JOSEPH LODUCA

October 20, 2010 | By

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There are a number of things that distinguish TNT’s hit TV series Leverage within the caper genre – witty characters, snappy dialogue, plus a careful balance of comedic and dramatic elements – but another key ingredient is the driving, jazz/funk music which composer Joseph LoDuca created, capturing the essence of vintage seventies fusion scores.

LoDuca has tackled the caper genre before – Josh Becker’s tight little heist thriller Running Time(1997) – but the film’s budget and the filmmakers’ evocation of a live teleplay downplayed the use of music to a handful of cues.

As Season 3 is being prepped for production, LoDuca’s beautiful jazz/funk music is now available on CD, and the lengthy album of themes and dramatic cuts will please genre fans, as well as those already familiar with his fine work in film and television.

Best-known for scoring Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films, perhaps LoDuca’s finest film work lies in the rich score he composed for Christophe Gans’ 2001 genre-bender, Brotherhood of the Wolf / Le pacte des loups.

His work in TV has also earned him multiple Emmy nominations and wins (Xena: Warrior Princess, and Legend of the Seeker), and he’s been involved with some memorable productions, including the cult TV series American Gothic (1995-1996).

Leverage is equally special, and in our lengthy discussion, LoDuca describes how he crafted the heavily funkafied sound for one of the best shows on TV right now.

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Mark R. Hasan: I didn’t know that your background is rooted in jazz.

Joseph LoDuca: Yes. When you grow up in Detroit, it’s inescapable.

MRH: Lalo Schifrin and Quincy Jones are known for bringing their own funky jazz sound to film music. Was it easy for you to write in that style?

JLD: I guess really I wasn’t referring so much to them, as the fact that somewhere in the seventies the idea of throwing in jazz-influenced funk became a great way to underscore capers of any kind. It was more that precedent, and I supposed that if truth be told, I was listening more to Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis than I was to Lalo Schifrin and Quincy Jones.

MRH: Schifrin tended to focus more on crime dramas, whereas in the case of Jones, he ended up scoring more caper films, including The Split (1968), The Italian Job (1969), $ (Dollars) and The Anderson Tapes (both 1971), The Hot Rock (1972).

JLD: I think you’re right. It became such a definable template. I think the whole idea with working on Leverage is we want the viewer in on the caper, on the inside from the moment we start the show off, so to use this kind of music was just a great way to do that, and it was just a fun and entertaining.

When Dean Devlin, our producer, approached me on the project, they wanted some music that they could cut to, and it turned out that I’d kind of done this music before, so that music is still part of the mainstay of Leverage; some of those main ideas are really things that I had created in the past, so it was an easy fit.

MRH: Are you familiar at all with some of the Italian composers of the seventies, because I found that ‘the caper sound’ crossed the ocean, carrying to Europe some of Jones’ and Schifrin’s recognizable sounds. The Italians, for example, seemed to emphasize solos and improvs, and fixated on keyboards and organ.

JLD: I wasn’t too aware of it at the time. You know, it became pop music; it was very lightly influenced by jazz, but it was more really influenced by pop music. To me, those are sort of ‘the Morricone Lost Years,’ those small ensembles with the cheesy organ.

I’m not as enamored with that music, but once again, it definitely struck a chord, and with film music, boy, you’re really trying to draw an audience in an immediate kind of way, so it’s fair game. I’m not surprised that it was kind of widespread in the world.

MRH: Part of that music style is really anchored to these driving rhythms around which you can build almost any kind of ornamentation. Is it hard to create different rhythms, or do you find the scenes in Leverage help you figure out what works, as well as what specific instruments to use for specific types of suspense scenes?

JLD: I think you’ve hit upon something. The approach is rhythmic because the whole idea is you’re trying to lay a groundwork for ‘the caper’ and how you’re going to pull it off, so you need ‘a motor,’ and the motor in this case ends up being some sort of funk rhythm.

As a matter of fact, if you’ve noticed by listening to the music of Leverage, there’s a distinct absence of soloing, and there’s really simply one reason for that, and that’s Dean doesn’t like to hear it.

Anytime I would play a solo that would go on for a couple of bars, the comment would be ‘No, it’s too noir.’ I guess the idea is that maybe the reference to the past is either too overt or is attracting too much attention, or that if you can keep the rhythms in the forefront, you can really have extended sequences with some complex machinations and cutbacks and switcheroos happening, and you’re able to absorb that visually better, I suppose, so it’s the interaction between the two.

‘Is it difficult to come up with rhythms when it’s all you have?’ [My] answer is No. It’s a lot harder for me to orchestrate for a 100-piece orchestra and making sure that the counterpoint remains intact and all the woodwinds are in their proper place – it’s a lot more detail – whereas this is really just about keeping the rhythmic feeling going, which I don’t think is particularly difficult.

That’s what’s so great about it. It’s just easy: you lock onto a groove [and] as long as it encapsulates the mood of the scene, you’re half-way there.

MRH: In caper films, the music score was always about supporting ongoing action, but it seems to be that since the eighties and nineties, that style of funky writing is also written around snappy dialogue. I think you even mention it in the CD liner notes that dialogue is like scat improv vocals.

JLD: There’s not a lot of montages. In Leverage, we don’t have that luxury. It isn’t the situation where I have a minute or minute and a half long montage to do anything. It’s all really carpet for what goes over the top, and that’s what it is; you accept it. You really just usually have a blast or two to punctuate the end of a scene, or change of location or a dramatic change in the direction of the plot.

MRH: I just find that instead of the music being restricted to what used to be traditional montages, now it’s part of many dramatic scenes. Each cue compliments the next cue and furthers whatever dramatic ideas are being pushed by the actors. I think that style is more involved now than it was before.

