magic of the marriage between
the
music and the movie. I gather that Reisz wanted to feature an accordion in
the score,
and that you weren't very keen. However, you integrated it very effectively
into a jazz
group and the accordion works well as a musical protagonist, expressing both
the


sentiments of the main character and all that goes on around him in a wide
spectrum
of moods.



JD I don't know why Karel specified it. However, he did, so we had to have
it. I
would have never chosen an accordion, but I didn't have that sort of breadth
of
imagination. I was a bit too much of a blinkered jazzer, who wouldn't use an
accordion if I didn't think was the best possible instrument to use there. I'd
have
probably used a Miles Davis-style muted trumpet, a tin mute, or something
like that,
which wouldn't have quite done the trick like the accordion did. It became
the theme
instrument at various moments in the film and helped in that way to point up
certain
aspects of the plot. I still don't know why it works, but I've got to admit
that it does
work in a way in the context in which it's used. Incidentally, although
Karel wasn't a
jazz fan, Albert Finney, then an unknown actor, really loved jazz, and often
used to
come to gigs before we did this film.



1960 saw Dankworth's first collaboration with Joseph Losey, on the prison
drama The
Criminal. The soundtrack features Dankworth's song 'Thieving Boy', sung by
Cleo
Laine with lyrics by the screenplay writer Alun Owen. Throughout the film
this song,
with its forlorn lyrics, serves as an highly effective and atmospheric
accompaniment
to the story. Two years later, Dankworth and Losey worked together on The
Servant,
their greatest collaboration. Writing in Jazzwise Selwyn Harris (2004)
describes
Dankworth's score as playing a key part in

conspiring in the film's dark emotional undercurrents. Pungent homophonic
chamber-like wind textures and insinuating jazz harmonies cut to smoky sax


lines suggesting nuances of character and mood while discreetly hinting at
the
underlying tension.



FG In The Servant you used a device similar to that of the accordion in
Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning, except here you have a very interesting
juxtaposition of
string quartet and saxophone quartet. They're almost like two sides of the
same coin.
They played the same theme, that four-note theme that you introduced in the
opening
sequence when you see Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) walking over to the house of
his
employer Tony (James Fox) to introduce himself and start his first day of
work. You
have the theme playing which is initially brought in by string quartet, and
then you
reintroduce the theme again with the saxophone quartet.



JD Yes, it changes on the interior of the house. I wasn't happy with the way
the
leader of the saxophone quartet played. He was very highly regarded, but
somehow,
though, the way he played it didn't sound like what I wanted. So, I then
re-recorded it
with the Michael Krein Saxophone Quartet, and then I got just what I wanted
out of
it. I didn't want it to be too sweet, but I didn't want it to sound too sort
of po-faced
either.



The song 'All Gone' in The Servant fulfils a similar role to the song in The
Criminal,
and is also sung by Cleo Laine. Harold Pinter wrote the lyrics. In Cleo and
John
Dankworth states:

The idea was that the same song should change imperceptibly to spell out the
degeneration of the situation. The first time the song was played, it was
quite
straightforward, then it crept in to the minor key, then it came with


interjections from tenor sax and in the last case it was done in almost an
atonal
way with Cleo singing right through what was in those days a cacophonous
background (quoted in Collier 1976: 108).



FG Pinter's lyrics have to do with the movie, but and the words could easily
have
been changed and the song transferred to the popular canon as a jazz ballad.



JD I asked Harold whether he would consider rewriting the lyric in a way
that it
could be performed separately from the film. As you say, the lyrics directly
relate to
the film and the tawdry things that happen in it. He said: 'No. For what
reason?'. I
said: 'Just so it might get more performances and you might be a more famous
lyricist
than you are at the moment', or something trivial like that. He never came
up with
anything, but there again I can't imagine what lyrics a Nobel Literature
Prize winner
would come up with!



