4/12/2024 0 Comments Kid composers animated![]() Equally, its low tempo of around 60 beats per minute signifies sadness for young children who associate tempo rather than tonality with mood (Mote 2011). Visual symbols of traditional (depicted as old-fashioned) jazz in the sequence include a broken banjo, a straw boater and cane, a washboard, double bass, piano and trumpet whilst the lyrics (‘a cat's the only cat who knows where its at … a square with a hornmakes you wish you weren't born’) reinforce jazz as an exclusive outsider culture.The song is unusual in the context of children’s music due to its minor key which tends to connote melancholy in Western diatonic music. In the ‘Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat’, Harris’ character Thomas O’Malley duets with Scat Cat voiced by Scatman Crothers. Harris appears as another jazz-loving animal in Disney’s The Aristocats (1970). Solid gone’) such tropes perpetuate earlier critiques of jazz and black-derived popular music by Theodor Adorno in the 1930s (1936). The ‘jungle rhythms’ serve to hypnotize Baloo (‘I’m gone man. However, the visualization of scheming, slouching monkeys, bananas, coconuts and grass skirts with a by-then nostalgic reference to Dixieland jazz repeats the lazy racial stereotypes seen in the Betty Boop and Disney cartoons of 35 to 40 years previous. King Louis’ quest for equality with humans (‘give me the power of man’s red flower’) may be read as a political allegory for the black struggle in America. Mouth trumpets, scat singing and jazz vernacular (‘clue me what you do … take me home, daddy’) are all present and correct. The film also features ‘I wan’na be like you (The Monkey Song)’, a duet between Harris and Louis Prima as King Louis. ![]() The Dixieland-style arrangements are well observed with muted trumpets, banjos, authentic chord progressions and turn-arounds. The song features occasional hipster slang (‘Yeah! Man!’) whilst Baloo’s relaxed demeanor suggests he may be ‘full of reefers’. Jazz band-leader and vocalist Phil Harris (singing as Baloo the bear) extols the virtues of escaping the rush of daily life through being street smart in ‘The Bare Necessities’. Two jazz songs are included in Disney’s 1967 film The Jungle Book. On a functional level, Bradley’s musical quotations of often just a few notes in length reflected the widespread popularity of jazz in America in the 1940s whilst rewarding ‘competent’ listeners of any age with extra semiotic signifiers. Such repetition further embeds jazz as an aural signifier of youthful energy, untrammeled lust and forbidden pleasures. ![]() Musical material was often recycled ‘Darktown Strutters' Ball’, ‘Here comes the sun’ and ‘Sing before breakfast’were all used in more than four episodes from the original Hanna-Barbera era from 1940-58 ( Tom and Jerry Online: The music listing 2018). For example, in the 1942 episode ‘Puss ‘n’ Toots’ in which Tom and then Jerry (!) make amorous advances on a female cat, Bradley includes snippets of familiar jazz tunes ‘Sweet and lovely’, ‘Darktown Strutters' Ball’, ‘The King’s horses’, ‘Boola Boola’ and ‘Tiger Rag’. Generally, the ‘borrowed’ songs would appear for just a few seconds to accompany a related site gag or visual reference (such as ‘The King’s Horses’ for chase sequences). His desire to maintain a constant melody throughout the 500-plus fast-paced bars of the average Tom and Jerry cartoon (Bradley 2002: 118) echoes the pursuit of modernist jazz soloists at the time.īradley was also adept at weaving intertextual references into his scores. Following bebop’s modernist philosophy, Bradley talks about his wish to avoid cliché and to make his music ‘funny’ by warping familiar melodies and disobeying traditional musical rules: ‘We must always progress, and never be satisfied to use the same formula over and over’ (Bradley 2002: 118). His compositional developments in the use of atonality, discord and avant-garde techniques such as Serialism chimed with the progressive bebop jazz that developed in the early 1940s. With the support of producer Fred Quimby, Bradley developed his own style of composition using complex, rapid and unconventional melodies, chromatic scales, and tightly-clustered ‘shock chords’ to compliment the wild and violent antics of the titular cat and mouse (Bradley 2002: 116). Bradley had also previously worked at Disney, but is best known for his scores for Tom and Jerry beginning in 1940. Scott Bradley performed a similar role at MGM from the 1930s onwards. ![]()
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