For the Alazraki puzzle print of “Father of the Bride,” now airing on HBO Max, the beloved classic about a daughter’s impending wedding day has been reimagined with some twists — it moved from Connecticut to Miami, and from a white family to a wealthy Cuban-led American brood Andy Garcia and Gloria Estefan, Adria Arjona’s parents. Diego Bonita portrays the groom, a lawyer from a Mexican family.
For the result, Al-Azraki turned to composer Terence Blanchard, whose works include “Mo Better Blues”, “Da 5 Bloods” and “BlacKkKlansman”. As heard on the track “Saving Wedding Montage” (listen above), Blanchard gave his own update – a score with his own jazz sound.
With the film showing in Miami, how did you approach the outcome?
When I first read the script, I was wondering if they wanted me to do a Latin score because the movie features some great Latin artists. But that’s not what Jazz wanted. He wanted a jazz score to counter what he had already put into the movie.
When you say jazz, it can mean a whole bunch of things, so it took us a minute to downplay what he was looking for. He threw some names like Charlie Christian, the American jazz bassist, and that’s completely non-directional.
I’ve also written a few different styles for the movie, and once we had it, it was all about finding great musicians who could bring the score to life.
What conversations did you have about how to score points in the movie?
I worked with a music producer and talked to him about ideas for musicians who would play in an orchestra. It was really about finding the right tone. We discussed it scene after scene. Drama recording is something I can do in my sleep. I might have been conceived when my mom was watching drama, but comedy is scary because you don’t want to spoil a joke. Jazz came to New Orleans to sit backstage. It was the first time someone in the room while I was writing and playing with jazz was saying, “Like this more.”
Were there comics tools that you used?
We seriously played comedy musically. If you look at Andy’s character, Billy, she is very conservative and traditional. He happens to love jazz. So the trick was not to turn on the comedy but to make this music indicate who this guy is. Through this lens, you can get the juxtaposition of these other characters. There was no need to play comedy there, especially with the daughter because she is the most sympathetic character in the entire movie.
If we tried to play comedy in the score, I feel like it would have ruined it. The whole movie got to that moment where Andy Bailey’s character turns around and says, “This isn’t the wedding I wanted.” So the music had to stay in his world.
Do the characters have decorations and signs?
There were specific topics. Billy had his subject. There was one for his wife [Ingrid]. When you write the music and start working on the scene, it goes a lot further as those musical personalities get into the plan.
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