Auto Jazz: Barney Wilen and the expanded soundtrack

This article offers a close analysis of the 1968 ‘soundtrack’ LP Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini (MPS) by the French saxophone player Barney Wilen. The theme of the LP is Italian racing driver Lorenzo Bandini’s death in a motor racing accident at the Grand Prix Automobile de Monaco in 1967. The article also discusses the visual dimension of the work; image materials were originally to have been presented with the recording to make Auto Jazz a multi-media experience. We tend to associate the late 1960s with revolutionary jazz, free jazz and experiments with jazz form and Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini is certainly ‘far out’. Jazz music at this time took on revolutionary tendencies both aurally and ideologically. However, it is not the politics of such countercultural acts that the recording expresses but rather (as a unique soundscape with elements of musique concrète) the emotional impact of a tragic real-life event through organized sound. The article examines the context for the LP: the development of ‘new wave’ cinema and use of jazz in this form, the concurrent revolution in modern jazz and contemporary experimental music and the form of ‘expanded cinema’ () that Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini was conceived to a contribution to.