In the year-long series Sounds Of Blaxploitation, Craig D. Lindsey plays the hits that defined a genre, drawing connections between the music of the moment and the films that gave it a platform.
While funk music is well-represented in this column, it’s rarely discussed how many jazz artists also provided film scores during the Blaxploitation era. Then again, most of these scores are from some of the genre’s most forgotten, most forgettable films. The album that Philly pianist Charles Earland did for the chopsocky actioner Dynamite Brothers has become a sought-after rarity. (I once saw a vinyl copy at a record store that went for $75.) The great soul/jazz drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie provided some X-rated grooves for interracial adult film Lialeh. (Light In The Attic Records reissued that album back in 2003.) Even that Black-and-proud duo Gil-Scott Heron and Brian Jackson got in on the action (along with percussionist Barnett Williams) with the filmmaking drama The Baron, composing a score that unfortunately has never been put on wax. One of the most notable jazz-influenced Blaxploitation soundtracks comes from guitarist/Blue Note Records veteran Grant Green, who was called on to score 1972’s little-seen action melodrama/message movie The Final Comedown.
From actor-filmmaker Oscar Williams (who penned Blaxploitation action-hero faves Black Belt Jones and Truck Turner), this celluloid expansion of Jimmy Garrett’s 1968’s play We Own The Night is basically an Afro-filled Gunfight At The O.K. Corral. An armed Black nationalist group (led by a pre-Lady Sings The Blues/Star Wars Billy Dee Williams as the frustrated, college-educated revolutionary Johnny Johnson) is stuck in a back alley, locked in a continuous shootout/standoff with racist cops.
Green’s first track, “Past, Present and Future,” accompanies The Final Comedown‘s opening prologue, which sets up the time-bouncing, flashback-heavy narrative of the movie. After a childhood memory jolts Johnson out of his sleep, we get a montage of Black folks scratching and surviving that gets more fast-paced along with the music. Green and his crew of musicians (including session legends like piano man Richard Tee, guitarist Cornell Dupree, drummer Grady Tate, and percussionist Ralph McDonald) lay out a soul suite that effectively goes from foreboding to anxiety-inducing.
Working alongside longtime jazz composer-conductor Wade Marcus, Green and company hit on various genres of Black music over the course of the score. A bleak, opening-credits sequence of dead bodies and other shots of urban decay, is accompanied by the title track, a dirty funk ditty accentuated by Green’s sirloin-juicy guitar licks.
He then merges bluesy jazz-funk with Afrocentric grooves during a playful sequence where Johnson takes his girl Luanna to dinner, then out shopping for African gear. (She usually receives her own lush, strings-filled theme whenever she’s in a scene.) Green also gets a bit churchy during a car scene where Williams has a heart-to-heart with his dad. Of course, we also get a few percussion-heavy cues for the more energetic sequences, with Green getting that waka-waka strumming going. And let’s not forget the solid, swinging horns assembled for the obligatory party scene:
The Final Comedown was just one of four releases that Green dropped that year, with the soundtrack getting more positive notice than the actual movie. (“The consistency of the music, the frequent highlights, and the polished performances and recording make the album one of high interest,” raved one contemporary review.) But, just like Scott-Heron and Jackson, not all jazzmen saw their film work do time on record shelves. After all these years, keyboardist and jazz-fusion icon Herbie Hancock’s score for The Spook Who Sat By The Door has never had an official release. (There was a bootleg vinyl release I bought back in the aughts, consisting of music that sounded like it was recorded off of somebody’s big-backed TV—complete with dialogue and sound effects!)
Released one year after The Final Comedown,The Spook Who Sat By The Door is another underappreciated, Black-owned adaptation about right-on revolutionaries, helmed by an actor-turned-filmmaker. Director Ivan Dixon (Hogan’s Heroes, Nothing But A Man) breathes some deceptively crafty life into author/co-writer Sam Greenlee’s literary 1969 satire, about a Black nationalist (Lawrence Cook) who infiltrates the CIA and acquires enough inside knowledge to assemble an inner-city militia and coolly launch his own revolt. Then-aspiring film composer Hancock jumped at the chance to score a movie by, for, and about Black people. As he wrote in his 2014 memoir Possibilities, “The producers didn’t have much money, but I didn’t care—I really wanted to do the music for this film.”
Recorded during his experimental, early ’70s “Mwandishi” period—after Hancock had provided the music for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup—The Spook Who Sat By The Door score sprinkles some aurally audacious moves throughout the mostly funkafied production. (Since the session players were never credited, it’s fair to assume he performed with his “Mwandishi” sextet, which included reed player Bennie Maupin, trumpeter Eddie Henderson, and bassist Buster Williams.) Interestingly, these moments happen during a couple of recruit-training sequences: one montage has Hancock playing with synths and backwards loops as CIA recruits show off their skills, while the other has rhythmic blips and sound effects going as Black men train in the field.
Mostly used for background noise, Hancock’s tunes provide the proper mood music for various scenes: slow and smooth for scenes where Freeman gets close and personal with a lady; avant-garde and angry when Freeman gives a pep talk to a light-skinned dashiki-wearer. He even pulls out some crazy, flatulent synth sounds for a couple adrenaline-pumpinggetaway scenes. Hancock can even get bland, adding a Muzak-style track for a comical sequence where an undercover brotha in full janitor gear—mop, bucket, the whole thing—steals from a preoccupied white guy’s desk.
For both Green and Hancock, their respective Blaxploitation scores were minor footnotes during prolific, innovative runs in their careers. While Hancock would go on to become a Grammy-winning elder statesman, Green died of a heart attack less than a decade later, in 1979 at age 43. Even though both physical editions of the scores remain hard-to-find treasure troves of righteous fight music, you can still head over to YouTube, where the scores (along with bothfilms) are available for free. (Though The Final Comedown score is allegedly streaming on Apple Music, several of the tracks are incorrectly listed.) Come to hear two jazz greats at their finest and funkiest, stay to get some tips on how to take down The Man.
Next month: This series concludes with a documentary on the most soulful day in Los Angeles history.
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