How ‘Saturday Night’s’ Intense Ticking Score Was Created By Tap Dancing, a Fiddle and Jon Batiste

variety.com:

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor “Saturday Night” director Jason Reitman didn’t want a score that paid homage to “Saturday Night Live.” Musician Jon Batiste says, “He wanted a pressure cooker of a score, and I interpreted that to mean that he wanted me to do an anti-score.” “Saturday Night” follows a tense 90 minutes on October 11, 1975, as Lorne Michaels and a group of young comedians and writers prepare for the first broadcast and premiere of “Saturday Night Live.” Batiste is doing double duty in Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” he’s playing musician and band leader Billy Preston, and he also composed the film’s score.

The “anti-score” directive was heaven for Batiste who loved that type of score because it breaks with the paradigm. The narrative is set within a 90-minute timespan. “The villain of the film is the clock,” says Batiste. “The music is an allegory for the ticking of, and pressure of time.” Batiste used the score to heighten the emotion and lean into the nostalgia, but he also needed to consider sound effects, score and dialogue. “It’s not typical, it’s unorthodox,” Batiste explains. “At certain moments the score becomes sound design.

In other moments, the score or the sound effects are louder than the dialog. Sometimes they’re telling the story. Sometimes the dialog is happening and there’s this brooding percussion underneath it that’s not quite score or sound design, it’s something else.” The opportunity to have one single-string instrument versus an orchestra was also a tribute to vaudeville and the entertainer Jack Benny. “I see ‘SNL’ as the pinnacle of variety, of vaudeville.