When I was writing Jammin’ at the Margins (Reference Gabbard1996) in the early 1990s, I thought of the book as the ‘Other History’ of jazz, a catalogue of myths that were constructed primarily in Hollywood which serious jazz writers should be devoted to correcting. Consequently, I had a great deal to say about a film such as The Benny Goodman Story (1956) because it invoked so many stupid myths about jazz. For example, in one sequence the young Benny is about to have his first date with a young woman, but he walks away when she laughs at him for wearing short pants. Within moments he hears a group of black and Creole musicians led by the legendary trombonist Kid Ory playing New Orleans jazz, a music Benny does not know. But presumably because he has just suffered his first sexual humiliation, he picks up a clarinet and begins improvising bluesy countermelodies as well as if not better than the veterans he has just joined. The entire film is naïve and racist, as it shows Benny learning from and then surpassing his black and Creole predecessors, even though they played a very different kind of music. Later in the film, Benny re-encounters Ory, who tells him that he has ‘the best band I ever heard any place’.
But I am no longer so certain that movies about jazz are simple repositories of myth. Perhaps Hollywood (and other places where films are made) can tell us a great deal about jazz history, especially the music’s reception. There are innumerable films where people are playing jazz, dancing to it, drinking to it, making love to it and of course talking over it. And each of these films responds to the changing practices and attitudes of the moment. So long as we construct jazz as a stack of recordings by esteemed jazz auteurs, we are likely to miss out on how it was actually experienced. This essay is essentially another ‘Other History of Jazz’. It moves chronologically through the last ninety years of film history and touches on movies from diverse genres made in the United States and Europe.
Sissle and Blake (1923)
Most scholars agree that the first true jazz recordings were made in 1923 when Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton were all in sound studios for the first time. In that same year Noble Sissle sang while Eubie Blake played the piano in a short film, Lee de Forest’s Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake Sing Snappy Songs (1923). An experiment in synchronizing sound with the moving image, this six-minute showcase anticipated The Jazz Singer by four years. It can be regarded not just as the beginnings of black performance in sound cinema but also as an index for how African-Americans were allowed to be represented in the early 1920s, as well as for how they themselves wished to be represented. It was, after all, the Harlem Renaissance, and both musicians appear relaxed and debonair in their carefully pressed tuxedos. But by no means are they hypermasculine entertainers. Sissle’s gestures even border on the effeminate.
Sissle and Blake perform, however, with confidence, wit and enthusiasm. This confidence was bolstered by their recent hit Shuffle Along (1921), the first successful Broadway musical with an all-black cast, for which they wrote all the songs as well as the script. A black presence was asserting itself in American popular music, in Broadway shows and even in early experiments in sound cinema. Audiences who watched Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake Sing Snappy Songs were probably most intrigued by the synchronization of sound and image, but they definitely took pleasure in the music of two performers who were bringing an accessible version of black music to a mostly white audience.
Louis Armstrong (1933)
By the early 1930s, Americans could hear jazz everywhere. Armstrong had been selling records briskly at least since 1926, when his Hot Five had a hit with ‘Muskrat Ramble’. He would appear in several films from a hybrid genre that offered a few helpings of jazz. In the 1930s and 1940s, these films were usually released with terms like ‘Parade’, ‘Broadcast’, ‘Canteen’ and ‘Sensations’ in their titles. Slight plots were built around attractive couples, but the stories were regularly interrupted to feature popular entertainers. Because they had nothing to do with the plot, black entertainers could be kept separate from the action and indeed excised in locales where whites were unnerved by the presence of blacks, even on celluloid.
When Armstrong was touring Europe in 1933, the Danish film industry cast him in one of the first of these compilation films, København, Kalundborg og – ? (‘Copenhagen, Kalundborg and – ?’, 1934). Filmed in a studio in Sweden in 1933 and re-edited to give the impression that a live audience was present, the film features an elegantly dressed Armstrong performing in front of the French orchestra with whom he was touring. Like Sissle and Blake ten years earlier, Armstrong is elegant and debonair, but he introduces a variety of vernacular gestures we now associate with authentic jazz, especially his verbal and musical asides. When he sings ‘Dinah’ (Harry Akst, Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, 1925), he effectively rewrites the melody. He does in fact use the lyrics written for the tune, but he throws in a handful of scat phrases and several exclamations such as ‘Oh, Baby’.