Despite the successes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Criminal
it
wasn't until after The Servant that Dankworth's film scoring talents were
widely
sought after. His next collaboration was in 1965 with director John
Schlesinger, for
Darling. In his memoir, Dankworth (1998: 155) wrote: 'Schlesinger was a keen
music
lover and was anxious that the score had a different feel from fashionable
movie
scores which merely reflected current tastes in popular music



JD What happened was that he entrusted me with the score, as a director does
in the
first place, but obviously tried to explain the sort of effect he was trying
to get for any
particular scene. One of the most important bits of music was when Julie
Christie gets


upset and runs through the set discarding her clothes and ends up sobbing on
the bed.
The camera followed her all the way through, and that's where I had Kenny
Wheeler
on the session. I particularly wanted him to be featured on this. However, I
guess I
probably overwrote myself, or got a bit 'Gil Evans-ed' up, or whatever.
Anyway I
thought worked out quite well. I'm not sure if John was there when I
actually
recorded it, but when he heard it, I could see he wasn't happy with it. I
realised then
that I'd somehow overwritten it, which you should be very careful about if
you're a
film composer, as it's a bit show-offy to do that. Some of the best film
music
shouldn't be heard or noticed at all, it should just be part of the
experience. Anyway I
realised he wasn't happy, so I said: 'Well John, I'm getting the sort of
texture that you
want now, but can you just tell me a little more about it?' So we looked at
it on the
Moviola and when he started trying to explaining to me what he wanted, I
said: 'John,
why don't you just sort of moan, or say syllables, or something, just to
give me an
idea where you feel things should happen'. So he made various sounds as we
watched, and I did get from him the idea that the music had to be very
thin,sad and
isolated and that the great layers of sound that I'd given it, a sort of
organ type
accompaniment, were not what he'd wanted, and weren't going to work either,
so we
redid it all again. Kenny Wheeler did the repeat, but instead of using the
flugelhorn,
he used a tin mute trumpet, and it got thinned down until it ended up being
almost
inaudible at the end, just a single instrument. So that was a case where a
director who
was very interested in music, but not musically literate, was able by sounds
and noises
to give me a road map of what he actually wanted to hear, and so we both
ended up
with the same sort of product, and with me converting into musical terms
what he had
in his mind.

[julian_craster]

CONTINUED.......


In Cleo and John, Dankworth describes Schlesinger's desire for a wide
palette of
musical sounds:

Darling (1965) was the most varied score I have ever written and it was an
immensely rewarding experience. The difficult part of the score was not only
in
the recording but also in the conception. Director John Schlesinger thought
of
the actual sound he wanted often by playing records for me at his home, with
the result that almost every section of music had a different combination.
One
was a choir, one a pop group, one a banjo player, one a solo singer, one a
symphony orchestra and another an organ. I also had to transpose some
sections
to other instruments to change the sound for Schlesinger, and I was glad of
my
experience as a jazz musician when making last-minute alterations (quoted in
Collier 1976: 109).



FG You mentioned in your memoirs that Reisz would have like to have written
the
scores himself, whereas Losey trusted you for the several movies you did
with him



JD Well, I think that might have been a little unkind to Karel. I think it
was just that
he felt that with his knowledge of music he could explain to me better what
he wanted
than if he expressed it in abstract terms like 'exciting' or 'dreamy' or
whatever. He
had little wisps of music that he knew in his head, so he would suggest a
Debussy-
like thing, a Wagnerian fanfare or a bit of Bach, and all that. Which, of
course, was
only his way of trying to explain, it didn't mean a series of pastiches of
all these
composers by any means. Losey, on the other hand, was someone who picked
people
for their ability, and unless he felt very strongly that they were on the
wrong track, he
would just let them get on with it. He respected their specialised skills
and powers of


discernment, and only on one occasion did I see him step in. I remember with
James
Fox in The Servant that at one point Losey felt that on the earlier takes
his voice was
too highly pitched and should have been a bit more in the lower register. So
Fox had
to redo all those passages.



Dankworth emphasises this point further in Cleo and John:

Directors like Losey, who gave me a completely free hand never even wanted
to know, in most cases, what instrument I was using. I find that I respond
to that
treatment much better. Probably part of the trouble with Karel's films is
that
they both happened at a time when I was very busy - the Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning score was done at the same time as The Criminal - I was
dashing from one to the other. I'd never done a film score before in my life
and
I was given two in the same month (quoted in Collier 1976: 72).

