I Want To Live

Music by Johnny Mandel

 

 

 

 

 

 

Award winning drama with outstanding performance of Susan Hayward, I Want To Live was also notable for an exemplary soundtrack. I Want To Live formed along with The Man With the Golden Arm and A Streetcar Named Desire the holy trinity of jazz tracks in film in its first generation.

Composed by Johnny Mandel in 1958, and featuring West Coast Jazz instrumentalists (including Shelly Mane, Gerry Mulligan and Art Farmer) is a remarkable work by expanding the jazz language for dramatic and narrative support. But while Streetcar was still connected to the symphonic tradition and The Man With the Golden Arm was more visceral jazz, I Want To Live worked on the two possibilities in a innovative proposal as cinema music. The percussion arsenal has special function in Nightmare Sequence and Stakeout, the latter one of the highlights of the soundtrack with its constant tension bordering on experimental. Also notable are the variations over the main theme making it sound tense or loose or apprehensive, until here an effect exclusive of symphonic soundtracks. The stylish Letter Wrighting Sequence is ahead of its time, pointing to an not existent format in jazz while San Diego Party is pure west coast. Given the relatively small instrumental group, it is striking to note the dramatic variations achieved as in the funeral progress of Gas Chamber Unveiling, or emotional desolation of The Last Mile. Marking not only a breakthrough in the use jazz as soundtrack, the work also revealed unsuspected creative ways for the genre. In doing so, the music for I Want To Live places itself as a remarkable work both in jazz history and in the history of cinema. The CD edition brings previously available material on vinyl and includes recordings of Gerry Mulligan Jazz Combo originally released in a separately album.