A James Ellroy Playlist: Death of a Composer

In the following post I am going to look at how James Ellroy portrays both real-life and fictional composers in his writing. Buckle up for some tales of talent and tragedy…

Requiem for Danny

The Big Nowhere contains many musical references. Towards the end of the novel, the dying Dr Saul Lesnick is being interrogated by Buzz Meeks about his patient, the recently deceased jazz musician Coleman Healy. Through his description of Coleman’s music, the reader gets a glimpse of how Ellroy might compose. Healy had been working on a piece titled “The Big Nowhere”, the same title as Ellroy’s novel:

Coleman was fighting his urges inchoately, with music. He was working on a long solo piece filled with eerie silences to signify lies and duplicities. The riffs would spotlight the unique high sounds he got with his sax, loud at first, then getting softer, with longer intervals of silence. The piece would end on a scale of diminishing notes, then unbroken quiet – which Coleman saw as being louder than any noise he could produce. He wanted to call his composition The Big Nowhere.

With such an aura of death hanging over these characters, it’s not surprising that Ellroy views music as elegiac. But this can be both solemn and exhilarating, as expressed in the stark high and low sounds that Coleman, a killer himself, produces with his sax. However, Coleman’s Big Nowhere is forever unfinished and deliberately meaningless. Ellroy’s sense of music is more closely tied to a narrative: crime fiction resolves mysteries and answers questions. Of course, the meaninglessness itself might be the answer, as Ellroy views Coleman’s murderous personality to be devoid of morality, empathy and ultimately just empty.

Jean-Louis Marchand and Delphine Baudet composed the album Requiem for Danny based on The Big Nowhere. In November 2019, while Ellroy was touring France, Marchand and Baudet pulled off a major coup when Ellroy agreed to read from the novel while the orchestra was performing Requiem for Danny onstage. Marchand and Baudet captured the brilliance of Ellroy’s prose and, at times, the bleakness of Coleman’s existence.

The track below is titled ‘Suicide’ and concerns the death scene of Danny Upshaw. Once again, music and death merge seamlessly in Ellroy’s world. May the Blues Sing Thee to Thy Rest…

Uptown Blues

In an essay titled ‘Ellroy’s History – Then and Now’ Ellroy describes the setting of his novel Perfidia, ‘rogue cops screw movie stars. Jimmie Lunceford is gigging at the Trocadero. Dig his eerie “Uptown Blues”‘. Ellroy had previously spoken of his love for Jimmie Lunceford’s music and “Uptown Blues” in particular on the BBC Radio 4 programme Inheritance Tracks. The concept of the show is that the guest picks one track they inherited from their parents and one track they want their children, loved ones or future generations to inherit from them.

Ellroy speaks knowledgeably about both the creative and technical aspects of the music which makes “Uptown Blues” such a powerful piece, ‘It has a haunting alto sax solo by Willie Smith, a haunting trumpet solo, and it’s almost a primer on the quiet elegiac mournful power of the Blues’

Ellroy chose “Uptown Blues” as the piece he hoped the children of his then partner would inherit from him. Lunceford died of a heart attack, shortly before a scheduled performance at The Bungalow Dance Hall in Seaside, Oregon. He was only 45. ‘He had a bum ticker’ Ellroy rued in Inheritance Tracks.

The composer dies. His music lives on.

Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is available to pre-order from Bloomsbury. You can also pre-order a copy from all good booksellers.