There are a number of things that distinguish TNT’s hit TV series Leverage within the caper genre - witty characters, snappy dialogue, plus a careful balance of comedic and dramatic elements - but another key ingredient is the driving, jazz/funk music which composer Joseph LoDuca created, capturing the essence of vintage seventies fusion scores.

LoDuca has tackled the caper genre before – Josh Becker’s tight little heist thriller Running Time (1997) – but the film’s budget and the filmmakers’ evocation of a live teleplay downplayed the use of music to a handful of cues.

As Season 3 is being prepped for production, LoDuca’s beautiful jazz/funk music is now available on CD, and the lengthy album of themes and dramatic cuts will please genre fans, as well as those already familiar with his fine work in film and television.

Best-known for scoring Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films, perhaps LoDuca’s finest film work lies in the rich score he composed for Christophe Gans’ 2001 genre-bender, Brotherhood of the Wolf / Le pacte des loups.

His work in TV has also earned him multiple Emmy nominations and wins (Xena: Warrior Princess, and Legend of the Seeker), and he’s been involved with some memorable productions, including the cult TV series American Gothic (1995-1996).

Leverage is equally special, and in our lengthy discussion, LoDuca describes how he crafted the heavily funkafied sound for one of the best shows on TV right now.

Mark R. Hasan: I didn’t know that your background is rooted in jazz.

Joseph LoDuca: Yes. When you grow up in Detroit, it’s inescapable.

MRH: Lalo Schifrin and Quincy Jones are known for bringing their own funky jazz sound to film music. Was it easy for you to write in that style?

JLD: I guess really I wasn’t referring so much to them, as the fact that somewhere in the seventies the idea of throwing in jazz-influenced funk became a great way to underscore capers of any kind. It was more that precedent, and I supposed that if truth be told, I was listening more to Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis than I was to Lalo Schifrin and Quincy Jones.

MRH: Schifrin tended to focus more on crime dramas, whereas in the case of Jones, he ended up scoring more caper films, including  The Split (1968), The Italian Job (1969), $ (Dollars) and The Anderson Tapes (both 1971), The Hot Rock (1972).

JLD: I think you’re right. It became such a definable template. I think the whole idea with working on Leverage is we want the viewer in on the caper, on the inside from the moment we start the show off, so to use this kind of music was just a great way to do that, and it was just a fun and entertaining.

When Dean Devlin, our producer, approached me on the project, they wanted some music that they could cut to, and it turned out that I’d kind of done this music before, so that music is still part of the mainstay of Leverage; some of those main ideas are really things that I had created in the past, so it was an easy fit.