So these two forms had sort of a conjoined birth. You know, when musicals first began, jazz was the popular art form of America. So I liked the idea of trying to get at the idea of jazz being at the root of the musical.Īnd then stressing these musical connections through visual allusions? It’s just dressed up with strings and European-style orchestration. And yet the music is absolutely based in a jazz vernacular.
It’s not completely one-to-one, the music in those movies isn’t strictly jazz, if you wanted to nitpick.
As far as the intellectual reason, there was something about the idea of jazz and it’s connection to the Hollywood musical - a lot of my favorite old Hollywood musicals, and musicals from the French New Wave, have a relationship with jazz. So the allusions are there for that reason, because the music matters to me. I grew up playing it and having it in the household. On a personal level jazz is important, has always been important, and will always be important to me. There’s the personal reason and then the intellectual reason. What are some reasons for these allusions other than other than providing a hit of nostalgia?
LA LA LAND SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER FULL
La La Land is full of allusions to classic jazz, things like nods to John Coltrane and Harold Land album covers and famous jazz clubs. Even the movie’s promotional posters are modeled after jazz album covers of the 1950s and 1960s. Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles, Chazelle talked about the relationship between his films and jazz, the challenge of overcoming nostalgia, and why jazz lost its popularity. (For what it’s worth, La La Land’s charming soundtrack draws far more from mid-20th-century musicals than it does from Miles Davis.) All of which means that Chazelle finds himself in the curious position of trying to stoke popular passion for a genre while simultaneously drawing criticism for his films’ attitudes toward that same style of music. Yet while the latter film is being touted as an Oscar front runner, some writers have pointed to what they see as Chazelle’s clichéd and narrow view of jazz, especially as espoused by Ryan Gosling’s character Sebastian. You’d think that’d make the 31-year-old writer-director of Whiplashand La La Landsomething of a beacon to other jazz lovers. Director Damien Chazelle and Emma Stone on the set of La La Land.ĭamien Chazelle makes movies about people who care - a lot, maybe too much - about jazz.