When Armstrong takes a trumpet solo on ‘Dinah’, he quotes from the song ‘Exactly Like You’ (Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, 1930) as well as a melody usually called ‘The Hoochie Coochie Dance’ (credited to Sol Bloom, 1893; see Scott Reference Scott2001, 106) or ‘The Snake-Charmer’s Dance’ before authoritatively bringing the song to an end with a high C. Although Armstrong had appeared in a few films as well as a Betty Boop cartoon in 1932, audiences at the cinema were getting the full force of his talent when they saw København, Kalundborg og – ?. More than virtually any other black entertainer of his day, Armstrong had found a global audience and he knew exactly how to appeal to it.
What Price Jazz (1934)
Black performers make a brief appearance in the short film What Price Jazz (1934), but the cast is otherwise entirely white. Dressed in nineteenth-century minstrel outfits, African-American dancers briefly appear in a survey of music and nightlife. One black female dancer in the sequence makes suggestive gyrations with her hips, provoking the allegorical figure, ‘Mr. Blue Laws’.
After the montage of scenes from white and black performances, we see Mr. Blue Laws denouncing the music under a sign reading ‘Society for the Prevention of Jazz’. An elderly man with a stove-pipe hat, Mr. Blue Laws is able to persuade another elderly person, Mr. Public Opinion, to join him on a raid of a night club. Mr. Public Opinion accepts a shotgun from Mr. Blue Laws, who wields an axe. They soon arrive at a club where scantily clad white women dance to the music of Ted Fio Rito and his Orchestra, one of the forgotten swing bands of the 1930s. At one point Rito himself makes the case for jazz, speaking in rhymed verse like everyone else in the film. (The source for the story is probably the medieval allegory, Everyman.) Mr. Public Opinion is soon seduced by the music and the dancing girls, eventually joining in and playing his gun like a clarinet. As Mr. Blue Laws angrily gives up his crusade, white women dance ineptly to Rito’s all-white band as it plays music that recalls the recordings of Paul Whiteman.
In What Price Jazz, ‘jazz’ is about dancing and night life. Similarly, when F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term ‘Jazz Age’ in 1922, he was not describing the music of Oliver, Morton, Armstrong and the other artists of the time who have since been canonized. Scrupulously ignoring black artists like these, What Price Jazz reassures audiences that it’s OK to like the music they already like. The two people in the film who do not agree are made to look ridiculous. Cinema and music were part of the same entertainment industry, and they were already in the business of promoting each other.
Clean Pastures (1937)
In the 1930s and 1940s, at the same time that Warner Bros. was introducing audiences to Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, the studio was also producing cartoons without these stock characters. Directors Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and especially Friz Freleng were responsible for the unmistakable style of the cartoons from Warners, especially the way in which, as Barry Putterman phrased it, the cartoons could ‘swing’ (Reference Putterman and Sandler1998, 32). Music director Carl Stalling was just as essential, consistently finding quirky, jazzy music to suit the action of the films.
At least since the early 1960s, Warner Bros. cartoons have been shown in regular rotation on American television and throughout the world. In 1968, however, several cartoons, eventually known as ‘The Censored Eleven’, were taken out of distribution because of their offensive depictions of black people (K. F. Cohen Reference Cohen1997, 54). One of these was Freleng’s Clean Pastures (1937), a parody of Warner Bros.’s The Green Pastures (1936), a feature film with an all-black cast. The Green Pastures did not rely on the most grotesque traditions of minstrelsy, but it did portray black Americans as mildly ridiculous, devoted to fish fries and ten-cent cigars and likely to slip into indolence if not appropriately disciplined. At one point, an African-American God decides to wipe out all of humanity when he is disrespected by a young woman playing jazz-like music on her ukulele.
