Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music through Jazz

The issues it discusses are fascinating ones, and it's a very worthwhile read. Andy Hamilton, The Wire

Comprising case studies of four films?bookended by an introduction and a conclusion in which Carlson lays out her arguments and synthesizes her insights?this book upends the idea that scoring films is ancillary or secondary to filmmaking. . . . Carlston's clear prose is very readable. Highly recommend. J. G. Matthews, CHOICE

[Improvising The Score is] a bold and challenging work, overall, which stimulates much thought. Jazz Journal, Michael Tucker

The book is a valuable contribution to the literature on jazz in film and the working methods of auteur filmmakers as well as their intersections. Björn Heile, Popular Music

This book represents a substantial contribution to the growing discipline of film music studies, not to mention jazz studies. I have always been intrigued by films such as Birdman, Afterglow, and Mo? Better Blues, but Carlson has found new ways to make them even more fascinating.

Krin Gabbard, author of Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus

Carefully researched and engagingly written, Gretchen Carlson?s Improvising the Score is a most welcome addition to contemporary jazz studies. With a persistent focus on music practice, Carlson?s various case studies reveal important insights about jazz?s unique relationships to film and media. Interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word, Improvising the Score is sure to be a widely read and highly influential work of scholarship. Ken Prouty, associate professor of musicology and jazz studies at Michigan State University and author of Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age

Carlson covers the topic from an enriching variety of perspectives (textual analysis, creative practices, industrial contexts). It?s refreshingly focused on contemporary films, and it?s concerned with jazz musicians as film composers?not with film composers utilizing jazz. A truly welcome addition to both film-music studies and jazz studies. Emilio Audissino, author of Film/Music Analysis and coeditor of Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack

At long last, an account of the transformative entanglement between jazz and film. Carlson deftly weaves together sociological, ethnographic, legal, and technological understandings of creative labor?precisely reading texts, then widening out to broader issues in film and media. This is a book that busts open the canon and, in doing so, imagines a better future for jazz studies and music in film. Nicolas Pillai, assistant professor of creative and critical practice at University College Dublin, managing editor of Jazz Research Journal, and author of Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image