Branford Marsalis - Rustin (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)

In Rustin, George C. Wolfe and Colman Domingo recount how one man helped make a movement. The biopic — which features a script from Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black — traces the life and work of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a gay Black man and a key architect of the 1963 March on Washington.

The emotional thrum that underscores Rustin’s triumphs and challenges amid one of the country’s most significant moments in history, is captured through Grammy-winning jazz and classic artist and composer Branford Marsalis’ score. Captured in multiple cities — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charlotte and New Orleans — the soundtrack was recorded digitally, then mixed to analog 2-track before being mastered digitally.

That includes the track “Show Me Your Ideas,” one of the score’s more energetic contributions. The song seemingly captures the initial rhythm of an idea and the eventual buzz of collaboration. It was, according to Marsalis, the byproduct of a scene that required he “create a sound that delivered enthusiasm sonically.”

“There are plenty of versions of that in the 60s. Blue Note Records required most of the musicians they hired to record to have at least one funky blues song on their records,” he continues. “Listening to Blue Note records by Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock to name a few, gave me a great sonic template to create the sound that we felt best fit the scene.”

The track’s big band approach helps it fluctuate between a single and collective sound — something that speaks to the larger reality of Rustin’s work within the Civil Rights Movement. A singular activist could conceive of a particular initiative or effort, but to carry it out on the scale necessary to create change, they’d need to eventually be open to and rely on others.

“Much of what I write has roots in the music that I’ve listened to. This is kind of an old R&B way of writing: start with the bass, then the drums, then the other instruments,” Marsalis says. “One version of this style — off the top of my head — is Herbie Hancock’s song ‘Chameleon.’ I didn’t think of it as a metaphor, but I was mindful of the fact that the scene starts with Bayard speaking alone, and gradually more and more of the students participate in the dialogue.”

Marsalis says much of the soundtrack, including “Show Me Your Ideas,” was inspired by Wolfe’s own music interests as a fan of blues, and its variations — jazz, gospel and R&B, to name a few. But it’s that big band sound — “brass (trumpets and trombones), as well as woodwinds (five-piece saxophone section)” — that most effectively captures the emotion of the sequence it soundtracks.

Wolfe would play a significant part in shaping the entire soundtrack’s sound, down to decisions around when to feature one instrument more heavily than others or playing with the singular instrument versus a chorus of them. “The cues with singular instruments were written with a full rhythm section or orchestral accompaniment,” Marsalis explains. “George felt scene[s were] more effective with those elements removed.”

In a press statement shared ahead of the film’s release, Wolfe describes how pivotal music was to his understanding of the activist, humanitarian and more.

“The one event in Bayard’s life that to this day causes me to quizzically, giddily shout to myself, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ is that in between fighting to save the soul of his country, he managed to find time to record an album entitled Elizabethan Songs and Negro Spirituals, which in point of fact, featured
the Bayard Rustin singing in that crystalline tenor of his, both Elizabethan songs and Negro Spirituals,” he said.

“The reason this piece of vinyl thrills me to no end is because it brilliantly captures the expansive view he had of himself and his place in the world, or should I say worlds, which existed in joyful defiance of other people’s limited view of who he was, where he belonged, and what he should desire,” he continued. “And it is for this reason, among a myriad of others, that Black-queer-Quaker Bayard Taylor Rustin is to my mind, the ultimate American.”

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