I went home and had a leisurely dinner, returning to Charles
at 8 p.m. or so with an old videotape: the movies Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Captain Carey, U.S.A. I mentioned that Jazz on a Summer’s Day was a highly influential concert film in its day and
that a lot of the people who filmed rock concerts in the 1960’s and since
copied from it (particularly, it turned out, in its multiple — and sometimes
oblique — camera angles and its absorption with the audience watching
the performers as much as with the
performers themselves), and Charles said, “Now I know who to blame.” Actually, he enjoyed the movie
— not only the music itself but at least some of the filmic tricks (working at
the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, director Bert Stern also availed himself of the
fact that an America’s Cup defense was occurring at the same time, and like
most other people who have filmed it managed to make sail racing look
considerably more exciting than it really is!), and the rather odd spectacle of
performers from the rhythm-and-blues world like Dinah Washington (doing a
legitimate jazz version of “All of Me” with vibist Terry Gibbs), Big Maybelle
(doing a rehash of the old Count Basie/Jimmy Rushing “Boogie Woogie Blues”) and
Chuck Berry (doing “Sweet Little 16” with a clarinet solo by Buster Bailey in
the middle of the proceedings — in addition to all his other contributions,
Chuck Berry also invented jazz-rock fusion!) cheek-by-jowl with the genuine
jazz musicians.
These included Louis Armstrong, George Shearing, Jimmy
Giuffre, Chico Hamilton (whose piece Charles actually liked better than I did —
I thought it on the dull side and could only marvel at how sedate Eric Dolphy’s
flute playing sounded here in comparison to the wild work on his own albums!),
Thelonious Monk (whose number was burdened with a voice-over from the America’s
Cup race, a poor camera angle that deprived us of any view of Monk’s fingers on
the piano keys, and low-quality sound recording that lopped off the top
frequencies of Roy Haynes’ cymbal work, but any film of Monk is welcome since he did so little — just this, his
appearance on the CBS-TV show The Sound of Jazz the previous year and the German footage from 1968
that became the basis of the posthumous documentary Thelonious Monk:
Straight, No Chaser) and a surprisingly
exciting (and Coltrane-ish) Sonny Stitt. But Stern was a good enough show
person to save the best performer for last. I’ve been listening to quite a lot
of Mahalia Jackson lately, and her closing set in Jazz on a Summer’s
Day is by far the best thing in the movie.
She’s in absolutely fantastic voice (was she ever not in absolutely fantastic voice? Sometimes Mahalia’s
vocal cords sound like forces of Nature — or God, if you believe as she did),
and for once Stern’s camerawork stays out of the way and allows the performer
to project her own appeal. (Mahalia is also helped by the plain cotton dress
she wore — she dressed like she was going to church, in formal but still simple
clothes, whereas most of the other women in this movie wore dresses only drag
queens would dare put on today; Anita O’Day sings divinely but sports one of
the silliest outfits of all time, a black cinch dress with white feather-boa
trimmings and a matching floppy sun hat that makes it a bit difficult to see
her face under the damned thing!)
