Name: What's Jazz Doing In A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms?
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T06:14:44.000Z
Duration: 10 min 15 s
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The creators of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms made an interesting creative choice in their season one finale.

To be specific, 30 seconds of jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham's rendition of Alone Together from his amazing 1959 hard bop album Quiet Kenny Durham was an underrated master of the bop era.

His playing, especially his playing on Quiet Kenny, has been described as intimate satisfaction, sensitive, unforced, yet deeply emotional.

All words that would describe this season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

But the choice to include this jazz song is not primarily interesting for what jazz song it is, but

Jazz is a genre of music that doesn't align with the aesthetic conventions of George R.R.

It's noticeably music from our world, the world of the audience.

For some, this inclusion was jarring in an unwelcome way.

A number of people online commented that the jazz music took me out of the story.

They expressed that as if it were a bad thing, and for them maybe it was.

But I also think it's part of the intention of that choice.

Such an aesthetic or tonal mismatch is bound to be a bit jarring.

It does take you out of the story, or more precisely, it creates a double consciousness in which part of your attention is still following the narrative while another part is suddenly made aware of the narration itself to the fact that you're being told a It's also funny, a little bit of comedy and light heartedness to contrast with the tragic ending of the previous episode.

A Night of the Seven Kingdoms is full of gags, and this is certainly one of them.

But I do think there's something deeper here too, because there are a number of similar creative choices in this finale, too many I think, to be just coincidental.

For example, the episode ends with another anachronistic needle drop 16 tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a country hit from 1955 about the labor exploitation of coal miners in Kentucky, workers who were paid in scrip not cash, but

credits that could only be spent at the company store, effectively enforcing their loyalty.

The subject matter is grim, but the music isn't.

Ford croons jovially over finger snaps and a walking baseline narrating a character resigned to his fate.

The tonal contrast parallels the shows in which Dunk and Egg move through a viol world with as much cheerfulness as it's possible to muster, each trapped inside systems that are very hard to escape or change.

Pre existing songs like this weren't used once in eight seasons of Game of Thrones or the first two of House of the Dragon.

Both are disorienting, or maybe a better word is reorienting, because they reorient the viewer's relationship to the show.

Of course, all non diegetic music, music that the charact can't hear, is a narratorial device.

But the music in the other shows isn't designed to make you aware of itself.

It's designed to deepen your immersion in the story.

In A Night of the Seven Kingdoms, composer Dan Roemer expands and experiments with the conventions of epic fantasy scoring, bringing in elements of music from the western genre.

But he's careful not to stray too far from the sonic universe created by Ramin Djawadi on Game of Thrones.

There was definitely like a bit of a feeling of like, how do we make this sort of feel like a western, but

We can't just go like full spaghetti Western style.

In Westeros, Roemer's experimentation stretches the conventions, but the Dorham and Ford needle drops are far more radical.

When they come on, it's as if all of a sudden you can feel the storyteller's hand.

You can feel that hand again in the closing title card, as Dunk and Egg leave the tourney and head out onto the road.

Dunk mus on where they could go in the Seven Kingdoms, and

Egg corrects him, saying that there are actually nine kingdoms.

Moments later, the show fades out to the familiar title card.

But this time it replaces the seven with nine.

Now, a title card may seem like a small thing, and it is.

But all the small things that exist at the threshold of an artistic text play an important role in framing our experience of it.

Collectively, these things, the title cards, end credits, the previously on recap, trailers, posters, press stores, even the episode thumbnail on HBO Max.

All these things and more comprise what's called the paratext, a term coined by the French narratologist Girard Jeannette.

The paratext exists at the threshold of the work, outside the story world, but

Normally, the boundary between the fictional world and its framing apparatus is a solid one.

But here, for a moment, that boundary becomes permeable.

It's as if the title card heard what Egg was saying.

This is an example of what Jeannette calls metalepsis, a transgressive crossing of narrative levels.

It's a ra soft metaleptic event, nothing so extreme as, say, Deadpool making a comment about Ryan Reynolds, but

it still serves to create that double consciousness, drawing our attention to the constructedness of this show.

The last choice I wanted to look at is a flashback in which Ser Arlan of Pennytree tells Dunk the story of how the Penny Tree got its name.

There's a moment where Ser Arlen pauses and Dunk asks him a sensitive question, but

After a second, it appears as if the old man has finally passed on.

then Arlen jerks awake to end his tale, because a true knight always finishes a story.

For casual viewers, this is just a moving scene.

martin's work, there's a resonance here that's impossible to miss the unending discussion and anxiety about Martin's long delay in finishing A Song of Ice and Fire.

Just a few months ago at Worldcon 2025, someone asked Martin if he was going to authorize someone else to finish his series, since he's not going to be around for much longer, a question that was rightly condemned by Martin's fellow panelists and other attendees at the event.

In January 2026, Martin commented on the incident.

I really didn't need that shit, he told the Hollywood Reporter.

Is it a coincidence that in the flashback, Sir Arlin appears to die before finishing his story?

he is a producer on the show and seems to have worked closely with showrunner Ira Parker.

The two of them would have to be naive to think that viewers in the know wouldn't make that connection.

The pattern I've been talking about the discussion about Martin's delay, the question at Worldcon, Martin's response, the TikTok videos discussing this very scene.

In light of those things, all of that is paratext, too.

The show is inviting us to enjoy the reference, the in joke, to see that it's making a joke.

Here again is the storyteller's hand in a scene where a character is telling a story.

What does breaking our immersion in these ways accomplish?

The answer, I think, is in that question, because it's wrong for me to say that these creative choices break immersion, because they don't really.

We're still immersed, still deeply engaged.

It's just that part of our consciousness is engaged in a way that's not typical of our experience of this kind of fantasy media epic fantasy has long privileged the kind of immersion that Tolkien called secondary belief, the temporary acceptance of a fictional fantasy world as real.

There are huge benefits to evoking this belief in the reality, reader or viewer.

It triggers a profound and singular emotional investment in the fictional world, and especially in the characters.

We feel their triumphs and tragedies as our own.

By drawing our attention to the constructedness of the story, we exchange some of that emotional investment for reflection.

We're invited to interrogate the meaning of these tricks, triumphs and tragedies.

As we're watching, we ask why the storyteller is telling us this story, and

How does the form of the story itself, or storytelling in general, construct meaning?

How do we understand the concepts of chivalry or true knighthood if not as stories?

After all, that's how these ideas first entered the world in the romances of the Middle Ages.

In what ways does the story story of dunk and egg affirm, challenge, or change those old narratives?

You can and usually do have both emotional investment and aesthetic reflection.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms certainly does.