To Cord Jefferson, jazz has always felt like “the sound of home.” So when thinking about the score for his first feature, American Fiction, where family was very much front and center, he felt there could be no more appropriate genre of music on which to draw.
“I grew up in a household where jazz was played all the time,” Jefferson explains. “My dad sort of loves to embarrass me with the story that he used to put Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue on the record player, and then he would take headphones and put them on my mom’s belly when she was pregnant with me, so I was in the womb, listening to Kind of Blue already.”
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Still, if Jefferson’s intuitive sense of a general direction for the music of American Fiction came quickly, ha had “no idea” to start how to execute on a jazz score. “We would throw in some sort of temp jazz music that was really great music, but it would stop working after about 10 seconds because all of a sudden, somebody would tell a joke, or something tragic would happen, and it wouldn’t work anymore,” recalls the filmmaker. “So threading that needle, I knew was going to be a challenge.”
An adaptation of the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, American Fiction is the story of Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.
Enlisted by Jefferson to pen the score was Laura Karpman, a 5x Emmy-winning Juilliard grad who, in returning to the genre of jazz with the film, felt as if she were coming back to her “true self.” An artist who’d dabbled in jazz going back to the beginnings of her professional training, Karpman agrees with Jefferson’s notion that scoring the film was a challenge, while suggesting that people too often use the idea of challenge as “a pejorative,” rather than what’s so “cool” about the life of an artist.
“Challenge is why you want to work on a project like this…” she says in conversation with the filmmaker in today’s episode of The Process. “It’s not a massive orchestra, not a massive budget, not all the things, but what it has is, it really stretches your chops as a film composer, and as a jazz musician, too, for me.” Some of the questions from the start, for the composer, were: “Where are we doing straight up jazz? Where are we going more into the world of film scoring? How do those kind of lines intersect and mush together?…You have to be able to blend and move and support the film where it needs support, to use music as this incredible tool that it is.”
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In terms of methodology, Karpman realized quite early on in the process on American Fiction that she wouldn’t simply “put people in a room” and have them improvise to picture. To ensure that her score worked within the context of a film that was quite dialogue-heavy, Karpman elected to record it “very strangely” — that is, one instrument at a time, so that all sonic elements could be isolated and manipulated as needed.
Aside from figuring out how best to make jazz work with picture, the other principal musical challenge was figuring out how to grapple with tone, given the story’s tendency to shift moods on a dime. “I recently saw, I think it was a Truffaut quote where he said, ‘If you can get comedy and melancholy in the same scene, then that’s successful and good,'” Jefferson reflects. “But if you can get comedy and melancholy at the same time, that’s really something wonderful,’ and I think that’s something that the film tries to do.”
As Karpman landed her first Oscar nomination last month for her work on American Fiction, Jefferson landed a pair in the categories of Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay. For more from the duo’s conversation on the Orion Pictures title, click above.
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