Mahalia comes out singing “Heav’n, Heav’n” — a gospel
version of the old spiritual that actually has little in common with the
original except the lyric line, “Everybody’s talking about Heaven, ain’t going
to Heaven” (as I said to Charles later, playing this right after Marian
Anderson’s record would illustrate the difference between spiritual and gospel)
— and then goes into “Didn’t It Rain?,” a performance that manages to rock far
harder than anything Big Maybelle or Chuck Berry could manage (thanks to
Mahalia’s sense of rhythm and the magnificent piano accompaniment of Mildred
Falls); it builds to a false ending, then to a reprise that gets the crowd
(previously shown as almost abysmally uninterested in the great music being
served to them — the tensions at the Newport Festival and the underage drinking
that would erupt in rioting two years later are already clearly visible in this
film) up on its feet, excited and stamping away — and then Mahalia finally
finishes “Didn’t It Rain” (during which, incidentally, she pronounces the name
“Noah” as “Nora” throughout, undoubtedly for euphony, not that it really
matters) to a tense, expectant crowd. Does she rock them harder with another
stomping, infectious gospel number? NO! She
gives them “The Lord’s Prayer”! Mahalia sings the familiar setting of the King
James version of the prayer — generally one of the most unspeakably dull pieces
of music ever conceived by the half-mind of man — and manages for once, with
her “worrying” ornamentation of the notes (she once defined gospel music as
adding rhythmic intensity to the faster songs and ornamentation to the slower
ones), to make the piece sound like a worthy companion to the eloquent language
of the Prayer itself — and that incredibly ill-mannered audience quiets down
and listens raptly, hanging on every word and every note. In his rather silly
song about Henry “Red” Allen, David Amram sang, “He turned the place into a
church” — an impression I never got from his music, but which is an absolutely accurate
impression of what Mahalia Jackson managed to do in this film, from her great
heart, her impeccable musicianship and the sheer power and weight of her
personal belief and conviction in God as expressed through her music. It’s one
of the most marvelous spectacles ever captured on film — and I noticed Charles had the same reaction the
Newport crowd did (and I did, for that matter): reverence. — 3/16/97
•••••
Last night I screened Charles and I a DVD of the pioneering
1958 documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day,
directed by photographer Bert Stern and shot in Newport, Rhode Island during
the Fourth of July weekend because that was the weekend of the Newport Jazz Festival
and also the America’s Cup yacht races. I’d earlier made a VHS tape of this
movie from the Bravo channel and shown it to Charles back in 1997, and it
remains a fascinating film both for its historical importance (among other
things, I believe it was the only time Eric Dolphy was ever filmed and the only time Thelonious Monk was filmed
in color) documenting the art of under-filmed jazz musicians and the template
it set for future music documentaries. Just as the Newport Jazz Festival itself
set the template for future pop-music festivals — it begat a similar but
competing event on the West Coast in Monterey, the Monterey Jazz Festival,
which in turn begat the Monterey Pop
festival in 1967 (which marked the explosive U.S. debuts of the Jimi Hendrix
Experience and The Who and itself was the subject of a hit movie, Monterey
Pop), which begat Woodstock (both the event
and the mega-hit film) — so Stern’s direction of this movie set the style for
future films of such events. The film opens with a series of abstract patterns
formed by the sun shining down on the waters of Newport harbor, following which
the film cuts to the performance we first heard underscoring the abstract
shots: “The Train and the River” by the Jimmy Giuffre 3. This was a highly
unusual group that featured Giuffre on clarinet and tenor sax, Bob Brookmeyer
on valve trombone and Jim Hall on electric guitar — no piano, bass or drums! The package we were watching contained a CD
of most of the film’s soundtrack (for some reason one song, a piece by George
Shearing listed on imdb.com as Carlos Federico’s “Rondo” but really the 1947
Dizzy Gillespie-Chano Pozo piece “Manteca,” is in the film but not included on
the CD), and one of the most interesting aspects of the movie is the sheer
eclecticism of the talent roster.
