Soundtrack

Blessed with the most wonderful birth name in American music, Thelonious Sphere Monk was one of the 20th century’s great artists of the piano and one of its enduring composers of jazz. He only ever recorded one film score, for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a semi-scandalous French adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel (later adapted as Dangerous Liasons and Cruel Intentions) directed by Roger Vadim. The film—which is also known as Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960, despite being released in 1959—came in the midst of a vogue for mood-setting jazz scoring in French film that started with Miles Davis’ groundbreaking music for Elevator To The Gallows, and continued with Art Blakey’s score for The Road To Shame, the French-Algerian pianist Martial Solal’s work on Breathless and Two Men In Manhattan, and the soundtrack for Les Tricheurs, which featured contributions from Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Coleman Hawkins, and Stan Getz.