Breaking Baz: Composer Laura Karpman Discusses Infusing ‘American Fiction’ With Hot Jazz & Rekindling A Classic Movie By Pioneering Filmmaker Dorothy Arzner
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Laura Karpman was drip-fed jazz notes when she was a baby. Her mother’s turn-table featured a playlist that included Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Wes Montgomery and Thelonious Monk, the virtuoso pianist, whose music informs and underpins her own jazz-infused score for Cord Jefferson’s scorching American Fiction. “So I remember in her painting studio, my mother had a record player and she would play everything,” Karpman recalls, and for good measure her mother would spin Beethoven’s violin concerto and a piece by Stravinsky.
Karpman lapped it all up, just as her mother had planned, because Mrs.Karpman had preordained “that I would be a composer when she was pregnant,” she tells me.
Her mother was a painter and sculptor “and she always, I think probably inappropriately, thought that music was the highest art.
And so she wanted me to be an artist and she wanted me to be a musician.” “She had this super eclectic taste in music,” she adds, fully acknowledging “that this had a huge influence on me because that’s what I would hear over and over again.
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