Pop & Jazz: Swing it, cut it and can it

JUST AS much film music routinely aspires to the condition of jazz, many jazz compositions sound as if they were written especially for the title sequence of a film that somehow failed to get made. Thelonious Monk's famous tune "Round Midnight" remains the great film noir theme that never was, its brooding atmospherics crying out for a visual accompaniment of dark, rain-slicked, city streets puddled with neon. It had to wait until 1986 and Bertrand Tavernier's film of the same name to make the opening credits (in an arrangement by Herbie Hancock), although David Meeker's trainspotter's bible Jazz In The Movies informs you that it can also be heard, played by Monk's quartet with Gerry Mulligan, in Peter Hall's screen adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming from 1973.

The cinematic spirit of Monk is invoked in the rather otiose translated sleevenotes to a remarkable new album by the Italian pianist and composer Rita Marcotulli. The Woman Next Door (Label Bleu) is a musical tribute to the films of Francois Truffaut, and it's one of the best albums of the year so far. Apart from Jean Constantin's original theme for Les 400 Coups, and two songs by Charles Trenet, the material is all Marcotulli's own, and it doesn't so much illustrate the films as evoke recurring themes and motifs, such as innocence, escape and the limitations of language.

As music, it's very varied, ranging from the opening track's gentle fusion (which recalls Wayne Shorter's Native Dancer), to a nearly atonal piano solo, to the accordion-heavy traditions of French cabaret and chanson, but despite this the album manages to work very well as a kind of suite. It's played mainly by a series of small ensembles drawn from a large group of Italian and French musicians, which includes the trumpeter Enrico Rava and the drummer Aldo Romano (who also sings, most affectingly). There's a few rather chewy, free-ish, moments but mostly it's beautifully light, intelligent, rhapsodic work and a perfect counterpart to Truffaut's own heart-on-sleeve, emphatically humanist, approach. The album ends with a recording of Truffaut's voice which then leads into a brief piano improvisation on the aliens' theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film by Steven Spielberg in which Truffaut played the role of the benevolent scientist. Like the best of Truffaut, it's an unashamedly emotional, three- hankie-weepie, moment.

There are more accordions on the re-release of Gato Barbieri's wonderful score for Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris (Rykodisc), which has been deleted for years. It's one of the best of all jazz soundtracks, and the combination of the Argentinian saxophonist's sand-blasted tone with the swirling strings of the orchestra and those deceptively cheery squeeze-boxes remains compelling listening. Lush, romantic tangos are mixed with Latin jazz solos wherein Barbieri's keening wail sounds more than ever like a small mammal suffering extremes of pain. The soundtrack album was a re-recording of the original score as used in the film, but the reissue also includes The Last Tango In Paris Suite, a series of 28 musical cues taken from the actual audio-track of the film. They're all very brief, but the music is often even more intensely passionate than on the original album.

The soundtrack album for the recent Beat Generation movie, The Last Time I Committed Suicide (Blue Note), mixes old bop tracks by Monk, Mingus, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey together with period songs by Ella Fitzgerald and the Andrews Sisters, an original score by Tyler Bates, and a few contributions from current Blue Note artists. The old stuff is reliably good, and Bates's score admirably tries to put a bit of punkish brio into its retro-bebop modes, but apart from a version of Muddy Waters' "Country Girl" sung by the great Cassandra Wilson with Javon Jackson, the other contributions by Blue Note acts - pianist Jacky Terrasson and two tracks by the over-rated singer Dianne Reeves - are hardly essential. Neither are the brief snippets of dialogue from the soundtrack, an irritation increasingly common on film albums, and one for which Quentin Tarantino can probably be blamed.

The soundtrack album to the American independent director John Sayles's latest film, Men With Guns (Rykodisc), is a real find. The film is set in Guatemala and the music is a Ry Cooder-ish archeological dig through the many layers of Latin American dance-styles (with yet more accordions), together with an original score by Mason During, written largely for the marimba and intended to invoke the spirit of Mayan music. The results are strange, but very effective.

So too is The Professional: The Best of Laurie Johnson (Redial). Although the ethnic coordinates of the veteran composer's 21 television and film themes are fixed throughout on the Home Counties, the contents remain - perhaps surprisingly - consistently interesting, whether considered as anthropology or music. And it has to be both really. Original themes for The Avengers, old and new; The Professionals: Jason King; This Is Your Life and a stunning adaptation of Ravel's Bolero, sound better than any recording that features the Mike Sammes Singers has a right to. The composer gets to stretch out a bit more on the companion release, The Musical Worlds of Laurie Johnson (Redial), which features three suites written in a classical vein, but this has to be one for the seriously committed, while anyone can enjoy high-kicking, Mrs Peel-style, to The Avengers

Finally, although it's more ambient or techno than jazz, Suck It And See (Pussyfoot) by the various artists of the Pussyfoot posse - who include the cult mixer and producer Howie B - is dedicated to the proposition that porn movies are the new rock 'n' roll. Dialogue samples from sleazy Seventies British porn movies; deconstructions of continually climactic themes (some of which sound remarkably like Laurie Johnson), and the odd attempt at old bedroom-soul are bricolaged with drum-machine beats to create a disconcerting soundtrack for the late-night activities of libidinous clubbers. Like most dance compilations, the two CDs go on and on, keeping it up long past the point where you'd be happy to settle for a cup of cocoa and a cuddle, but as a bit of post-coital slap and tickle they're amusing enough. They're also seriously obscene.