In Clean Pastures, a black patriarchal God also ruefully watches his people being seduced away from salvation by syncopated music. Early on we hear ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ (Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard and Kenneth Casey, 1925) on the soundtrack while animated women perform in the style of Cotton Club dancers. We also see a martini shaker, a glass with an olive on a toothpick and a black hand that snaps its fingers after it lets go of two dice at a gaming table. The view then rapidly pulls back from Harlem until the earth becomes a tiny dot with stars and planets whizzing by. A path of white bottles (The Milky Way) leads us to an African-American heaven with the title ‘Pair-O-Dice’ over the pearly gates.
The black God sends a Stepin Fetchit-like Gabriel down to Harlem to bring souls to Pair-O-Dice. Once he has arrived in Harlem to begin the process of claiming souls for Pair-O-Dice, Gabriel encounters Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, dressed as always in the most elegant style and dancing to ‘Old Folks at Home’ (1851), a minstrel tune written by Stephen Foster. A blacked-up Al Jolson then appears on the street, singing Harold Arlen’s ‘I Love to Singa’ (1936). When he takes his trademark stance with one knee on the sidewalk, a child-sized puppet drops out of the sky and inspires Jolson to shed a tear as he briefly alludes to ‘Sonny Boy’ (Ray Henderson, Bud De Sylva and Lew Brown, 1928), the maudlin song that provided the tear-jerking finale to Jolson’s mega-hit, The Singing Fool (1928). The several songs in this one brief sequence are united most prominently by their shared Warner Bros. copyright. But they also reveal the wide range of musical traditions that could represent Harlem and black America in 1937.
Neither Robinson, Jolson nor anyone else on the Harlem street pays any attention to Gabriel’s ineffectual imprecations that they renounce dance halls and taverns. But then several show-business personalities appear looking down on this scene from the black heaven and offer their advice to God. Although they are wearing wings, the advisors can easily be identified as Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Herb Jeffries, all of them very much alive in 1937. Each of the four insists that ‘rhythm’ is the way to bring souls to Pair-O-Dice.
Calloway subsequently brings his orchestra to Harlem where they play a hot version of ‘Swing for Sale’ (Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, 1936) on a street corner. Soon the celebrity musicians are leading a parade of Harlemites to Pair-O-Dice, but the song that accompanies them upwards is no longer contemporary. Instead, we hear a big-band version of another minstrel tune, ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’ (James A. Bland, 1879). The new, jazzed-up Pair-O-Dice appears to be indistinguishable from Harlem except that people wear halos and there are apparently no cabarets or dice games. In the film’s punch line, even the devil wants to live in Pair-O-Dice. Although he walks in holding his hands in prayerful fashion, Satan winks at the audience as the cartoon ends. The wink strongly suggests that Pair-O-Dice may not be a holy place much longer.
The moral of Clean Pastures seems to be that swing music has become so popular that it might as well be a tool for saving souls. At least the souls of black people. A simpler interpretation would be that the cartoon is having fun with familiar figures such as Robinson, Waller, Armstrong, Calloway and Jolson, all of whom were a source of great fascination for American audiences, white as well as black. Not surprisingly, the cartoon makes no real distinction between minstrelsy and jazz. In the Warner Bros. world, and in much of the popular imagination, ‘Swing for Sale’, ‘I Love to Singa’ and ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’ are all part of black music regardless of whether or not the songs were written by African-Americans. And all of it could contain a white performer like Jolson along with a wide range of black artists, including Armstrong and Waller, now regarded as jazz geniuses.
Phantom Lady (1944)
By the mid-1940s, bebop was becoming the hippest music in the United States, even if ultimately it had little staying power with audiences. This was true at least in part because the boppers did not want their music to slip harmlessly into the mainstream like the jazz of previous generations. In the words of Amiri Baraka, bebop was ‘harshly anti-assimilationist’ (Reference Baraka1963, 181). When told that their music sounded crazy, bebop musicians and their fans embraced the word: ‘Crazy, man’ became a term of praise. For the large movie audience, it made perfect sense that many of the boppers (as well as many pre-boppers) were hard drinkers and drug addicts.
