It may not be Mark Isham’s best score, says Selwyn Harris, but Isham’s music for director Wayne Kramer’s film The Cooler, influenced by the rat pack era, has a strong jazz feel, with songs by Diana Krall and Tierney Sutton and a big band featuring drummer Peter Erskine.

By Hollywood standards, Mark Isham has truly arrived. In a career that now spans over two decades, the New York-born trumpeter has recently established his place on the film composers’ A-list. Last year Isham wrote the score for the Oscar winning Crash and recently supplied the music for the James Ellroy-adapted thriller Black Dahlia.

Yet with his prolific run of film work since the 1990s, Isham’s career as a jazz artist has had to take a backseat. His sporadic recordings as a jazz trumpeter and composer, however, shouldn’t be overlooked. Cutting some excellent records for ECM with Art Lande in the 1970s and 80s, Isham is also known for contributing to the work of creative rock artists such as Van Morrison and David Sylvian that’s besides leading bands in various projects that have shifted between ambient electronica and acoustic jazz and owe a large debt to Miles Davis. On these, Isham shows an acute awareness of space combined with wistful trumpet melodies that often make for a chilled kind of jazz that’s stimulating rather than mind numbing. He has carried this very effectively into the cinema.

Although his most recent score for the extremely disappointing Black Dahlia also contains his familiar detached-jazz trumpet, it’s in the field of independent, low-budget cinema that Isham has had the rare opportunity to make film music that requires real jazz musicians. This is most apparent in the romantic drama Afterglow (1997) which heavily featured the improvisations of saxophonist Charles Lloyd and more recently in director Wayne Kramer’s debut The Cooler (2003).

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