It wasn’t the first jazz soundtrack to a film noir, but it’s an exemplar of the form: Davis’s careful, vulnerable, vibrato-less playing – sometimes using his mute, at others gently enhanced with echo – was tailor-made to snake through black-and-white shots of night-time city streets and imply turbulent moods swimming through shadowy rooms and behind inscrutable faces shot in stark closeup. On arrival at the studio they found the film’s star, Jeanne Moreau, holding court at a makeshift bar loops of footage from the film were projected while they improvised, with Davis suggesting that whatever they played be in counterpoint to the images on the screen. The band – a local pick-up group, including expatriate American drummer and bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke – were given little more than some rough ideas Davis had jotted down in his hotel room the night before. The soundtrack to Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud ( Lift to the Scaffold) was recorded in two days in December. When Louis Malle made just that offer to Davis in November 1957, Davis accepted the challenge. Certainly, he was sure he would never have been approached by a movie director during a US nightclub residency and asked to compose music for a film. In France, he felt respected as an artist without question or caveat: this had never been the case in his racially segregated homeland. Touring Europe had a profound effect on Davis.
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