In fact, any musician who played loud, aggressively rhythmic music could be lumped in with the new breed of jazzers. You did not have to play like Dizzy Gillespie or Thelonious Monk to speak the argot and strike the pose. In Phantom Lady (1944), a group of white musicians raises the roof playing music that has much more in common with the New Orleans revival than with bebop. Nevertheless, the music and the musicians were made to appear ‘crazy’.
In Phantom Lady, Ella Raines plays the part of Kansas, the secretary of a man she knows to be innocent even after he is convicted of killing his wife. In pursuit of clues to prove her boss’s innocence, Kansas dresses as a floozy in order to extract information from Cliff, a jazz drummer played by Elisha Cook Jr. In what is surely the most memorable scene in the film (and perhaps the only time in film history when Cook was allowed to kiss a woman), Kansas goads Cliff into playing an intense drum solo with the other hopped-up musicians. The camera shows her standing over him and controlling him like a puppet with her gestures. ‘It is a powerful sequence, with its sexual undertones barely hidden, and it remains one of the most striking metaphors for sexual desire in film’ (D. Butler Reference Butler2002, 64). Even though – or perhaps because – it was played exclusively by whites in Phantom Lady, jazz was beginning to mean sex to a large segment of the population. The association goes back to the ‘professors’ playing ragtime piano in brothels in the early twentieth century and continues today with recordings by Miles Davis still providing young people with the best music for seduction.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Young Man with a Horn (1950)
Bebop continued to be absent from the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, even in Young Man With a Horn (1950), in which the trumpeter/protagonist Rick (Kirk Douglas) is said to have taken his music as far as it can go and is searching for a new sound. We see the young Rick playing in New Orleans style and eventually the sweet and showy big-band style we associate with Harry James, who in fact dubbed in the trumpet solos when Douglas pantomimes playing. If Rick was indeed after a new sound, bebop should have been inevitable in a film made just when the music was at its apex and even Goodman was leading a bebop band. But bebop was much too closely associated with blacks and with drug abuse to find a place in Hollywood’s world of reassuringly wholesome (and white) family entertainment.
Black jazz musicians could, however, be put to use when that world needed to be contrasted with something sordid and corrupt. No one was more responsible for Hollywood’s reassurances than director Frank Capra, especially in a film that has become a quasi-sacred Christmas ritual, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Early in the film, when George (James Stewart) and Mary (Donna Reed) are falling in love, they dance enthusiastically to the music of a white swing band. But when George is allowed to see what his hometown would be like without him, he briefly visits Pottersville, the town invented by the robber baron Potter (Lionel Barrymore). When George stops into Martini’s bar, a once comfortable refuge has become a sleazy saloon. In Pottersville, Martini’s even has a stout black pianist wearing a derby and holding a cigar between his lips. There is no bebop in It’s a Wonderful Life. In fact, the black man is playing an archaic style of music while whites play contemporaneous dance music. The boogie-woogie we hear in Martini’s is not intrinsically sordid, but the blackness of the pianist was clearly intended to play upon the audience’s bigotry and to add an extra level of depravity to Pottersville.
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958)
The most successful blending of jazz and film may be the ‘night walk’ sequence in French director Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958). While Davis and his group improvise on the soundtrack, Florence (Jeanne Moreau) wanders the streets of Paris wondering what has become of her lover Julien. The novel by Noël Calef on which the film is based had only a small role for Florence, the wife of the industrialist killed by Julien. Making Florence a central character was the most brilliant aspect of Malle’s adaptation, and it made Moreau a star.
Throughout most of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Julien is trapped in an elevator after killing Florence’s husband. The night walk on the Champs-Elysées is beautifully shot by cinematographer Henri Decaë, and it also offers Moreau an opportunity to develop her character. Unlike the femmes fatales of American film noir, such as Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) or Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), Florence is not greedy or manipulative. She genuinely loves Julien, and when he does not appear at the arranged time, she is a lost soul.
Malle had filmed Moreau’s night walk and several other scenes without knowing who would provide the music. Only after principal shooting was over did Malle learn that Davis was in Paris for a gig at the Club St. Germain. He realized that Davis’s music would fit perfectly with the action of the film. Significantly, Malle chose a jazz artist not because the film was about murder but because he knew that Davis’s music could enhance the love plot. As it turned out, Davis did not have quite as much work as he had anticipated when he arrived in Paris, and he was happy to work with Malle (Szwed Reference Szwed2002, 152).
