Museum of Modern Art to Exhibit Jazz Scores

  I  

New York’s Museum of Modern Art will explore the history of jazz scores in films from the 1950s to the present. Starting April 15 and ending Sept. 15, the film retrospective will feature live concerts and a gallery exhibition.

The Academy Award-nominated film score by Alex North for Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is credited with opening up jazz scoring to a new generation of composers, including Elmer Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Lalo Schifrin and Henry Mancini.

Collaborations between New Wave filmmakers and Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and more recent efforts like those between Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard, Clint Eastwood and Lennie Niehaus, and David Cronenberg with composers Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore, are featured in the film retrospective.

The gallery exhibition will present original film posters, album covers, moving-image clips and movie trailers, animation art and other printed materials relating to jazz and cinema.

The concert series will feature contemporary musicians performing some of the original jazz soundtracks featured in the film program.

More info: moma.org



  • Rodney_Holmes_Courtesy_Meinl.jpg

    A drummer’s drummer, Rodney Holmes gigged with everyone from Joe Zawinul and Carlos Santana to Steve Kimock and the Brecker Brothers.

  • DB26_Critics_Poll_Montage.jpg

    Clockwise from top left, Mary Halvorson, Patricia Brennan, Adam O’Farrill, Keith Jarrett’s At the Deer Head Inn: The Complete Recordings, Sheila Jordan and Jaki Byard.

  • Abdhullah_Ibrahim_Detroit_Jazz_Festival_2022_by_Michael_Jackson.jpg

    Ibrahim was an early jazz acolyte, studying the music via 78s he would buy from soldiers stationed in South Africa — who also gave him the nickname “Dollar.”

  • DB26_Joe_Lovano_by_Michael_Jackson.jpg

    Joe Lovano’s Paramount Quartet will record live at New York’s Village Vanguard for ECM records on Aug. 26–27.

  • promoFINALdress-1_copy.jpg

    “There was something about her tone and sound and phrasing — an intimacy, a vulnerability, an honesty,” says Joshua Redman, who produced Cavassa’s record after she toured with his band.


On Sale Now
August 2026
74th Annual DownBeat Critics Poll
Look Inside
Subscribe
Print | Digital | iPad