Oscar-nominated this year for American Fiction and an eight-time Primetime Emmy award nominee for series including Ms. Marvel and the documentary film Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, US musician Laura Karpman is nominated for film composer of the year at this year’s World Soundtrack Awards (WSA) which take place this week as part of Film Fest Gent.
2023 marked a pioneering year for the Juilliard School graduate, who worked on six film and TV projects across the year. As well as American Fiction and the Rock Hudson doc, her work on feature The Marvels is also recognised in her WSA nomination.
Taking influence from her early explorations within jazz, Karpman is also noted for her Grammy Award-winning album, Ask Your Mama, a multimedia setting of Langston Hughes’ 1961 poem. She spoke to Screen about her recent work and the influence of jazz on her compositions.
2023 was a prolific year for you. What is it like working on such different projects in such a short space of time?
Honestly, every year feels like that to me. 2023 was the year that people noticed, let’s put it that way.
How much influence do your experiences in jazz have on your work?
I grew up playing classical music and jazz without any hierarchy, I did them both simultaneously. So I grew up feeling like orchestral music and jazz were part of who I am musically as a composer. All of my work is based on jazz in some way, shape or form.
In terms of scoring, it’s in more subtle ways. American Fiction is a jazz score, Rock Hudson is a jazz score. Jazz is also in The Marvels: Dar-Benn, who is the villainess [played by Zawe Ashton], her theme is played by the same musician in Rock Hudson and American Fiction. That’s a jazz theme in many ways. It’s very much an American sound as well.
This leads us to Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed. How does your compositional approach change when you start scoring someone’s life?
I think jazz was the style that Steven [Kijak], the director, wanted and it was about creating these themes for various aspects of his life: very dreamy for depicting him dreaming about being a star in Hollywood; there’s a mambo which is a super-fun sexy piece that’s about play time and being with guys and all of that; there’s a theme called ‘Romance’ that’s about the complexity of his romantic life. And then of course there’s all of the eighths [note] stuff too, which is about ultimately the tragedy of his life in that by coming out he was the guy that marshalled in awareness [around AIDS and gay rights]. He became an activist in his own way – maybe because he was forced to, but he did it.
When it comes to American Fiction, a lot of the influence seems to stem from Thelonious Monk. How did you construct the sound world to Cord Jefferson’s film?
Rock Hudson was about writing great themes, putting a lot of great jazz musicians in a room together and then applying them to the picture. With American Fiction it was more of a typical scoring process but using jazz in that process. There’s ‘Monk’s Theme’, there’s the ‘Family Theme’, there are all these different themes as well as moments of improvisation, which are much smaller and woven around dialogue in a different kind of way. It’s a talking movie so the dialogue almost serves as another musical instrument.
Was there much improvisation in the American Fiction score? Did you allow the players to have creative agency?
Yes, but not nearly as much. Because the minute somebody takes a solo, you’ve got a line of dialogue which gets in the way. You don’t have five-minute cues in the same way that you do with Rock Hudson. There are little moments where solos are woven around dialogue but they are fewer and further in between in American Fiction.
Was it completely different on a project like The Marvels, and working for Marvel?
That’s all written, yes. It’s big orchestra and it is what a superhero score is. Honestly, in The Marvels, there’s a lot of vocal experimentation, and there’s also another improvised section where we use box notation and the players created their own rhythms. The truth is it all comes from the same sensibility as a music composer: jazz informs the classical, and classical informs the jazz. They are not separate for me, it’s just a part of who I am stylistically.
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