Sidney Lumet Appreciation: On working with Quincy Jones

Excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies:

Sidney Lumet:

The Pawnbroker had as complex a score as I’ve ever worked on.

In the opening sequence, Sol Nazerman, a Jewish refugee from Germany, is sitting in a suburban backyard, soaking up the sun. His sister asks for a loan so she and her family can take a vacation in Europe that summer. To Nazerman, everything about Europe is a cesspool. He says, “Europe! It’s rather like a stink, as I remember.”

The next sequence shows him driving into New York City, to his pawnshop in Harlem.

Those two scenes set up the conception of the score. Earlier, I had said that The Pawnbroker was about how and why we establish our own prisons. At the beginning of the movie, Nazerman is encased in his own coldness. He has tried desperately to feel no emotion, and he has succeeded. The story of the movie is how his life in Harlem breaks down the wall of ice with which he has surrounded himself.

The concept of the score was “Harlem triumphant!” — that the life, pain, and energy of his life there forced him to feel again.

I decided I wanted two musical themes: one representing Europe, the other Harlem. The European theme was to be classical in its nature, precise but rather soft, a feeling of something old. The Harlem theme, by contrast, would be percussive, with lots of brass, wild in feeling — containing the most modern jazz sound that could be created.

I started looking for a composer. I first approached John Cage. He had a record out at the time called Third Stream, classical music handled with jazz instrumentation and rhythms. He wasn’t interested in doing a movie score. Then I met with Gil Evans, the great modern jazz composer and arranger, but found it tough to get through. Next, I approached John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, but I felt he didn’t really like the movie when I showed it to him.

Then someone suggested Quincy Jones. I knew some of his jazz work from records he’d made on a big-band tour of Norway. We met. It was love at first sight. His intelligence and enthusiasm were inspiring. I found out that he’d studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, which meant that his classical background was firm. He gave me other records of his, many on obscure labels. He’d never done a movie score, but that made him even more interesting to me. Very often, because of the nature of the work, composers develop their own set of musical cliches when they’ve done too many pictures. I thought his lack of movie experience would be a plus.

I showed him the movie. He loved it. We went to work.

Talking about music is like talking about colors: the same color can mean different things to different people.

But Quincy and I found that we were literally talking the same language in music. We laid out a musical plot that was almost mathematical in its precision … we moved in steps from the European theme to the final total dominance of the Harlem theme. At midpoint in the picture, they were equally balanced.

It was a magnificent score, and the recording sessions were the most exciting I’ve ever been to. Because it was Quincy’s first movie score, the band that turned out for him rivaled Esquire’s All-Star Jazz Band. Dizzy Gillesbie, John Faddis (a mere child at the time) on trumpet, Elvin Jones on drums, Jerome Richardson on lead sax, George Duvivier on bass … the names kept pouring into the recording studio. Dizzy had just come back from Brazil, and for one music cue he suggested a rhythm that none of us, including Quincy, had ever heard before. He had to sing it with clucks, gurgles, and glottal stops until the rhythm sections could learn it. Quincy looked as happy as any man I’d ever seen.

Usually, when we finish recording a music cue, we stop and play it back against the picture. But the level of inspired playing from this band was so high that I told Quincy not to interrupt it. We’d play it back at the end of the day. Nobody even asked for the obligatory 10-minute break every hour. We played right through.

At the end of five three-hour sessions spread over two days, we played it against the picture. It was immediately apparent: Quincy had made a major contribution to the movie.