Apple Music drops 'Defiant Jazz' playlist from hit series 'Severance'

"It's genre-busting music, which I hope suits the feeling our show aspires to," Ben Stiller tells Apple Music of this playlist celebrating the Season 1 finale of his Apple Original series Severance streaming on Apple TV+. The playlist's title—and its collection of skronky retro and avant-garde jazz selections from artists like Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, and Albert Ayler—is a reference to the soundtrack for a deeply unsettling office dance party in the seventh episode of the series, which is about data-entry employees at a mysterious company with a chip implanted in their brains that prohibits them from remembering their non-work lives. "We wanted it to reflect the weirdness of the corporate culture," Stiller says of both the scene and the spirit of the songs found here. "The feel to me of the show is always 'generic retro.' It was all very evocative to me of a dance party from the some future '50s retro-exotica world."That skittish mood is exemplified by the playlist's opening track, "Shakey Jake" by Joe McPhee. "It embodies the weird tension under the surface that always exists with the characters," Stiller says. "And the saxophone is insane—I don't know how he gets those sounds. It's a 13-minute-plus track and the build is amazing. It's pushing the bounds of the jazz form, almost to an anarchic level."