American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson knows his film has a secret weapon. Sure stars Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown have been getting their share of awards recognition, as has Jefferson himself — but it’s composer Laura Karpman’s vibrant, jazzy score that keeps the emotionally layered tone of American Fiction afloat.
“I wanted the film to feel like real life, and I feel like life is neither comedy nor tragedy,” Jefferson says. “It sort of vacillates between those two things multiple times in the same day. I knew that I wanted jazz in the score early on and Laura had such a deft hand and an understanding of exactly what was needed. She was just a wonderful collaborator from day one.”
For Karpman, a prolific composer who started writing music at the tender age of seven and works within a variety of film and TV genres, jazz was the perfect musical style to support the highs, lows and tonal shifts in Wright’s character Monk’s colorful, moving journey throughout the film.
“The character’s name is Thelonious Ellison, right? His nickname is Monk. So you have to acknowledge jazz,” she tells Vanity Fair. One of her early ideas when she began composing the film’s music, was thinking about Wright’s voice and dialogue as an instrument.
“When we work with an actor, of course we never are working with them in person, but I’ve been listening to Jeffrey Wright for years because I also score Marvel’s, What If?, and he’s The Watcher, so I knew his voice,” she explains. “It’s like a familiar tenor saxophone. So then I started playing around with the idea of, well, ‘What if Jeffrey’s actually one of the instruments?’ So you’ve got Jeffrey, and then you’ve got other instruments working in the interim spaces between his dialogue.”
Karpman’s score is made up of multiple saxophones, flute, bass, drums, multiple pianos and select scenes backed by a string orchestra for what she calls “that big movie feeling.” One other special component is renowned jazz flutist Elena Pinderughes. “The reason why her sound is so special is because there’s so much breath in it,” says Karpman. “At the end of her phrases you hear breathing, it’s this incredibly rich sound in her playing that is truly unique.”
She also wrote in specific moments for improvisation, one of the many hallmarks and heart and soul of jazz.
“The whole thing is scored like a [traditional] film score, notated, things happening, but then there’ll be two bars of improvisation or four bars of improvisation,” says Karpman. “The improvisation was very much put into a certain place so that it could work in and around the dialogue. And then I recorded everybody separately. So I had incredible control to be able to take things out and move things around to different places. It’s a movie where there’s a lot of dialogue and you can’t step on the dialogue, but you do want the freedom of improvisation.”
Karpman had a very busy year, composing for six film and TV projects: Fiction, The Marvels, Ms. Marvel, Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, What If?, 61st Street.
The California-born, five-time Emmy winner is delighted with the work and being able to create within so many different genres. Working on Marvel’s The Marvels, for example, presented her the opportunity to write music for space, resulting in a sound she calls “percussive space junk,” a hint of which she added to the Fiction score.
“There was always the question with The Marvels, what does space sound like? So we rented all this stuff, like junk, but we went in with mallets and all kinds of stuff to test out what would have a really cool sound,” she recalls. “And then it was just sitting in my recording room, so when I was working on American Fiction and the drip scene, I thought, ‘God, I wonder if we should use that space junk in this?’ Because that scene has kind of a clunky feel and that old house has that kind of a clunky feel.”
Although her work is technically finished on Fiction, Karpman has been delighted with the film’s reception and accolades.
“This was one of those movies that when I first saw it, I knew immediately what a special film it was. I really wanted [to work on] this score, there is such a nuanced conversation about race, about what it is to be an artist, about what it is to be in a family about this whole,” she says.
And with the enthusiasm for her jazzy addition to the film, might a vinyl version be made available for those who want to own a piece of it? “That’s a really good question,” she says. “We do have some extra stuff that’s just sitting in our back pocket, so that if it came out on vinyl, I’d definitely put it on the record.”
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