“And then — she walked in” Jazz Noir, Dark Jazz, and How Music Tells a Story
Featuring thoughts from Morten Gass of Bohren & der Club of Gore
Consider, for a moment, the following:
The acrid smoke from the last cigarette in my pack wafted up from the dim ember and mingled with a thin misting of steam rising up from the gutter. Each passing pair of headlights that crawled by on the street only briefly illuminated the grimy, rain-slick concrete sidewalk, but it was long enough to confidently take another step in the murky darkness. I reached up with my free hand — the one unencumbered by the the only stress reliever I could rely on anymore — and pulled the corners of my overcoat closer around me. At a guess, I had another handful of blocks before I would pass my apartment building stoop. Being the night that it was, though, meant that I would be passing right on by. After all, I had been hired to find her — and it was nearly midnight.
Pulpy, ridden with time-tested noir tropes, but most importantly, evocative. It’s that kind of writing that birthed an entire genre of film. A Streetcar Named Desire, L.A. Confidential, The French Connection, to name a few.
Jazz noir, however, is predicated on the idea that the music is just as vital of a storytelling component than any fedora-wearing, revolver-packing, grizzled detective with a troubled past.
In essence, being a connoisseur of jazz noir is living in constant pursuit of the music that summons some of the same feelings that the opening to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon does. It’s the desire to uncover an auditory experience that transports the listener into the shoes of the hard-boiled detective trailing a femme fatale along a dark avenue lit exclusively by the fickle amber light of streetlamps.
Buttoning down exactly what generates this “X factor” emotion is difficult. Many fans of the genre(s) would give you different answers when prompted — hell, that’s what kept happening to me when researching the culture surrounding this shadowy, melancholy corner of music. With my gumshoes on, I dug around for an answers. Tracing all the red string on my wall, I kept uncovering an oft-repeated phrase:
I can’t describe it, but you’ll know it when you hear it.
Which is sort of a wild way to describe a genre of music, isn’t it?
— however, it does make a bit of sense when you look further.
“Jazz noir” goes by many names. Terms such as “dark jazz,” “doom jazz,” “ambient jazz,” are used interchangeably, and all dip heavily into the wacky world of the genre-bending “post metal.” Each group that would even condescend to refer to themselves as any one of the monikers above all straddle a place along a gradient that incestuously samples from one defining characteristic or another of a given sub-subgenre.
For example, a landmark collection of artists, Bohren & Der Club of Gore, features downtempo instrumentals composed on synthesizers, saxophones, traditional ivory tickling, and beat machines cranked down to the lowest BPM possible. Murmuring, brooding saxophone vocalizations a la “The Gentle Side of John Coltrane” whisper over top a minimalist percussion accompaniment throughout their record “Black Earth.” An accompaniment that, by the way, you can start counting up from “one-one thousand” in between snare hits to gauge when the next one will fall. Good look finding a metronome that plays at their tempo.
I had the chance to speak briefly with Morten Gass of Bohren to find out what speaks to him regarding jazz and it’s relation to film noir. Considering the clout they hold in that particular community, I was curious as to how he felt about Bohren’s music garnering a following obsessed with the feeling of walking a desolate street after dark.
John: The music you create is brooding and thoughtful. What do you look to for inspiration?
Morten: The usual suspects I would say: Music, movies, comics and everyday life. But sometimes a particular instrument or effect unit can have an inspiring impact.
J: Your group has a dedicated following in internet communities centered around noir — film noir, jazz noir, etc. Do you have any guess as to why your music speaks to so many interested in ‘noir’ music?
M: Just listen to our music, then you have the answer! I mean we are no polka band that provides an happy atmosphere at the Oktoberfest.
J: Listening to your music, I often feel transported to some gloomy, desolate, and dimly-lit lounge well after midnight. Does your imagination or inner cinema go to a certain place when listening to ambient/doom jazz?
M: The place is called “Die Parkklause”, a small bar in my hometown Mülheim an der Ruhr. Unfortunately, it was closed years ago (after a guest had detonated a hand grenade in it).
J: If you could share one other group or band in the genre of doom/ambient jazz with Doubletime’s readers, who would you tell them to go listen to? (If you have more than one, I won’t take points off)
M: Frank Duval.
Bohren’s music, like others who occupy a similar sonic niche, has an unnerving and eerie quality. The droning, oscillating intonations from the mellotron on Maximum Black evoke dread. Over top that, you have a quartet of drums, piano, saxophone, and bass. The mellotron, in this context, acts as a sort of setting upon which the other instruments build from.
It is here, I believe, that the “X factor” of jazz noir is born. In order to visualize that, though, we need to take a bit of a detour. Before we do that, if you’re enjoying the read, give it a clap for me and follow Doubletime for bi-weekly editorials on music.
Certain classical music composers are famed for the illustration of narrative through their masterful use of sounds. Vivaldi, Wagner, Beethoven, Korsakov; these heralded figures in the world of classical music are held to such reverence not just for their technical excellence, but for their ability to weave together musical phrases to tell stories.
A typical narrative structure involves the opening of the story, the continuation of that story, the climax of the conflicts, the resulting action of that climax, and the resolution of the narrative elements. Music, especially originating from the classical end of the genre spectrum, also follows such a structure.
Entire characters will be sonically represented through the use of repeated motifs. Thundering, maximalist brass sections penned into Wagner’s operas will conjure up images of monstrous Norse gods. Tittering violin chirps in Vivaldi’s compositions illustrate the ceremonial return of bird songs during spring.
Here, we find our definition to why jazz noir has that illusive, difficult-to-define quality that gives it an “you know it when you hear it” characteristic (and why even /r/jazznoir doesn’t explicitly require the ‘jazz’ part).
A song feels like jazz noir because it, intentionally or not, is giving our imagination a soundtrack that meshes with what we understand ‘noir’ to look and feel like. A steady back beat provided by the rhythm section, a droning mellotron; these elements give us our tonal backdrop. The proverbial set decoration for the imagined-up theater play going on in our minds. We have our rain-slick street, or we have our smoky bar.
Add in improvisational, free-form saxophone playing or trumpeting and we have our characters. Just like in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, we’re using those instruments as anchor points for our imagination to affix the roles of the scantily-clad, seductive female client who’s hiring our private eye — but not telling him the whole story, naturally.
However, in the words of Martin Mull:
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
If you’re interested in hearing for yourself the soundscapes that inspired this expedition into the dusty corners of music, let it do its own storytelling through this playlist.
Next time you’re walking home at night, crossing underneath the streetlights and passed by only the occasional car, try out some jazz noir (or Bohren, specifically). You might bump into me out there enjoying it, too — then, we’ll go back to my place and watch Double Indemnity and it’ll just be a swell time.
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Thank you to Morten Gass of Bohren & der Club of Gore for taking the time to answer some of my questions.
