ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how scores combine a jazz idiom with the avant-garde music of the time and how this combination operates within the context of action thrillers of the late 1960s and 1970s. The action and suspense thriller genre is a difficult one to delineate. The chapter limits the analyses to music in one type of scene, which unambiguously belongs to both: the chase scene. Music of immediacy has no metaphorical purpose beyond the basic characteristics associated with the specific musical style or genre. Bullitt established a high benchmark for subsequent car chases in action thrillers made in the 1970s. The changing approach of music for action thrillers reflects the drastically changing mood in the United States from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. The sequences convey the characteristics of music of immediacy, some in the basic mode, some focalized and one being deployed in an ethical mode.
