“American Fiction” Composer Laura Karpman Ups the Score for TIFF People’s Choice Award Winner – Sound & Film

If you compose music for a character named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in the film American fictionIt should be pretty obvious where a composer like Laura Karpman finds her inspiration.

“They wanted the music to sound like Beethoven, but I thought I’d take a different approach,” Karpman joked during Deadline’s live music event “Sound & Screen: Film,” before getting serious about how the jazz- greatness himself was part of the process film, which won the Toronto Film Festival’s Oscar Bellwether People’s Choice Award in September and is in theaters next month.

“It had to be influenced by Monk,” Karpman said of the score for writer-director Cord Jefferson’s first feature. “There were a few repeats. I thought maybe I should just get the 10 inch model of Monk [LP] and arrange it. It became something.”

The film from Orion, MRC, T-Street, Almost Infinite and 3 Arts stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, a frustrated novelist fed up with the enterprise of profiting from “black” entertainment that relies on tired tropes. To prove his point, he himself writes a bizarre “black” book under a pseudonym, which becomes a bestseller and spawns a film adaptation.

Karpman was commissioned to create the jazzy film score. When she went to boarding school outside Boston, she took the bus to the city where “everyone was on tour”. “I heard all the greats of jazz,” she told the audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

“The association of jazz with film music and concert music has a long history – it’s not that unusual,” said Karpman. “It’s great to have the opportunity to bring them together.”

American fiction Also starring Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Keith David, Issa Rae and Sterling K. Brown.

Come back on Monday for the panel video.