Jazz critic Gary Giddins has said that Malle had ‘nerves of steel’ to put his film into the hands of improvising jazz artists (Giddins Reference Giddins and Malle2006). But Davis quickly became deeply invested in the project. With the French and expatriate musicians who were his sidemen in Paris, he spent four hours playing along with scenes that Malle put into loops so that the musicians could watch them repeatedly and play along. The CD re-issue of the soundtrack includes multiple takes for each scene in the film that has music (M. Davis Reference Davis1988).
As he watched Moreau’s character walk through the night streets, Davis was effectively reading her mind, creating musical gestures to complement her facial expressions and body language. In one moment in this sequence, Moreau cries out ‘Julien’ when she sees a car that looks exactly like the one her lover owns. Davis lays out, allowing the audience to sort out what is happening as Moreau sees a bourgeois family emerge from the car. Then, as Moreau continues her stroll, his trumpet kicks back in. Otherwise, there is nothing to interrupt the communication between Moreau the actress and Davis the improvising musician. Just as Armstrong was shown at his best in the Danish film København, Kalundborg og – ?, Davis was given licence to make a brilliant contribution to a French film.
When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965)
Long after Armstrong appeared in the Danish film, he was in another compilation film of sorts, When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965). The film is an odd remake of Girl Crazy (1943), a George Gershwin musical starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. When the Boys Meet the Girls is also a sequel to Where the Boys Are (1960), a vehicle for the country-inflected pop singer Connie Francis, who had a juke-box hit with a song of the same title. Even more bizarrely, several singers and pop groups with no relationship to Gershwin were dropped in at various moments, including Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Herman’s Hermits, Liberace, and Armstrong and his All Stars. The film came out shortly after Armstrong suddenly appeared on the pop charts in 1964 with ‘Hello Dolly’ (Jerry Herman), a record that sold well enough to knock the Beatles out of Billboard’s number one slot, a place they had held for fourteen weeks. At roughly the same time, Herman’s Hermits had a hit with ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ (Trevor Peacock, 1963) and Sam the Sham struck it rich with ‘Wooly Bully’ (Domingo Samudio, 1965). The producers were awkwardly matching up popular groups with Francis and the music of Gershwin.
In 1965, America had no PG13, R and X ratings for films. Virtually all American films were made for the entire family. There had been a rash of teenpics in the 1950s with the rise of rockʼn’roll, but Hollywood was still trying to make films – especially musicals and Biblical epics – that appealed to everyone. With his infectious grin and exuberance, Armstrong fitted the bill even better than Herman and Sam the Sham. In the last shot of the film, after the characters have been sorted into pairs of lovers, Armstrong appears alone on screen and exclaims, ‘Oh, yeah’.
Save the Tiger (1973)
By the 1970s, jazz no longer had a large audience, but many enthusiasts were still following a substantial number of the music’s artists. In the most egregious moment of Ken Burns’s ten-part documentary Jazz (PBS, 2001), we are told that jazz effectively died along with Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who both passed away in the early 1970s, and that it did not come back to life until Wynton Marsalis began recording in the 1980s. After that, according to Burns and his team, the narrative of jazz changed with musicians supposedly looking backwards towards honoured predecessors rather than chasing the next new thing in the future. Jazz musicians such as Dexter Gordon, Kenny Barron, Woody Shaw, Bill Evans, Betty Carter, Art Pepper and Ornette Coleman, to name only a few, had important careers in the 1970s. And geniuses like Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jaki Byard and the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago were making great jazz that simultaneously looked backwards and forwards.
