You often have one song coming from one window another coming from another

You often have one song coming from one window, another coming from another – opera, rock’n'roll, Frank Sinatra.” It was the music the characters might have been listening to as they lived their daily lives, and in Mean Streets that meant a treasury of music cues, ranging from the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the Shirelles’ “I Met Him on a Sunday” to snatches of opera and Scorsese’s all-time favourite, when Harvey Keitel rests his head on a pillow and the pillow seems to vibrate with the Ronettes doing Phil Spector’s “Be My Baby”.If you play that rush of sound against life (or a moving image), then it seems to say, “Here comes something great”. It is the phenomenon that has sometimes been known as “jukebox music”. What he meant by that was the kind of music that might have been playing in the places where films were set. As film fan/scholar, Scorsese treasured the contributions composer Bernard Herrmann had made over the years to the work of Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons) and Fran?s Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451, The Bride Wore Black).Until this point, Scorsese had specialised in assembled scores. Yet, there’s at least one very famous example of that, and it’s worth remarking on. He even made an old-fashioned musical once – or a film in which the two lovers were characterised above all in their attitudes to music, as much as in the music they played. (I’ll come to that later for New York, New York is one of his most neglected great achievements.)So it’s remarkable that a great many Scorsese films do not have specially written scores, and may not even have a “music by” credit.

In 1987, he directed the music video for Michael Jackson’s single, “Bad”. In 1978, at the Winterland ballroom in San Francisco, he made a film of the “farewell” concert by old Dylan associates The Band in The Last Waltz, with guest stars that included Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Neil Young and many others. Only a few years ago, he was part of a team that did a series of documentaries on the blues. (The film contains vast tracts of unseen footage of the singer in the period leading to his strange apotheosis in 1966, including the notorious “Judas!” moment at Manchester Free Hall – an episode that instantly entered pop lore and will be changed forever as an idea once it has been cast in celluloid and seen by the rest of us for the first time.) But Scorsese’s filmography shows a nearly constant interest in music.Long ago, in 1970, when he was teaching film at New York University, he worked as an assistant director and an editor on that landmark concert film, Woodstock. He’s like a poet talking about love who knows the 3,787,411 previous citations of the word

But there’s more. Anyone who knows Scorsese says he also listens to music all the time – pop, rock, opera, classical. He is always searching for that moment when music and a scene will alter the nature of material, like gasoline plus a match.

I take that example because one of his favourite scenes is a car that bursts out in an explosion (think of Robert De Niro’s car in Casino), and he can do it to something from Phil Spector or a little snatch of Verdi.
This is a way of alerting you to a reportedly stunning two-part documentary on the life and work of Bob Dylan made by Scorsese for HBO and about to appear on the BBC’s Arena strand. According to nearly every story written about Martin Scorsese, he does two things in life, and only two: he is either engaged in making movies; or he is watching movies from his enormous private collection with the kind of respect that believes everything you do on every new movie is only a re-making of a living tradition. Instead, each song is pushed along by a vigorously strummed acoustic guitar or intricately plucked ukulele, and fleshed out by battered brass, wheezing accordion or the cheapest of children’s Casio keyboards.A different approach to live music is always welcome, and an escape from the decades-old dictates of electric guitar and bass – and drums, especially so.. But most gratifying is the way they create vibrant, driven music without a drummer or drum machine marking out time in the background. They change instruments with every song, drawing on sax, melodica, flugel horn, accordion, and so on. The Marseille Figs, who have journeyed from Berlin, Barcelona and Hackney to play for us tonight, tear straight into “Me and My Monkey” which, despite the fact that they’re a three-piece, manages to sound like a rock epic.
The band are an intriguing mix of very old-school skiffle, bluegrass and jazz, with slightly less old-school post-punk. Amanda, the evening’s vaudevillian host, informs us that the support band is two Polish guys she’s just met on the street.