Elsewhere in the same book he also makes an interesting point about scoring
Accident
(1967):

I discussed the instrumentation [with Losey] for a long time. It's sometimes
the
only way you can communicate . you can't really discuss music with a non-
musical person without playing examples which I'm terrible at, so one
discusses
instrumentation. Somehow, I came up with the idea of two harps, and he
agreed
to that - I don't know why - and I wasn't sure that I could pull it off, but
in fact
it worked quite well (quoted in ibid: 108).

In fact, the music was actually commented upon by the film's reviewer in New
Society, who noted that:

John Dankworth's harp theme represents the peace of the environment in the
college library as well as in the meadows and on the river. Against the
heavenly


harps his throating saxophone tells us of the anguished feelings of the
characters
in that peaceful environment (quoted in ibid: 109).





FG I read that you turned down the score to Blow Up (1966). You said that
you
weren't keen initially because it was not the sort of film you would
normally do, or
were not comfortable with in some way.



JD It's not quite true to say that I turned it down. I was phoned and asked
if I was
interested in doing it, and I said I wasn't; anyway they might not have
chosen me
even if I'd gone to the interview. At that time I was doing a lot of film
scoring and I
think they really would have liked to have used me if I'd wanted to do it.
So, I never
really got into the subject matter or whether it was a suitable film for me
at all. I just
felt that I was doing a few too many films at that time and that I'd better
turn down
something and make life a bit easier.



FG Yes you've said that after The Servant, the offers started coming in.
Once The
Servant established you as a film composer, did that enable you to exercise
more
creative freedom as a composer, as someone who could do your own thing
within the
context of the movie?



JD I think that if you are approached, rather than you approaching them,
then you
must have some sort of standing in their eyes, so you do get a certain
amount of
freedom in any movie, but any film composer has to remember that he is one
of a
team. You've got to do what's best for the team rather than display your own
music at


the expense of everything else in the film. But obviously, if they want to
cut out a
piece of music because they think that the scene doesn't need it, or to cut
out a whole
scene that's got a bit of music that you love, you can't exercise any
control over that.



FG- You have said that jazz composers work well in the film context because
of their
versatility and their ability to make last-minute adjustments. Do you think
that's
maybe one of the reasons why so many jazz composers flourished in writing
for films
in Hollywood and London during the 1960s?



JD- Well maybe. It could be the fact that when you are hired to do a film as
a jazz
composer, you inevitably come to certain portions of the film where jazz
just won't
do; maybe it's just source music - you see a violin and cello and piano
playing in a
café, and you have to adapt. There's always something there that isn't jazz,
and that's
a very good learning process for jazz composers who were a bit more
tunnel-visioned
when they started. In the same way you very quickly find that the technical
requirements of writing for films are to work to a stopwatch. People make
that out to
be some sort of mystique that only a few chosen people can ever understand,
but, of
course, we all know it's as easy as hell, isn't it? Particularly in jazz, if
you select a
metronome speed and you've got cues of say 12.8 seconds and you fit it at
120 beats
per minute, so you know that every bar line and so on. People say: 'I wonder
how
you ever get those things together', and you pretend that's it very
difficult because
you don't want too many jazz composers coming in and being competitors.



FG Are there any current plans to do any more film scores?




JD At the moment, no. I've not been considered for anything since Gangster
No 1

[Dankworth's most recent score of 2001]



FG If you were invited to score again, are there any particular directors or
film figures
that you would like to work with?



JD Well, I can't say that there are, really, because I don't really want to
do any more,
unless they came out with a very strong case and said that they wouldn't go
ahead
without me, or flattered me enough to make me feel that the music was going
to play
a very big part in the film, and said that they wanted me ahead of anybody
else. Other
than that, I must admit that I cast my mind back to the pleasures of doing
it but also
the headaches that are often caused by internal politics, where people
involved in a
film are manoeuvring and countering each other. I felt I couldn't go through
all that
again. I much prefer to be in as total control as possible of music, and
there are lots of
ways of doing that without having to go into the movies.