The movies, however, appear to have agreed with Burns avant la lettre. Except for splashy star vehicles like Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and New York, New York (1977), the American cinema had little use for jazz unless it could be connected with artists such as Diana Ross and Liza Minnelli, who still had mainstream appeal. If jazz did turn up, it had much more to do with nostalgia, as in Save the Tiger (1973). In that film, Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon) is a businessman striving to protect his innocent youth from the fallen world in which he lives. The soundtrack regularly features recordings from the 1930s and 1940s such as ‘Air Mail Special’ (Benny Goodman, James Mundy and Charlie Christian, 1941), ‘Flying Home’ (Benny Goodman, Eddie De Lange et al. 1939), and ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’ (Edgar Sampson, 1934), always as signifiers of a cherished past. When Harry’s garment business is on the verge of bankruptcy, he hires an arsonist to burn down the factory while making it look like an accident. Unlike his business partner (Jack Gilford), Harry is prepared to undertake dangerous and illegal action in the hope that he will be able to collect a substantial insurance cheque. The film climaxes with the factory successfully disposed of and Harry lost in reverie as he and the audience listen to the 1939 recording of ‘I Can’t Get Started’ (Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, 1936) by Bunny Berigan, the white trumpeter/singer whom Armstrong once identified as his favourite among the many musicians who imitated his trumpet style (Schuller Reference Schuller1989, 464). The pale white jazz of Berigan may not have much cachet today, but it does give solace to an ageing character in a film from 1973.
Jerry Maguire (1996)
There is a long list of American films in which white people fall in love on the screen while audiences hear the voices of invisible black singers (Gabbard Reference Gabbard2004). In Jerry Maguire (Reference Gabbard1996), directed by Cameron Crowe, the white couple played by Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger do in fact make love while black music plays in the background. The lovers are listening to Mingus’s 1957 recording of ‘Haitian Fight Song’. But this scene should not be confused with the moment in Groundhog Day (1993) when Bill Murray and Andie McDowell fall in love while Ray Charles (nondiegetically) sings ‘You Don’t Know Me’ (Eddy Arnold and Cindy Walker, 1955). Or with Before Sunset (2004), when Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy decide they are made for each other as they listen to Nina Simone sing ‘Just in Time’ (Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, 1956). Or with any number of other films that appropriate invisible black voices for white romance.
The crucial scene in Jerry Maguire takes place when Jerry (Cruise) and Dorothy (Zellweger) are about to consummate their relationship. Dorothy is a single mother who has entrusted her child to Chad the Nanny (Todd Luiso), who has served long enough almost to be part of the family. Chad meets Jerry at the door on the evening when he knows that Jerry is about to make love to Dorothy for the first time. Before Jerry can enter, Chad hands him a cassette tape. Along with a great deal of oratory about the value of jazz, Chad suggests that Jerry and Dorothy listen to Davis while they make love. As Chad hands the tape to Jerry, he can be heard off-camera saying, ‘I put a little Mingus on there too’. In a 1997 interview with Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly, Crowe said that he originally intended to have Jerry and Dorothy make love to ‘So What’ (Davis, 1959) from a 1960 Stockholm concert with Davis and John Coltrane, ‘But when I put it on that day, it was too languid and wasn’t as good as Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song”, which sounded like a herd of elephants mating. We’d already filmed the nanny saying the music was on a tape of “Miles and Coltrane” – so we later dubbed [the nanny] saying “And I put some Mingus on there too”’ (Willman Reference Willman1997, 25).
In Jerry Maguire, after Chad hands the tape to Jerry, the film jumps to a close-up of Dorothy in her bathroom preparing to join Jerry in the bedroom. At this point the audience can hear the bass solo with which Mingus opens ‘Haitian Fight Song’. Anyone who cannot connect Chad’s line about putting ‘some Mingus’ on the tape to what is on the soundtrack may assume that the music is nondiegetic, especially because Jerry and Dorothy do not acknowledge the music in any way. But then Jimmy Knepper’s amazing trombone solo on the recording becomes even more amazing when he breaks into double time. At this moment Jerry gives Dorothy an incredulous look and says, ‘What is this music?’ Jerry and Dorothy both begin laughing, even more united now that they share a complete inability to understand what Mingus and Knepper have achieved.
