Jazz-Experts: Please help me find great Jazz music in movies!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_a_Murder. Duke Ellington Orchestra, Billy Strayhorn composed the score. Great movie, great soundtrack.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000005Z5X/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000033VF/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000IMYH/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000003N9Q/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000472K/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000004785/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000071UX/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil...Great soundtrack with a mixture of jazz staple names and some of the actors playing in the movie crooning a few. Surprising level of musical technicality and sincerity. Sideways....Soundtrack by Rolfe Kent was written for the movie. Great job of creating the tone of the movie with this music. When I want to feel as I did while watching the movie Sideways, the soundtrack can readily transport me. Sideways soundtrack is also a great CD to listen to at work. Not distracting but a creative energy with some of the songs. Best of luck.

http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/findaid/jazz/intro.htmlhttp://www.jazzstandards.com/Bookstore/Book070.htm http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=17361 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008ES6Z/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ Also, keep in mind that many many jazz standards were written for Broadway shows and then used in a variety of Hollywood films later. Some songs appear in key scenes in numerous films, for example, the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmDuNm71IHM wrote http://jazzstandards.com/compositions-0/igotrhythm.htm for Girl Crazy on Broadway in 1930. It was originally sung onstage by Ethel Merman and made her famous. Girl Crazy was made into a 1932 RKO film, and then in 1945 it was remade again by MGM. This time the song was sung by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THvJtAENfaQ. Then later it was sung by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZmy1UolCNg in American in Paris as well as other films. These songs were really recorded and rerecorded and used. Because they were great. Basically, a great jazz song is like a really solid musical blueprint, it gives a lot to work with to build a house. You're given chords and a melody and lyrics, but the different musicians, tempo, style and context will turn the same song into a completely different one. So they are very adaptable, and there was positive audience recognition with using the great standards. That's why Gene Kelly fought to have An American in Paris be an all-Gershwin score... even though the songs were all familiar to the audience, they were performed in totally new context that fueled the dance scenes. It was a big risk for Gene Kelly to make that film and the Gershwin songs were really important to help it pay off and give an all-dance film credibility. Okay, I'll stop babbling now. I can go on about this junk.

BTW, you should utilize http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/award_recipient_detail.asp?ceremonyId=7&awardRecipientId=60 to help you research your songs. And if you do a little googling, you'll find further evidence of things like I said above... for example, As Time Goes By was actually written by Herman Hupfeld for the 1931 musical "Everybody's Welcome." Then it was recorded by Rudy Vallee. Then in 1942 it was in Casablanca sung by Dooley Wilson.

Jerry Goldsmith – Love Theme from Chinatown

Miss Lynnster for the win. :-)

Woody Allen's Radio Days is set in 1940s America and the story revolves around the radio music and personalities of the time. As such, it has some wonderful jazz songs including (from memory, there are many more) Ellington's Never No Lament and Benny Goodman's Goodbye, both brilliant big band jazz songs. I'll second mykescipark's Ascenseur pour l'echafaud. Miles Davis wrote the score, and though they aren't recognisable standards, the music is wonderfully moody, evocative film noir jazz. The episode of the Simpsons when Mr Burns woos Grandma Simpson has them dancing to Goodman's Sing Sing Sing, but I don't know if cartoons count for you. Louis Armstrong's Hello Dolly, surprisingly enough, is from the Broadway musical of the same name. His What A Wonderful World has also been in countless movies.

I think you also should be careful about calling some songs jazz standards that aren't, though. For example, http://ask.yahoo.com/20030804.html was written in 1967 and was never considered a standard. It was more of a pop song performed a jazz great. It was used in films like Good Morning Vietnam twenty years later, but it wasn't written for a film.