Jazz Speaks the Language of the Silents

In my dream, it is 1960 and the nation’s capital is hosting a gala 45th anniversary screening of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic, “Birth of a Nation.” The sidewalks outside are choked with angry protesters, and not even the promise of a new musical score by “one of America’s greatest living composers” can dispel the seemingly eternal controversy over the movie’s unabashedly racist perspective on post-Civil War life.

Nonetheless, it’s this very controversy that assures a packed house. Many in the audience are segregationist congressmen hoping to draw inspiration for the filibusters they hope will continue to block the waves of civil rights legislation awaiting passage.

The theater grows dark. The movie starts, along with the music. And from the first chord, Griffith’s stirring paean to the Ku Klux Klan is transmogrified, through wailing saxophones, angry horns, tittering wind instruments and all-round syncopated mischief, into an entirely different masterpiece than its genius maker had intended.

This tempestuous, visionary score deflates “Birth’s” grand foolishness, replacing it with a caustic but no less majestic irony. Those who loved the original movie are scandalized. Those who hated it are enthralled.

When the lights come up, an impassioned audience howls to see the composer, who also is the conductor. A spotlight illuminates a hulking figure rising from the orchestra pit to absorb the catcalls and bravos. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Charles Mingus!

As I said, it’s only a dream. Mingus never wrote a score for “Birth of a Nation”--or any other silent movie. And more’s the pity.

But though the idea of a jazz composer writing background sounds for a silent classic seemed somewhat implausible 40 years ago, it is now an established (if little regarded) practice along the music’s cutting edge. Guitarist Bill Frisell has written scores for such Buster Keaton comedies as “Go West” and “The High Sign.”

And clarinetist Don Byron has written music for the 1927 racial melodrama “The Scar of Shame”--a performance of which was, alas, canceled at this summer’s JVC Jazz Festival for lack of advance ticket sales. I guess audiences for film or jazz still find the idea as implausible as my Mingus fantasy.

Maybe that will change, given last Sunday’s world premiere of a new musical score by trombonist Wycliffe Gordon for “Body and Soul,” a 1925 thriller by African American movie pioneer Oscar Micheaux. The screening at Avery Fisher Hall was part of this year’s New York Film Festival and the latest in a series of synergistic projects involving both the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Rob Gibson, Lincoln Center Jazz’s executive director, says his Film Society counterpart, Richard Peqa, brought a print of Micheaux’s cult classic to his attention two years ago. “It took us that long to figure out how to go about it and who was the right person to do it.”

Gordon, 33, a mainstay of various bands led by Lincoln Center Jazz’s artistic director Wynton Marsalis, says he “felt connected” to the project, partly because of the story’s setting in his native Georgia and partly because of its hellfire-and-brimstone church subtext.

The movie stars Paul Robeson, an electrifying presence throughout, as Jenkins, a hard-drinking, ruthless ex-convict who poses as a pastor in a Georgia hamlet and preys on the helpless daughter of a devoted parishioner. Like most old-fashioned pulp stories, “Body and Soul” has, with time, acquired a layer or two of surrealism that softens the blows of its over-the-top dramaturgy.

Gordon, who guides the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra through his score, both connects with and has fun with the movie’s swooning, keening melodrama.

The music often has the antiphonal clatter and buzz that one imagines a 1920s jazz band would have evoked in an original screening of Micheaux’s movie. Yet there are also more modernist themes that shadow Jenkins on his vile errands. Overall, the score leaps with knowing abandon between blues and gospel motifs in communion with the story’s broad depiction of good and evil, sacred and profane.

Both the band and the movie have gone to Germany for the score’s European premiere on Friday. One hopes that, sooner rather than later, there will be even more adventurous collaborations between jazz musicians and silent movies, especially Micheaux’s and other long-lost classics.

As for Griffith, well, “Birth of a Nation” may be better left alone. But what about his subsequent ill-starred 1916 epic, “Intolerance”? And though the idea would be sacrilege to purists in both art forms, what would Ornette Coleman do with something like Chaplin’s “The Circus” (1919)? Or “Modern Times” (1936)? Not a chance, I know, because Chaplin’s own music works just fine. But I can dream, can’t I?