Jazz and the movies have a shared history stretching back almost a hundred years. The relationship came into its own in the US in the mid twentieth century. Elia Kazan's 1950 movie Panic In The Streets is an early example of how film makers used jazz-based soundtracks to enhance drama and atmosphere and create ambiances of social or magical realism.

As the 1950s wore on, television joined the party. On big and small screens, jazz became the go-to genre for projects dealing with crime, sex and drugs—bop and hard bop had become perceived by conservative society as synonymous with irresponsible demi-monde pleasure seeking, at best, and outright moral depravity, at worst. The double whammy of white racism and a cultural establishment still in thrall to European notions of art played a significant role here.

Only when rock 'n' roll gave way to rock in the mid 1960s did film makers stop regarding jazz as the touchstone of progressive culture. Great movies and great television using jazz soundtracks continued to be made, but rock now carried the swing.

Jazz soundtracks need to be approached differently than regular jazz albums. Jazz for film tends, in general, to be light on extended improvisation. But it is strong on atmosphere, good tunes and rhythm. Most soundtracks include tracks lasting less than a minute and few last much longer than five minutes. But the combination only sounds bitty if you are unprepared for it. (Additionally, some soundtracks suffer when divorced from the visuals, though this is not true of any of the albums listed below). If you accept all this, and are tolerant of instances of orchestral sweetening and heightened atmospherics sometimes verging on melodrama, then you will have an aural ball.

This alternative top twenty excludes biopic soundtracks, such as the one for Clint Eastwood's Bird (CBS, 1988), and reportage, such as Aram Avakian and Bert Stern's 1958 Newport Jazz Festival documentary, Jazz On A Summer's Day (Charly, 1998). The many wonderful "soundies" produced by the RCM Corporation in the 1940s, which were played on a small screen mounted on top of a coin-operated unit like a jukebox, merit an article to themselves.

The list also excludes such widely celebrated albums as