FG If you look back at the scores that you've done, do you have a particular
favourite, one that really stands out?



JD I think that the one that hangs together the best is The Servant. I
thought it did the
best service to the film and worked very well with it. But I'm also quite
proud of in
isolation, so to speak.



FG- It has been said that since the 1970s many movie scores have been bitten
by The
Graduate bug, which is to say that they consist of popular songs
specifically written


for the movie or that they use existing popular songs. Thus movie scores
gradually
started incorporating more popular music as opposed to original music.



JD- That's right, and it still applies a lot today when you see a list in
the credits as
long as your arm of 25 other pieces of music. That's the one thing that
displeased me
about the way film music was going. Maybe the reason why I like The Servant
is
because I don't think that there's one example of that in the film. I had to
write
whatever had to be the music for the film. I think that what it amounts to
is that you
get rather offended when they want to use a record of someone else. You
think, no
doubt unreasonably, that you might be able to do something that would work
better.





Notes

1. The other British feature films which Dankworth scored are: Return from
the Ashes
(1965), Sands of the Kalahari (1965), Scruggs (1965), Morgan: A Suitable
Case for
Treatment (1966), Modesty Blaise (1966), The Idol (1966), Accident (1967),
The Last
Safari (1967), Fathom (1967), Boom (songs only) (1968), Salt and Pepper
(1968),
The Other People (1968), The Magus (1968), The Last Grenade (1970), The
Engagement (1970), Perfect Friday (1970), 10 Rillington Place (1971), Kiss
Kiss
(Bang Bang) (2000), Gangster No. 1 (2000). His British television work
includes
scores for The Voodoo Factor (ATV 1959), Survival - various episodes (Anglia
1961 till?), The Avengers - various episodes (ATV 1961-4), Monitor - 'What
the
Dickens' episode (BBC 1963), Tomorrow's World (1967-81), From a Bird's Eye
View (ATV 1971), The World of Survival - various episodes (Anglia 1971-7),
Ooh La
La! (BBC 1973), Telford's Change (BBC 1979), Mitch (LWT 1984), No Strings
(Yorkshire 1989), Money for Nothing (BBC 1993).

2. Look Back in Anger (1959) had jazz in the background, but it was by Chris
Barber,
and the music was largely unrelated to the movie. The protest and rebellion
in the
trumpet may have been a metaphor for the anger that the Richard Burton
character
felt, but it was not convincingly intertwined with the drama itself.
Curiously enough,
Barber also features in the youth club in We Are the Lambeth Boys.


References
Collier, Graham (1976), Cleo and John, London: Quartet Books.

Dankworth, John (1998), Jazz in Revolution, London: Constable.

Harris, Selwyn (2004), Jazzwise, pages?

Prendergast, Roy (1977), Film Music- A Neglected Art, New York

[Moor Larkin]

When did he stop being a Johnny?

No mention of All Night Long then.......

[Steve Crook]

Originally Posted by Moor Larkin When did he stop being a Johnny?

Sir John sounds better than Sir Johnny for some reason.
But when people aren't using the title he's usually still Johnny

Steve

[julian_craster]

Sorry about the (lack of) formatting......but this article comes from a PDF file, and I would tediously have to go through it line by line to input it tidily, unless sombody knows how to do this automatically.....

[Moor Larkin]

Very kind of you to bother at all Mr. Craster. Anyone who's really interested will not mind picking their way down the page. Another answer is to copy and paste it into Word and then reformat it for oneself......

So, Steve..... Sir John Wilkinson?..... Surely Sir Johnny is a must......

[Steve Crook]

Originally Posted by Moor Larkin Very kind of you to bother at all Mr. Craster. Anyone who's really interested will not mind picking their way down the page. Another answer is to copy and paste it into Word and then reformat it for oneself...... So, Steve..... Sir John Wilkinson?..... Surely Sir Johnny is a must......

It's odd, the more familiar appellation does seem to work better for some people, or is it to do with their surnames? Lord Dickie Attenborough, Lord Larry Olivier, Sir Bob Geldof. But somehow Sir Johnny Dankworth just sounds wrong to my ear

So who's this Wilkinson bloke then?

Steve