David Schroeder

NYU Steinhardt Jazz Studies Director

In an email to the Wire, Schroeder characterized himself as a "purist who believes that soundtracks should match the periods that films are attempting to capture." He added: "There is a fine line between modernizing a classic novel and separating the period music that gives the audience a more accurate representation and feeling of the times. Can you imagine, for example, using soundtracks by Jay-Z, Q Tip or GoonRock to underscore Schindler's List?" Plus, in his opinion, the artists that were playing during the 20s and 30s were "just as outrageous, shocking and cutting edge as the modern day artists chosen for the Gatsby soundtrack."

Art Gottschalk

Professor of Composition and Theory at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University

Gottschalk had some words for Luhrmann. In an email to the Wire, he explained that he finds Luhrmann's use of pop "disingenuous at best and jejeune at worst." He elaborated: "Disingenuous because film-makers often use hit music of the day to attract a secondary audience to their films, or to create an au courant perception to a subject that they are afraid may be of little interest to a popcorn-buying young public. Jejeune because his use of pop music seems to imply a sort of superiority inherent to the music that he (or his alter ego, Jay-Z, in this case) selects, as if saying that this music speaks more to the emotional and dramatic arc of the story than, perhaps, the period music might." (In a follow-up phone conversation, he said he thought the will.i.am song "sounded like somebody that doesn't know period-era jazz making stereotypical sounds and trying to pass it off.")

But Gottschalk also explained how Luhrmann basically has the wrong idea when it comes to Fitzgerald's use of music in his text. Fitzgerald is not referencing "African-American street music." Instead: "All the musical references provided in The Great Gatsby are to vaudeville type numbers popularized by such artists as Al Jolson, and written by well-trained Tin Pan Alley types like Gus Kahn. But even the hot dance bands of the period, such as Fletcher Henderson and Bix Beiderbecke, were composed of virtuoso musicians and were decidedly NOT of 'the street.' The social level portrayed in Gatsby was familiar with black music of the time primarily through white entertainers who pretended to bring such music to them in a socially acceptable form, such as Jolson's black-faced performances. I fail to see how anything that Luhrmann or his musical collaborators did sheds any light on this fact."

Tommy Kay

Jazz Musician

Kay, a jazz guitarist based in Los Angeles, came out in the soundtrack's defense—to a certain extent. In a phone conversation he told us that, for him, the Gatsby era is epitomized by George Gershwin's chord progressions in the song "I Got Rhythm." He thought there were a couple of songs on the soundtrack that "really utilized that," and cited will.i.am's "Bang Bang" and Bryan Ferry's "Love Is The Drug." As for will.i.am's contribution, Kay said: "He really made an effort to have it be thematically and musically relevant to that era and I thought that was a actually cool." And the soundtrack as a whole? Kay thinks you can make the case for it, since jazz was the pop music of its day. On the other hand, he said that there's no sense of improvisation, another element that makes jazz, well, jazz.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.