Jazz For The Screen ★ Leith Stevens Or Lighthouse All-Stars?

Leith Stevens' All Stars

Jazz Themes

From

The Wild One

No picture — and no music — could have a more appropriate title than "The Wild One", for this is the story of hot blooded youth — particularly of the wild, half-inarticulate and violent leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. This leader, Johnny, played by Marlon Brando, lives, it seems only to get his gang into trouble. (...)

Decca is fortunate to be able to present the pulsing music which emphasizes the action of "The Wild One". It is written, arranged, and played by Leith Stevens and his All Stars. Leith Stevens was one of the first leaders and arranger-composers to foster jazz music over the air on radio. He led the orchestra on the original CBS Saturday Night Swing Show. This was the time of the revival of jazz music. Raymond Scott's Quintet started on that show, and, curiously enough, one of the performers in the house band — a trombone player — was the now famous comedian, Jerry Colonna. Although not generally known as one of the "fathers" of Jazz, Leith Stevens has always had a great fondness for it. This is exemplified by the brilliant performance and the equally brilliant ensemble heard on these recordings. *(from the liner notes)*

A missing link in the Lighthouse All-Stars collection?

Although conceived as a soundtrack recording for the motion picture The Wild One, this LP does not officially appear within the discography of the Lighthouse All-Stars; nevertheless, this recording belongs, in both spirit and execution, to the same musical nucleus that defined the Lighthouse sound in the early 1950s. Issued under the name "Leith Stevens' All Stars", the album reflects a logic typical of the Hollywood film industry: the music is credited to the composer responsible for the soundtrack—in this case, Leith Stevens—even when the actual musical realization is carried out by a clearly identifiable group of jazz musicians. It is now also known that, in reality, all the arrangements were done by Shorty Rogers.

Leith Stevens (1909–1970), a central figure in mid-century Hollywood film scoring, developed a distinctive approach that incorporated elements of modern jazz into dramatic cinema. His work includes scores for films such as Destination Moon (1950), Private Hell 36 (1954), The James Dean Story (1957), and Julie (1956), among many others. Stevens' use of progressive jazz created an innovation in film-music history, and he was particularly attentive in selecting the right musicians for his projects. For The Wild One, he turned to the interpretative skill of the outstanding young trumpeter and conductor Shorty Rogers. Shorty's collaboration with Stevens on film scores produced some of the most compelling background music of the era, representing one of the earliest instances of this approach in cinema and marking the beginning of a jazz trend in dramatic film scoring.

As Shorty Rogers recalls in Roy Carr's The Hip: Hipsters, Jazz and the Beat Generation (p. 91), his involvement in The Wild One originated through the direct intervention of Marlon Brando, who had heard his album  Modern Sounds:

"For a long time, the Lighthouse was the focal point for jazz in LA, the West Coast equivalent of Birdland, except that a lot of movie people were always dropping by. Composer Leith Stevens was a regular and through him I got to work on "The Wild One".

Brando had control over the soundtrack and he asked Stevens for suggestions. Stevens gave him some current LPs including my "Modern Sounds" ten-inch for Capitol. ‘I want that guy,’ Brando told Stevens after he'd heard the album. So Stevens composed the themes and I arranged them in exactly the same way I would have done for Stan Kenton's orchestra or my own Giants".

From another perspective, trombonist Milt Bernhart's testimony, from a telephone interview conducted on November 12, 1999, indicates that, through Shorty Rogers' connection with the Lighthouse, most of the musicians were hired to play for the score of Marlon Brando's film The Wild One:

"…We got our first chance to work in a studio playing all of the score for a motion picture because no one less than Marlon Brando had heard an album of Shorty's, The Giants, not the Lighthouse group but heard Shorty's album, on Capitol, and when they were talking about music for a picture called 'The Wild One', they had already assigned a man to do the score, Leith Stevens, who was a staff writer, a good one, but no background in jazz per-se and Brando opened up in a meeting and said listen to this. So they listened to it and I don't think any of the music department knew anything about Shorty, nor did they intend to. Before it was over he was assigned to the picture and then because of that the door opened to the rest of us. So that was the first time I worked on a movie out of the Lighthouse".

In this way, Jazz Themes From The Wild One can be understood as a natural extension of the Lighthouse universe: a recording conceived under external conditions—contracts, credits, and production requirements—but performed by the same group of musicians who, night after night, shaped one of the most active centers of jazz in Los Angeles. 

Hence the question and the reasonable doubt posed at the beginning… Wouldn't this be one of the Lighthouse All-Stars masterpieces that wasn't? 

It is also worth noting that, in the original Decca release credits, some of these musicians appear under slightly altered names—Shorty Rogers as "Roger Short" and Shelly Manne as "Manny Shell"—a common practice at the time, likely reflecting contractual constraints rather than artistic choices.

Heard in this context, the album reveals itself not merely as a soundtrack, but as a peripheral—yet fully authentic—document of the Lighthouse sound in its transition into the Hollywood studio system.

It is fitting, then, that Jazz Themes From The Wild One should also mark the beginning of a new series, Jazz For The Screen, a collection of film and television soundtracks, dedicated to exploring the many ways in which jazz musicians, arrangers, and composers brought their music to the world of film and television. From feature films to television productions, the series will trace a broader history of jazz composed and recorded for the screen, and the often fascinating encounters between the world of jazz and the demands of the studio.

Side 1

1- The Wild One

2 - Lonely Way

3 - Beetle

4 - Blues For Brando

Side 2

5 - Hotshoe

6 - Windswept

7 - Scramble

8 - Chino

(All compositions by Leith Stevens)

#1, #3, #7, #8

Shorty Rogers [as Roger Short], Maynard Ferguson (trumpets);

Bob Cooper (tenor sax); Bud Shank (alto sax); Jimmy Giuffre (baritone sax); 

Russ Freeman (piano); Carson Smith (bass); Shelly Manne [as Manny Shell] (drums). 

#2, #4, #5, #6

Shorty Rogers [as Roger Short] (trumpet); Bob Cooper (tenor sax); Bud Shank (alto sax, tenor sax), 

Jimmy Giuffre (tenor sax, baritone sax), Milt Bernhart (trombone),

Russ Freeman (piano), Carson Smith (bass); Shelly Manne [as Manny Shell] (drums). 

Recorded in Hollywood, California, October 2, 1953