JLD: And really, we’re discussing television here, too. The idea of doing extended visual sequences is really something that tends to happen more in movies, although I’m working on a series now that has a lot of great opportunities for extended montages with music, so it just depends.

MRH: For the Leverage soundtrack album, were the cues expanded for the CD, or are those the actual cue lengths in the series?

JLD: It’s a combination of both. As I mentioned, some of the music actually had existed before and became a very identifiable part of Leverage, [whereas] the majority I think comes from specific scenes, but the music is retooled a lot in Leverage. Any one of those cues could take on ten or twelve different versions throughout the season because some of them have been so identified with a situation.

This is once again something that Dean has made a really interesting decision on, and a good decision: the format…When the heroes are on top and have successfully either foiled the bad guy or are really in high gear on the move in their caper, there’s a theme for that; this is going to be the same from week to week, and I think it’s a way of once again making it that much more fun for the viewer to participate.

MRH: For the Leverage soundtrack album, were the cues expanded for the CD, or are those the actual cue lengths in the series?

JLD: It’s a combination of both. As I mentioned, some of the music actually had existed before and became a very identifiable part of Leverage, [whereas] the majority I think comes from specific scenes, but the music is retooled a lot in Leverage. Any one of those cues could take on ten or twelve different versions throughout the season because some of them have been so identified with a situation.

This is once again something that Dean has made a really interesting decision on, and a good decision: the format…When the heroes are on top and have successfully either foiled the bad guy or are really in high gear on the move in their caper, there’s a theme for that; this is going to be the same from week to week, and I think it’s a way of once again making it that much more fun for the viewer to participate.

MRH: What’s it like working with Dean Devlin, because he’s got this hugely successful feature film career behind him – Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Patriot (2000) – and I don’t know if this is his first foray into television series?

JLD: It’s not, and I was fortunate to start working with Dean when he started his foray into television, which was on the first of the three Librarian telefilms that he did for TNT [The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004), The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines (2006), and The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008)] as well as a few other projects that we worked on together.

I think he would say that he’s found television very interesting because it’s very immediate; you have an idea, and you can run with it. Sometimes the developmental stages, like trying to get a feature film off the ground, can be very challenging, and film years are not like TV years, so I think he really enjoys the immediacy of that. I certainly do.

Because he’s a creative producer, television really is the medium of the creative producer as opposed to film. In film, he’s very much an anomaly, much like great producers of the past. I think that’s really the difference: he’s very involved, he’s a huge music fan (which is also great), and he has a tremendous eye for detail.

MRH: Was it difficult to come up with fresh music for Leverage’s second season, or were there specific things you knew you had to retain?

JLD: To be honest, having worked on many long-running series, the development of the music parallels what the writers are going to do for us, so it’s going to be as challenging as the writers make it for us, because we’re the musical storytellers in our roles as composers.

In Season 2, it was interesting as we had an episode take place entirely in an Irish pub, so that defined the setting in the music in that episode. We had one job that took place during an Italian wedding. Those types of things make it interesting, and we have these little excursions of combining the genre music with the caper music with the ethnic idiom that we’re in.

MRH: I think some of that it reflected on the CD. There are some cues with interesting instrumentation. The Irish stuff is on their as well.

JLD: Yeah, because it was fun. It was quite a diversion, and it’s sort of complete in and of itself. Some of those things were actually used just as source music; some of them were source / score, used to do both background music [and] also play during dramatic situations. I think they were worth putting on the CD just because they were so different.

The idea was to just give an overview of the show and choose some interesting bits that compliment each other. I don’t know if it was more of a schizophrenic attempt that way, but I just wanted to pick some of what I thought was interesting.

MRH: My next-to-last question is just about another show you worked on and has always been one of my favourites, which is American Gothic (1995-1996).

JLD: Oh! Wow!

MRH: I sometimes have a tendency to get hooked on shows that don’t last because they’re perhaps too risky for the networks to fully support, and I always liked the fact that American Gothic gave you some striking opportunities to score situations with really odd characters.

JLD: You’re right. It was, and I’m glad that you noticed. I think the show unfortunately was ahead of its time. It was a show that was really destined to be what was in the emerging cable network, but it ended up in what was then the number four network, CBS, on a Friday night at 10pm. And the subject matter was certainly controversial for that time. What was great is [I had] Christian western music combined with southern music combined with the devil worship music. It was quite an interesting blend.

MRH: The show also had some wonderful characters that made it easy to write strong music around because whether it was the sheriff or whether it was the doctor or the love interest, they were all really strong characters.

JLD: Yeah, they were strong characters in strong situations; dramatically, very intense situations. Some of them were human situations, some of them were supernatural situations. It was a very intense show. It was a lot of work.

MRH: I remember when they broadcast the pilot, they issued a warning saying it might be too intense for some people. As a viewer, it was interesting to see how dark the show could become. Some episodes were really shocking.

JLD: Oh, it really was, and that was Shaun Cassidy’s baby. It was a great show to be on. I’ve been fortunate because a lot of the dramatic shows that I’ve worked on have had a lot of meat to them, and have had a lot of meat to the music as a result.

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KQEK.com would like to thank Joseph LoDuca for his time, and Beth Krakower at CineMedia Promotions for facilitating this interview.

Visit the composer’s website HERE.

Visit the official Leverage website HERE.

All images remain the property of their copyright holders.

This article and interview © 2010 by Mark R. Hasan

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Related external links (MAIN SITE):

CD:  Leverage, Seasons 1 and 2 (2008)

DVD/Film:  Brotherhood of the Wolf / Le pactes des loups (2001) —  Leverage, Season 1 (2008)

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