The recurring title theme is Sclavis’s diatonic waltz, a 32-bar melody arranged by Pifarély, whose violin adds a glimmer of dissonance in the variation chorus the brisk tempo and combination of clarinet and accordion places it in the tradition of French scores that milk a jazzy banality-that is, a melodicism unrelated to jazz proper, but influenced by its rhythms, economy, and instrumentation (think Tati). Aside from an introductory theme, which Sclavis borrowed from an earlier work (called “Dia Dia” on the CD), the movements were newly composed to complement the action, either by explicit musical rhyme (a percussive train-like rhythm in sync with the mechanics of the mining machinery) or in deliberate contrast (a rubato moodiness to underscore an astonishing fight between masked doppelgängers). At Gould Hall, they sat in a semicircle before the screen, following the action with the mostly through-composed pieces. Sclavis scored the film for his clarinet and bass clarinet Dominique Pifarély’s violin Vincent Courtois’s cello, which has a Hendrixian reverb attachment Jean Louis Matanier’s accordion and François Merville’s drums and marimba. It belongs to the realm of fascinating one-shots by actors-including Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, Lorre’s The Lost Ones, and Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks-and, though little seen, adumbrates setups, images, and ideas in 1940s films as varied as How Green Was My Valley, The Face Behind the Mask, The Woman in the Window, and Phantom of the Opera. With the advent of sound, a silent film had no chance, and though Vanel directed one other picture ( Le Coup de Minuit, 1935), he never recovered from the fate of the first, which he had financed himself. Dans la Nuit, a meditation on fate, infidelity, fear, and loneliness, pays homage to his father’s Lyonnais mining village and Soviet-style montage, wielded with brio and auguries that emerge on a second viewing. He starred in hundreds of movies, including several international productions: A favorite of Henri-Georges Clouzot, he was the craven Jo in Wages of Fear (named best actor at Cannes) and the proto-Columbo detective in Diabolique, which may have led Hitchcock to cast him as Cary Grant’s betrayer in To Catch a Thief. If Vanel’s name is unfamiliar, you might recognize his face. (Can I hear an amen?) What I can’t do is argue that the film is incidental to the CD, or vice versa. I can suggest how Dans la Nuit fits into Sclavis’s growing canon, amplifying melodic ideas in his earlier work and rounding out an intense scrutiny of French musical practices that makes him a formidable figure in French jazz and not merely an imitator of American customs. Still, I find myself listening repeatedly to the 16 concise episodes that vividly recapitulate key events in an exceptional “lost” movie for which Bertrand Tavernier has loyally campaigned, wisely recruiting Sclavis (who had scored one of Tavernier’s pictures). The former, however, puts me in the odd situation of wanting to rave about a score that can exert only limited enchantment on those who can’t see the film. The latter confirmed and expanded my admiration. Then, on March 7 and 8, Sclavis and his new quintet made a rare appearance in New York, accompanying a screening of the film at the French Institute Alliance Française and playing selections from L’Affrontement at Tonic. Many jazzmen have scored films and prepared corresponding albums, yet in this case there was neither an available film to boost interest nor enough elaboration to give the album a life apart. Arriving after the double-whammy 2001 releases of Les Violences de Rameau and L’Affrontement des Prétendants, its retrograde nostalgia seemed peripheral, a Gallic detour or ECM indulgence. My first response to Louis Sclavis’s Dans la Nuit, his commissioned score to Charles Vanel’s obscure 1929 film, was indifferent disappointment. The last place you expect to find an outstanding example of that kind of melody, which has done more for Kleenex than the flu, is in the work of a musician and composer closely associated with the European jazz avant-garde. The living master of the idiom, which is not so much composed as recycled, is born-and-bred New Yorker Carl Davis, a workhorse of ’70s British cinema who scored several new films while finding his true métier in re-scoring silents and TV series about the silents. It’s a melancholy diatonic waltz, the love child of “After the Ball” and Charlie Chaplin, whose genius extended to sentimental themes that prod us to smile through our tears. An increasingly uncategorizable light photo: Cary ConoverĪ certain kind of melody is embedded deep in the DNA of silent movies.
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