Of Don Ellis, Gene Hackman & 'The French Connection'
Great things come in threes
Welcome again music lovers!
This time, I’ve put something together that I really hope you enjoy: a mix of music and movie criticism. The music portion centres on jazz trumpeter and bandleader Don Ellis, one of the most original musicians to ever play the music. The movie portion touches on the late, great Gene Hackman and The French Connection, the film that solidified him as one of the New Hollywood’s leading men and for which Ellis provided its distinctive score. The French Connection is many things; to me, it’s principally the finest movie about and shot in New York. Again, I hope you enjoy what I’ve put together and please let me know your thoughts too.
For those who haven’t seen The French Connection, some significant plot details are included in the below essay.
Two more pieces are coming later this month. First up will be an essay celebrating two albums I recently got hip to: Judy Collins’ In My Life from 1966 and Chi Coltrane’s self-titled from 1972. Both are fierce, tough and bold albums.
After that will be my latest piece for paid subscribers (thank you for your financial support of the work I do here!). Free for everyone will be my latest round-up of new and upcoming albums I’ve been enjoying and that I think you will like too as well as links to some of the great writing I’ve read over the past few weeks here on Substack. Behind the paywall will be another update on some of the albums I’ve recently enjoyed in the record room as well as a quick hit on how my newsletter is doing.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
There was an advertisement once with the tagline: “Don’t miss a beat this weekend.” It was to publicize transit passes for Saturday and Sunday: a day pass for $10 and a two-day pass for just five bucks more. There was a graphic included of a musical staff. A few notes to the right, a treble clef to the left with a time signature of….10/15?!?!?
Someone took a photo of the ad, created by Metrolinx, a chronically beleaguered transit agency, at Toronto’s Union Station and posted it on Twitter with the following: “Someone needs to have a chat with Betty from marketing….”
Cue the dunking, almost all of it good-natured and inside baseball for music nerds. By far, the hippest of the replies speculated if Betty from marketing had a thing for Don Ellis. If anyone could have tried to play something in 10/15, it would have been him.
Odd and complex time signature became the defining feature of the orchestra that the trumpeter founded in 1966, a pursuit inspired by his studies in ethnomusicology and his particular interest in Hindustani music. It was this sense of adventurousness that made Ellis unique. He got his start with the ghost version of the Glenn Miller Orchestra that Ray McKinley led. He worked with Maynard Ferguson, George Russell, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Mingus. In 1965, he began to play a specially made trumpet that had four values, contracting the tonal interval of his lines while expanding their expression.
With that, Ellis’ solos could have a slashing, exhilarating quality. On ‘Indian Lady,’ the explosive opener to the Orchestra’s third album—its first for Columbia—Electric Bath, Ellis almost smears his notes as they hurriedly pour out of this instrument during his improvisation—for most of it, he plays against the force of the Orchestra. It lasts for just about a minute but its fleetingness only makes the feeling that it is revealing a vision of the future that much more powerful.
It is sustained through a driving clavinet solo by Mike Long, trombone and tenor saxophone solos by Ron Myers and Ron Starr respectively and a wild percussion solo—there were four in the group and three bassists—led by drummer Steve Bohannon. There’s also multiple fake endings and recurring blasts of Ellis’ unforgettable theme. About the only conventional thing about ‘Indian Lady’ is that it was in 5/4. It is a shot of music adrenaline that could wake the dead.
Electric Bath was a prescient album. The ballad ‘Open Beauty’ with its echo-laden electric piano arpeggios, ethereal melody and floating interjections by Ruben Leon and Joe Roccisano on soprano saxophone foreshadow Miles Davis’ ‘In a Silent Way.’ Davis was listening to Ellis but if his comments in his 1968 Downbeat blindfold test are taken at face value, he was unmoved by what he heard. Electric Bath and, by extension, Ellis, were part of the late-sixties counterculture, challenging previously held assumptions and smashing them to pieces, creating something new from the shards.
That was happening a lot in 1967. Electric Bath was recorded over two days in September and released later that fall. A month prior, Bonnie and Clyde was released in theatres, one of a number of motion pictures that set into motion the arrival of the New Hollywood. It was fuzzy in its morality—the earliest heist scenes have a slapstick quality set to the music of Flatt and Scruggs—and graphic in its violence—the later heist scenes erupt with sudden, contemporary horror. It was as inspired by the gangster movies of the thirties as it was by the French New Wave. There are many memorable things about Bonnie and Clyde. Here is one. It involves a joke.
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It is told while Clyde Barrow drives with his brother Buck in the passenger seat. Buck tells of an ill mother and her son who tricks her, a teetotaler she, into drinking milk sweetened with some brandy on advice of her doctor to get her on the mend. Her son adds a little more brandy to the milk each day and soon, the mother is chugging it down. Then comes the punchline as she tells him, “son, whatever you do, don’t sell that cow.”
