Hollywood, 1932. A Black saxophonist is being filmed for a jazz musical, backed by other Black musicians on a sound stage. Before the cameras roll, he is told his skin is too light compared to his compatriots. He must apply burnt cork to his face to darken his skin. Otherwise the movie studio will shut the production down, because a seemingly interracial film won’t play in Southern states due to their segregation laws. The movie studio’s executive Manny (Diego Calva) tells the saxophonist Sidney (Jovan Adepo), “You’re an actor now. Actors change their appearance for roles.”

This small incident in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) serves as a microcosm for jazz music’s inhabitation of Hollywood cinema. For music purists, jazz can never live on the film soundtrack, due to jazz’s authorial, collective and expressive modes of production being antithetical to the factory line compartmentalisation of cinema’s discrete creative departments. For those open to the multimedial aberrations that occur in cinema’s chaotic assemblages, ‘cine-jazz’ is both a gaudy meltdown of the form’s legacies and a fascinating fabulation of the same. The score to Babylon is by Justin Hurwitz, the fifth he has provided for Chazelle. It fits the bill of ‘cine-jazz’ and enthusiastically dives into the core conundrum of the film: providing rambunctious jazz for the late 1920s setting when jazz viscerally thrived in the live world – just as it was about to be tamed and neutered in the dream worlds conjured via Hollywood’s transition to recorded sound.

Sidney swallows his pride in what is Babylon’s most discomfiting moment, donning black make-up and performing his solo for the camera. Visually, it signifies how Hollywood trades in caricatures; some will find the scene exploitative and offensive, despite its liberal revisionism. But listen to the music being played: Hurwitz has composed a weird, thumping, monotonal dirge. Shaded with atonal colouring, it merges New Orleans second line striding with ominous Stravinsky-like pounds, and in doing so complements Sidney’s character who elsewhere has cited Scriabin as an influence. This brass backing (“Damascus Thump”) feels disconnected from Sidney’s solo (exuberantly performed throughout the film by three players: Sean Jones, Dontae Winslow and Ludovic Louis) as it conveys the forced unfit of Sidney’s situation – one shared by how all film music is enveloped by a performative layer, where ‘playing’ becomes ‘acting’, defined more by staged theatrics than by composed execution.

The intersection of Blackface and the face of Blackness is one of the many suppressed undercurrents in the long history and trailing present of the Hollywood image factory. Babylon won’t be the last. Its ambitious three hours bites off more than it can chew – but isn’t that what Hollywood was born to do? Hurwitz’s score arguably provides the most salacious take on mixing suppressed histories and imaginary settings. And like any attempts to distil fact from fiction, his score requires an analytic ear to bring out his arch ‘jazzification’ of period jazz idioms. The score to Babylon brazenly peddles a wide range of ‘fake jazz’ instrumentals (evoking avant mutations like Pigbag and Defunkt). The subtle point that energises Hurwitz’s work here is that if Hollywood’s ‘cine-jazz’ is what jazz purists have always derided, Babylon proffers a pumped-up version of the fakest of jazz concoctions: historically inauthentic, aurally posterised, harmonically caricatured, technologically infused and stylistically multiplied. Result: wild, Babylonian jazz.

A full 30 minutes unfolds before the title card for Babylon appears. This drawn-out prelude unfolds during a seriously debauched Bel Air party in 1926, at the height of silent cinema’s hold on the US entertainment experience. Babylon’s party scene – a mini-opera of coked-up club music of the era – is pumped by a suite of Hurwitz’s themes (I count at least six), all played by Sidney and his crack party ensemble of raucous musicians (with distinctively crazy tones by saxophonists Jacob Scesny and Leo Pellegrino). Despite its visual overload, the hysterical scene carries musicological weight by evoking how vital live music was in generating excitement before cinema laid grand claims to inventing such sensational experiences. The oft-forgotten thing about Hollywood studios is that nearly all of them started out as music publishers, who viewed movies primarily as vehicles for promoting their copyrighted songs. Put simply: the visuality of cinema bloomed from the music.

Babylon persists in being a gaudy pantomime – part deliberately, part unavoidably – but its soundtrack deepens its characters through a range of devices. The party symbolically frames a sensory through-line in the film: how ‘real’ jazz is embodied in the ‘real’ life of musicians, and how ‘fake’ jazz is embodied by the ‘unreal’ life of characters in films. The crazed music visibly played by Sidney’s band is carnivalesque raving, but at other times its propulsive jazzy rhythms (Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich meets Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington) stoke the boiling frustrations and impassioned drives of assistant Manny, trumpeter Sidney and wannabe-star Nellie (Margot Robbie).

Chazelle’s previous film, La La Land (2016), opens with a Babylonian noisescape of radios blasting through car windows of a long winding slug of traffic on LA’s Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange. As per musicals stricture, a mass dance number evolves through spectacular group choreography, filmed in a one-shot feat of athletic camerawork and co-ordinated bodies writhing to the melange of salsa and mambo rhythms. It’s all very pleasing to a musicals-loving audience, but the scenography is curdled by counter-text: most movies these days show LA freeways ravaged by near-future apocalyptic decimations of the American metropolis (from Resident Evil to Civil War). This opening number “Another Day Of Sun” can be read as a horde of zombie drones commuting to precarious employment; their personal choice of music playback transforms them into wildly reanimated corpses, flailing in synch to sunny, mulatto Californian orchestrations.

