Clicking With Clint

On some level, Lennie Niehaus leads what might seem like a dual life. He is a saxophonist whose resume includes work with Stan Kenton and who has played with his own groups in recent years.

But on a more public scale, he is the right-hand music man for Clint Eastwood, having scored Eastwood-directed films from “Tightrope,” in 1984, through the current “Space Cowboys.”

Eastwood and Niehaus have made a number of impressive films over the years, some more popular than others, including “Bird,” the biopic about bebop hero Charlie Parker; “Unforgiven” and “The Bridges of Madison County.”

The numbers are on their side this time. “Space Cowboys” earned $18 million on its first weekend, an amount that was about the total take of their previous collaboration, the fine 1999 film “True Crime.”

Joining the ranks of industry people taking flight from Los Angeles, Niehaus moved to the relative tranquillity of Thousand Oaks five years ago. There, he can focus on composing, drive into the Warner Bros. scoring stage or attend occasional meetings.

An avid saxophonist who feels itchy if he doesn’t play for long periods, he also takes the occasional gig, as he did at Borders Books in Thousand Oaks a couple of months ago. There, he had a CD release party for a quintet date, “Live at Capozzoli’s,” on the Woofy Productions label. On it, he was joined by Bill Perkins, another West Coast veteran, on tenor sax.

Writing film scores is notoriously taxing work, especially considering the general process of making movies, in which the scoring is the last order of business. But Niehaus works well under deadlines.

“When I get on a movie, I’m a workaholic and I get on a high,” he said. “I’ll wake up at 6 in the morning and start writing, and I’ll go until 2 in the morning. Especially if I’m in the middle of a cue, I can’t go to sleep. You live and eat and breathe it.”

As it turned out, after the extensive special effects and sound editing involved in “Space Cowboys,” Niehaus--who had just returned from England, where he participated in a tribute to Kenton--had only 2 1/2 weeks to complete his score. He plunged into learning the vernacular and technical aspects of “Outer Space 101A,” but he avoided watching similar films or cliches of the genre. It gives a freshness to the score, which is subtly interwoven with a song parade from Willie Nelson to snippets of jazz from Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau.

Niehaus and Eastwood by now enjoy one of the healthiest symbiotic relationships of any director and composer on the scene. As Niehaus explained, “Clint is actually quite shy. A lot of people don’t know that. Other actors are extroverted, but Clint is not one of those. He’s not Dirty Harry. He’s a pussycat.”

Eastwood is also an avid fan of music, jazz in particular. Niehaus remembers his first project with Eastwood, “Tightrope,” which took place in New Orleans. Eastwood scouted out a club just outside town and was impressed with one musician in particular. He asked Niehaus to write some tunes for the musician, James Rivers, and Niehaus did, sketching out several overnight on hotel stationery.

The next day, Niehaus recalled, “We went to the recording studio and had all of the tunes I had written, and they all ended up in the movie, including the one I had in mind for the main title, which was sort of a modern-day version of Sidney Bechet,” a jazz composer who died in 1959.

He said with a laugh, “I think I created a monster, in some small way. From that experience, Clint got this idea, ‘Well, Lennie can do something in 10 minutes.’ I used to have a 76- or 80-piece orchestra, and he’d say, ‘Do you think you could do this?’ Of course, that’s a little different from dashing out something for a quintet.”

His musical lifeline to Eastwood’s films has extended beyond the big screen, including organizing a two-hour tribute to Eastwood’s film legacy at Carnegie Hall, released on an album and television program. Last year at the Monterey Jazz Festival, he pieced together a compact version of the Carnegie Hall program as one of the prominent performances.

Eastwood and the Monterey area go back: He lives nearby, was mayor of Carmel and is now on the board of directors of the festival, the finest on the West Coast. Not incidentally, he also met Niehaus at Ft. Ord when both were in the Army and found camaraderie as die-hard jazz fans.

Recently, Niehaus completed an ambitious 45-minute suite for a PBS documentary on Eastwood, to air in September. The resulting score is an orchestration he hopes will be performed live, perhaps by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

His Eastwood connection has also benefited his own jazz life. As he said, “I stopped playing for a while, but when I did ‘Bird,’ I was forced to really pick up the horn again and get back into it, partly just so I could show [the film’s] Forest Whitaker how to play.

“After that, I found myself playing free and in a more mature way,” Niehaus said. “I was taking more chances, and I feel that I’m playing more musically, because with every musical thing that I do, I find it comes through on my horn. My friends notice that. I play larger intervals, instead of running the scales through the chords. I’ll play a motif or a pattern and develop it, things like that.”

Jazz, Niehaus explained, “was my first love, but I studied composition and had always been a composer. I love both equally. I get a musical high from doing both of them. People are put in niches or bags. If they mentioned Lennie Niehaus, they’d say, ‘Oh, he’s the jazz alto player.’ You always have to prove yourself. I could say, ‘I studied orchestration with the finest. I can write for strings and for woodwinds and for large orchestra, jazz band, whatever.’ ”

A number of film composers have jazz credentials.

“John Williams used to be a jazz pianist,” he said. “He wasn’t the greatest, but he was decent. And Dave Grusin is a marvelous jazz pianist who has done some great movies. Mark Isham, too, is a jazz trumpeter, who also played with the San Francisco Symphony. There are a lot of guys out there now who can go from wearing one hat to another.”

It’s safe to say that Niehaus dons many hats and wears them well.

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Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.