Post-Bop Trauma: Polish Crime-Jazz Cinema and Its Westward Path to Hollywood

The global spread of American popular music alongside the pervasive distribution of 1940s and ’50s crime dramas, among other Hollywood products, encouraged a prejudicial association between jazz and social deviance in the form of sexual indulgence, criminality, ethnic otherness, or configurations of each reflecting the others. At the same time, African American and other visionaries were pushing the jazz idiom in bold new directions according to their own creative ambitions. Nevertheless, these experimental jazz values were increasingly appropriated in jazz-inflected film scores to reinforce traumatic narrative contexts across the 1960s—as visceral iterations of horror jazz. The Polish crime-jazz association is unique within this transnational artistic context for mobilizing a palpable countercurrent of feature filmmaking, particularly through the work of filmmaker Roman Polanski and his favored composer Krzysztof Komeda, whose intersecting international career paths would eventually meet in Hollywood. Prominent African American jazz musicians, bandleader-drummer Chico Hamilton among them, also contributed to this westward momentum. Ironically, the cinematic trend toward disturbing psychological evocations of otherness represented a professional opportunity for modern jazz innovators unavailable to them otherwise at this time.