"Hollywood legend Bernard Herrmann's final score accompanies the gritty Taxi Driver, about a cabbie turned vigilante. The jazz-tinged orchestral score harkens back to the early years of crime jazz film and television scores, but with a darker sensibility rarely heard in the soundtracks of the '50s. The track 'Diary of a Taxi Driver,' featuring Bickle's monologue about the 'scum' on the streets, is a mini-masterpiece of brooding menace, with pulsating snare and cymbal echoing the cabbie's restlessness like a ticking time bomb."– from Chapter 1: Crime Jazz and Felonious Funk of Kristopher Spencer’s Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979
