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I've always harbored a love/hate relationship with jazz: loving it for its passion but hating it for its oftentimes vulgar incomprehensibility. This is how I feel about New York City, and I've wandered through this place since the day I was born. Beauty and grace, form and unity, run a rapid existence with that of depravity and chaos.

Jazz bears a frequent and stereotypical association with late nights in smoke-laden saloons and similar retreats: cheap wine, cheap women and even cheaper songs pouring through the apathy and despair; a microcosm for the macrocosm of big city life. (O'Neill's THE ICEMAN COMETH, for instance.) It's no wonder that jazz found a place here in its evolutionary path and dubbed it the BIG APPLE. The genius of Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter,...(all jazz-influenced) painted NYC in all its mythic charm and brilliance; however, the sordid underpinnings were always here.

John Barry's score to MIDNIGHT COWBOY uses jazz in his title "Fun City" as irony, underscoring the promise of a city that descends into disappointment. Elmer Bernstein's score to THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM uses it in full force to portray the film's subject matter of drug addiction. But it's Bernard Herrmann's TAXI DRIVER score that is one of the most ironic, forceful and unrelenting portrayals of New York City at its very worst.

The character Travis Bickle (Robert DiNiro) is described, via saxophone, as a lone voice wailing in a widerness of impending doom. The passages we hear on the sax, hearken back to an earlier time but re-emerge in savage distortment: strained by contrapuntal orchestrations that become screams in the night.

Travis Bickle is, of course, totally insane (even by NYC standards); his frustration driving him to his mission. He becomes a self-appointed saviour, out to deliver us all from the scum and debris that plague our daily endeavors. This "heroic guy" is as sleazy, as corrupt and as anarchistic as the enemy he's out to rid the town of...and proves it; but we seem to cheer him on!

What better way to paint a character like Bickle but with jazz? He embodies all our screams in the mind's darkness that are suppressed in the light. He could be at once loved and hated, accepted and rejected,...as with jazz and other incomprehensible polarities. Oh, by the way, I've been rumored to play jazz myself...it may be only a rumor but someone's always "talking to me" about it when I play piano.