Did Crowe know how profoundly he was revising, perhaps even ridiculing, the standard use of black music in Hollywood films? And did he know that ‘Haitian Fight Song’ celebrates the slave rebellions led by Toussaint Louverture in the late eighteenth century? And if so, was he associating the song with the relationship in Jerry Maguire between Jerry and the black football player Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr), whom he manages? In an early scene Rod demands that Jerry repeatedly shout ‘Show me the money’ into the telephone so that he can continue as Rod’s agent. When a black athlete demands this kind of a performance from a representative of the white power structure that controls his career, it almost suggests a slave rebellion.
Clueless white people like the fictional Jerry and Dorothy may not understand Mingus and the politics that he regularly brought into his performances. But in the late twentieth century, when jazz had definitively become an insider music, there is a strong possibility that Crowe, who worked as a music journalist before becoming a filmmaker, was communicating with fellow aficionados.
The Terminal (2004)
Steven Spielberg, who turns out to be something of a fan, made a film that turned to jazz in its final moments. In The Terminal (2004), Tom Hanks plays an immigrant from a fictional European country who finds himself marooned in New York’s Kennedy airport because of political changes that took place in his country while he was still in the air. Only at the end do we discover that he has come to America to get the signature of saxophonist Benny Golson, the only musician in the famous ‘Great Day in Harlem’ photograph of 1958 who has not signed a sheet of paper passed on to Hanks by his father. When Hanks finally manages to escape from the airport, he goes straight to a hotel where Golson and his band are briefly heard playing Golson’s composition ‘Killer Joe’ (1954).
Once again, nostalgia is what puts jazz into the film, especially because of the aura attached to the 1958 photograph of fifty-seven musicians posing in front of a Harlem brownstone. Since so many of the artists in the austere black and white photo were elderly, nostalgia was built into the photograph from the beginning, and it structures the excellent documentary film about the image, Jean Bach’s A Great Day in Harlem (1994). To add pathos to Spielberg’s film, Golson is, as of this writing, one of the two surviving musicians who appear in the photograph (the other is tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins). There were at least a dozen survivors when The Terminal was released in 2004, but Spielberg surely knew that not all of them would be around for much longer and that his hero’s project of tracking down one survivor would be all the more affecting.
Spielberg, who has said that he is a lifelong admirer of Golson (Saunders Reference Saunders2005), filmed the saxophonist when he was still in his prime and playing in typically relaxed but exuberant fashion. In The Terminal, a European is the only devoted jazz fan, and he has sought out Golson in honour of his father, a man from a time when jazz was still popular entertainment. But Golson plays a timeless music, not at all the fading flower of a better time, like ‘I Can’t Get Started’ in Save the Tiger.
Whiplash (2014)
In Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014), jazz is not relaxed. The film presents the music as an extremely demanding art form exacting drastic life choices from those who hope to succeed. A young drummer, Andrew (Miles Teller), who wants to play like Buddy Rich, is taken under the less-than-protective wing of Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) at a music school that is clearly based on Juilliard. Fletcher drives Andrew relentlessly, even slapping him in the face to make a point about rhythm. Only at the end do we discover that Fletcher is not a sadistic sociopath but a dedicated mentor who knows that Andrew can become a great drummer only after gruelling practice sessions and a life-changing commitment. Because Chazelle has ratcheted up the intensity of his story, viewers can be caught up in it. But as Richard Brody has pointed out (Reference Brody2014), who would want to risk physical and mental well-being in order to play like Buddy Rich? To be fair, Rich was capable of playing with a certain level of sensitivity, but mostly he was an egomaniacal show-off. And when Whiplash climaxes with Andrew performing Rich’s tired old trick of tapping two sticks on a snare drum gradually slower and then gradually faster, one wonders what the filmmakers think the art of jazz is all about.
Whiplash recalls any number of sports films in which mentors unrelentingly drive talented young athletes to extremes in order to ensure their success. But Whiplash also recalls movies about ‘high art’ such as the ballet films The Red Shoes (1948) and Black Swan (2010). I suppose that we have come a long way since jazz was portrayed as the music of primitive black people or pop ephemera for whites. But Whiplash emphasizes only the most exhibitionistic aspects of jazz as it is currently practised. There is nothing in the film about the crucial process of musicians listening to each other.
Nevertheless, Whiplash is almost reverential in its treatment of jazz as an art form, one of very few films in recent decades to make this claim.