Buck tells the joke with a pronounced Southern diction. He can’t get through the punch without laughing. It’s not the most artful joke but it is funny. The irreverent glee of hooking the mom on alcohol without her being the wiser underscores the thumbing one’s nose at authority vibe that gives Bonnie and Clyde such vitality. It also doesn’t hurt that telling to joke to Warren Beatty’s Clyde was Gene Hackman's Buck.
In the scene, Hackman turns the cornpone up to 11, relishing the opportunity to tell a joke Buck has probably told many times already (indeed, he tells it a second time in the picture), not masking its silliness but delighting in it. And in so doing, it’s impossible to not be drawn in to Hackman and his ability to take over a scene, moulding it into a mini-masterpiece of screen acting.
While Bonnie and Clyde was Hackman’s big break—a triumph of his determination to defy the odds solidified, in part, when he and Dustin Hoffman were voted “the least likely to succeed” when studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse—it didn’t launch him as one of a handful of the leading men of the New Hollywood who brought a fierce, mesmerizing energy to the screen. That happened four years later with The French Connection, a dramatization of a 1968 bust by the NYPD of almost 250 pounds of heroin smuggled aboard a ship from France.
It’s about a half-hour into the movie that we learn the name of the character Hackman plays. “All right, Popeye’s here,” he pronounces as he and his partner, “Cloudy” Russo, played by Roy Scheider, raid a Brooklyn bar. That kind of flourish calls back to when he and Russo go out to a club called Shay’s after a shift during which Doyle, dressed as a sidewalk Santa Claus, roughs up a suspected drug dealer, bamboozling him with accusations of picking his feet in Poughkeepsie. Doyle enters the supper club to the sound of the Three Degrees on the stage, shakes the maître'd’’s hand, heads to where the group is singing, subtly dances and then goes to sweet talk a female employee. That kind of charm fuels the remarkable spectacle of Doyle shaking down the all-Black clientele at the bar.
At one point, he collects some of the pills, weed and other mind-bending stuff left on the bar rail in his hat, dumps them into a shaker glass, adds a half-glass of beer, slams a glass on top to mix and shakes vigorously while calling out, “anybody want a milkshake?” After ordering two of the men in the bar into two phone booths to stand inside facing the wall with their hands up, Doyle spots another man, begins to rough him up, pushes him into a backroom and then, they laugh. They know each other. The guy Doyle manhandles for all to see is an informant. Doyle asks him what’s the latest scuttlebutt on the drug trade in New York. The informant says he hasn’t any and has heard nothing about a wise guy who has caught Doyle and Russo’s eyes: Sal Boca.
Doyle, after asking the informant where he wants to get hit—appearances must be kept—and then socks him in the mouth. Right after, they pretend to tussle back into the bar. The raid then ends almost as quickly as it started with Doyle and Russo backing out of the bar. As they go, Doyle offers a rote “we’re going now, bye.”
Again, Hackman makes the scene, bringing layers to his breakout role. Doyle is a lot of things: a barely functioning alcoholic, a bit kinky in his sexual proclivities, conversant in racial and other slurs, a blowhard and a textbook definition of the “bad cop” but he is also a showman. Doyle is magnetic, charismatic and born to enact the theatrics of policework. Doyle comes off as a cop on a mission but not the one he is enacting at the bar. That’s schtick and he doesn’t disguise that.
One of the many things about The French Connection that has become movie lore is that William Friedkin, its director, begrudgingly cast Hackman as Doyle. Another is that Fernando Rey was cast sight unseen after Friedkin told Robert Weiner, the casting director, to hire “the guy from Belle de Jour” to play Alain Charnier, the suave linchpin of the plan to smuggle 120 pounds of heroin from France to New York, only for Friedkin to discover once Rey arrived in the city for the movie that he wasn’t the guy he wanted. That was actually Francisco Rabal, with whom Friedkin would later work on the tense and taut Sorcerer.
Yet another is that the movie is observational. Its verité feel gives it a deeply immersive quality. The viewer is watching the action like a bystander. Save for a short voice-over of exposition by Russo once he and Doyle obtain wiretaps on Boca, there is nothing in the form of exposition. The pieces eventually come together but The French Connection is the kind of movie to watch once to be introduced to all of the pieces of the story and a second time to puzzle them all together.