Despite numerous references to the Hollywood musical’s modernist statesman, Stanley Donen, La La Land is an Americano mash-up of Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961) and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg (1967), both of which are notable for their use of colourful production design in exterior environments. These seminal musicals externalised the form, not so much making the musical ‘real’ as demonstrating the allure of fantasy. La La Land puts Wise and Demy through an audiovisual kaleidoscope to create tizzy Technicolour shards, each a multi-layered allusion to the genre, leaving it open to the usual critiques against spongey postmodernism. Yet Hurwitz’s score skilfully alternates between winking camp and empathic psychological shifts, strangely due to the film leaning into barroom jazz more than celebrating Broadway glitz. His music provides an undertow to the repellent positivity of the musical (of which the form is more aware than people assume).

The core bond between barista actress Mia (Emma Stone) and altruistic pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is built upon her hatred of jazz and his love of the same. Their debated discourse on the relevance and purity of jazz is actually quite funny: audiences should recognise people from both sides of this fence. The plot extends this musicological combat. The Muzak piped into the restaurant where Mia escapes a boring date seamlessly melts into Leonard Roseman’s orchestrations for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause (1955) played at a cinema where she meets Sebastian. The film projection breaks down during the famous planetarium scene, leading them to go to the actual Griffith Observatory, where Hurwitz’s grand waltz scores the couple’s choreographed dance. The divisions and definitions of jazz dissolve as the number ends with their first kiss. Yes, it sounds cloying, because it openly is.

Other similar transitions follow, addressing the veracity and scope of jazz. At a small club, Sebastian sits in with a Black quartet, full of solos and chromatic runs – but is this ‘classy’ contemporary jazz really that far from Muzak once it enters a social space? Later, fellow musician Keith (John Legend) asks Sebastian to audition for Keith’s band in a studio. They’re accomplished and slick – until Keith triggers sampled beats and deploys fuzz guitar licks (think The Blue Series Continuum releases, 2001-2004). Keith berates Sebastian for being outdated, and even contributing to jazz as a dead medium: “How are you going to be such a revolutionary when you’re such a traditionalist?” Real jazz? Fake jazz? Cine-jazz? Hurwitz’s scores don’t take sides in these limiting debates, and instead dance with their semantic twists and turns.

Chazelle and Hurwitz commenced their collaborative dissection of jazz in Whiplash (2014). It opens with sound in a black void: a snare exercise increasing in tempo. It reaches a humming peak and cuts to Andrew (Miles Teller) alone practicing. He erupts into a solo (Teller himself playing; elsewhere, Bernie Dresel) which is interrupted by Fletcher (JK Simmons) who tests him in a series of humiliating smack-down prods and commands to Andrew to execute impossible patterns at fiendish tempos. Welcome to Shaffer Conservatory of Music – or any such college hell in your town. In this cauldron of performance, young, predominantly white musicians enrol to master their jazz chops. They play repurposed instruments from the American Civil War to generate jazz – ironically under a militaristic regime of hierarchical ranking, subordinate hazing, and psychological razing. The terrorising relationship between conductor Fletcher and drummer Andrew brings these issues into oppressive relief.

Dreaming of his hero Buddy Rich, Andrew is a human drumkit. His four adolescent limbs are wired by hormonal frustration and overloaded with competitive drive and grinding impatience. Andrew is a corporeal ball of contradictory impulses, epitomising the classic ‘jazz drum solo’ – that tedious moment where the backing drummer is allowed to perform like a wind-up monkey unleashing its pent-up energy. Chazelle has drafted a perfect summation of this archetypal figure of the jazz drummer, fleshed out by Tillman. His performance is a reversal of the Sidney in Babylon: Andrew is an actor generating music through being a musician.

But when Fletcher dismissively reduces Andrew to page turning at a rehearsal with the studio band, his deflation is conveyed by the diegetic sound of the ensemble practice melting into a drone. This is the first of only around six cues Hurwitz delivers for Whiplash. Each captures the confused and frazzled state of Andrew; the music simmers in a stew of unformed nothingness. Not ambient: amniotic. After this monstrous humiliation by Fletcher, Andrew throws himself into practicing the impossible “Whiplash” (a Las Vegan display of syncopated fireworks, composed and arranged by Hank Levy). We hear parts of the piece, only to have it submerged by Hurwitz’s tempo-less haze of brass tones.

In Whiplash, Hurwitz scores the psychic space around the music played by the students at Shaffer. It’s a sharp move: jazz is so thick in the film’s story it sucks all oxygen in the space. This results from the unrelenting pressure of jazz within the socio-industrial environment of music production and performance. Call it ‘art’ if you insist, but the drive to succeed professionally in music performance is every bit as nasty as the biting bark of Fletcher. A number of Hurwitz’s cues are built upon a kick drum pulse, set to the tempo of a male teenager’s nervous foot thumping under the table at a mall food court. This isn’t music: it’s the sound of music overwhelming and debilitating the self.

When Fletcher pushes Andrew to the edge to play an impossibly fast tempo, a low trumpet exhales while a single bass note is sounded on the piano. Their refutation to play any melody or rhythmic pattern is a sign of how anti-music this performance is. And there’s the rub: Whiplash is about everything music isn’t. To score such a premise required Hurwitz to think of music in similar terms. Lined up with La La Land and Babylon, one can audit how Chazelle – once a college level jazz drummer – and Hurwitz have presented a remarkably astute and complex discourse on the psycho-dynamic energy hiding behind the many myths, dreams and phantasms of jazz.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.