The French Connection was filmed on location in New York during the winter of 1971 and it pulses with its energy. There’s an understanding of New York’s magnetic sway, a kind of excitement inherent when Henri Devereaux, the French filmmaker who becomes the patsy in Charnier’s plan, reveals upon arriving in the city by ship with the car he doesn’t know is loaded with dope that it’s his first time in New York. And when he goes to retrieve the vehicle after it is seized in a botched arrest of car thieves by an increasingly zealous Doyle, Russo says “well, that’s New York” after Devereaux says even though he had heard that vehicles are towed by the hundreds in the city, he still can’t believe it happened to him. In other words, Devereaux has payed some of those New York dues. He will soon pay a whole lot more of them. Charnier—it’s unclear if he’s been to the city before—is also shown dining like a king on vacation. Outside of the restaurant where he is having a meal of meals is Doyle and Russo.
The French Connection is ultimately about the chase. Its target is always just out of Doyle’s grasp. The most famous chase is, of course, Doyle chasing a subway through Brooklyn by car. While it remains a thrilling piece of filmmaking, the pursuit on foot of Charnier by Doyle through the Upper West Side down to the shuttle at Grand Central is even more satisfying.
If there is an argument to be made that The French Connection is the most electrifying movie made in and about New York, the seven-and-a-half minutes of Doyle and Charnier cat-and-mousing through the city just about seals the deal.
It is almost dialogue free. As Doyle prowls around the Westbury Hotel at 69th and Madison—now a condominium—there are the sounds of the city. The wind, car horns, feet pounding the pavement. Charnier’s exit from the hotel is announced by a brief blast of muted trumpets. Charnier makes like a tourist—looking in shops, taking in his surroundings. Doyle realizes Charnier has slipped free of the feds surveilling the hotel. As the target gets further away, Doyle starts to jog. Soon, a string quartet plays a theme that had appeared earlier during Doyle and Russo’s late-night-into-morning tail by car of Boca and his wife. This piece of music is the heart of Don Ellis’ score for the movie.
During a 2016 conversation with screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie, Friedkin, a jazz and classical lover, mentioned that he was a regular at Ellis’ long-standing Monday night rehearsal gig at Nucleus Nuance, a club in Los Angeles. Struck by the sheer daring nature of his music, he asked if Ellis would write the music for The French Connection.
By this time, Ellis’ music had become even more expansive. He added a string quartet. The trumpeter would often jump on a drum kit for what he called a “drum soli” during which each percussionist—in addition to Ellis, drummers Ralph Humphrey and Ron Dunn and conquero Lee Pastora—improvised in turn. Tears of Joy, recorded over four nights at San Francisco’s Basin Street West in May 1971, documents this turn.
A ballad of deep feeling like ‘Loss’ balances against horn writing on band member Sam Falzone’s ‘Get It Together’ straight out of Blood, Sweat & Tears as well as frenetic pieces like ‘Bulgarian Bride’ and ‘How’s This for Openers?’ Tears of Joy is mind-bending. Brain-scrambling music.
What Ellis wrote for The French Connection is more conventional but still far removed from what was still, in 1971, traditional film scoring. The short fanfare at the beginning of it, sounding like a slightly off-pitch siren, is in line with how the movie throws the viewer right into the story. The end music is mystic and uncertain as Doyle’s obsession turns deadly while Charnier vanishes into thin air once the police bust their men after the handoff of the heroin to Boca and associates, and the cash to Charnier on Wards Island.
What sticks most from Ellis’ score—only about half of the music he wrote was ultimately used—is the version of the chase music theme as Doyle tracks Charnier to Grand Central. The four-note motif grows in intensity and volume, reflecting Doyle’s growing mania. Hackman turns from a guy minding his business on Madison to a guy possessed by an urgency beyond words as weaves around the crowd to hop onto the shuttle to Times Square. Charnier’s taunting taps of the top of his umbrella, first real than seemingly imagined by Doyle, are integrated into the music as are the sounds of the city, creating, in its own way, a celebration of the urban grit of New York.
Ellis would record the theme for his final release of Columbia, Connection. With its layering of electronic effects, it only echoes the throbbing impact of the version cut for The French Connection but is a valuable artefact nonetheless as a soundtrack for the movie was only released long after it swept the 1972 Academy Awards. It is now, sadly, out of print and also unavailable for streaming.
No matter. The best way to hear it is to watch The French Connection and appreciate the intersection of genius that beat within Ellis and Hackman (and so many others associated with the movie) and continues to beat in New York.
Don Ellis was such a a treasure. Even people who have no idea who he is have heard hours of music he influenced.
"Electric Bath" is probably the most avant-garde jazz album I have ever heard. Ellis makes Dave Brubeck's experiments with alternate time signatures seem tame by comparison.
And, of course, RIP to Mr. Gene Hackman. All the various tributes to and profiles of him in the weeks since his death proves that Hollywood lost something special when he quit acting.