The performers ranged from Louis Armstrong to
Thelonious Monk (whose piece “Blue Monk” was saddled with a radio broadcast of
the America’s Cup over Monk’s playing in the movie but is blessedly “clean” on
the CD —and also pitch-corrected, eliminating the noticeable wow and flutter in
the movie) and included avant-garde groups like Chico Hamilton’s quintet (whose
front-line instruments were Fred Katz on cello and Eric Dolphy on alto sax and
flute —Stern filmed this ensemble rehearsing “Blue Sands” in a room and then
showed the final performance on stage) and Giuffre’s trio; straight-ahead bop
by tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt and guitarist Sal Salvador; Anita O’Day’s
marvelous treatments of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two” (she wears one
of the silliest dresses of all time and it wasn’t until I saw a later
documentary about her that she
explained why she wore this odd black outfit with white trim and a big
black-and-white floppy hat: she came to Newport expecting to perform at night,
the festival organizers put her on during daytime instead, and when she heard
that she went to a local dress shop and bought an outfit similar to those the
society women who lived in Newport would wear if they had to go out in daytime
under a hot sun), the latter of which she does in a double-time patter style
that sounds like she’s trying to swing a Gilbert and Sullivan song; and three
talents who strictly speaking were not jazz at all. One was the R&B singer
Big Maybelle, who did a rather raucous blues called “I Ain’t Mad at You” that
was a variation of the Count Basie-Jimmy Rushing “Boogie Woogie” from 1936 and
1937; interestingly, she had to follow an even bigger R&B talent, Dinah
Washington, who sang a version of the standard “All of Me” that showed off her
jazz as well as R&B chops. (Dinah’s performance here is yet more evidence
that, as great as Aretha Franklin was, she was only the second “Queen of Soul”: Dinah was the first, and most of
what Aretha did in the 1960’s Dinah had done as well or better in the 1950’s.)
One of the odder “ringers” was Chuck Berry, who was brought out to play “Sweet
Little Sixteen” in what proved to be one of the movie’s least satisfying clips
(despite the triumphalism of one imdb.com reviewer of this film, who wrote,
“this particular slice of time has special significance, because jazz would
soon be replaced in popularity by Rock & Roll. We watch it happen before
our eyes as a young Chuck Berry takes the stage. Backed by some excellent jazz
musicians, all looking ‘amused’ but not taking very seriously the music that
would knock them off the charts for good within a couple of years.” Actually,
Berry looks bored in this clip — almost totally lacking the galvanic energy he
brought to his performances in the Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll “quickie” films
(even though in those he was merely miming to his records instead of performing
live in real time) — and though veteran jazz drummer Jo Jones gets into the
rock spirit and plays well, trumpeter Buck Clayton and trombonist Jack
Teagarden just stand at the back of the stage holding their instruments but not
playing them. The one soloist we hear besides Berry is clarinetist Rudy
Rutherford (not Buster Bailey, as
I’d previously thought), and he’s totally clueless as to how to play a solo on
a song like this. Stern and editor Aram Avakian (whose brother George Avakian
produced the music recordings and, because he was dealing with performances
that had been filmed in real time, he couldn’t indulge in the technical
prissiness that led him to have the artists re-record in the studio songs they
had performed at Newport and splice those into allegedly “live” albums from the
Newport Festival and other large, outdoor and acoustically chancy venues)
wisely saved the two most galvanic performers for last.
Louis Armstrong gets
three songs in the movie (most of the artists just got one, maybe two if they
were lucky) and a long stage rap before he starts — which, as Charles pointed
out, indicates that he was already being thought of as an entertainer as much or
more than as a musical artist), including a duet with Jack Teagarden on Hoagy
Carmichael’s song “Rockin’ Chair.” The two had already recorded a legendary
duet on this song at New York’s Town Hall in 1947, and 11 years later they
re-created it with nice variations, including one joke about the racial
difference between the Black Armstrong and the white (though part-Native
American) Teagarden: when Teagarden sings the original lyric, “I’m gonna tan
your hide,” Armstrong replies, “I’m already tan.” The very last performer in
the film is the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who starts with a
slow-rocking version of the spiritual “Heav’n, Heav’n” and then turns on her
righteous soul power on the song “Didn’t It Rain?” The song, as you might have
guessed, is about Noah (or, as she pronounces it, “Nora”) and the Flood, and
she gets so totally “in the spirit” she out-rocks Chuck Berry and provokes the
crowd to ecstatic dancing and the kind of “spirit-filled” jumping up and down
in their seats you see at one of the more charismatic Black churches. If you
needed any more proof that all
blues, jazz, rock and soul music is firmly rooted in the songs of the
African-American church, it’s right here. She soars to a climax, does a false
ending, comes back to raise the crowd to even greater heights of spiritual
ecstasy and then seems almost embarrassed by the wild applause. “You make me
feel like I’m a star!” she says, rather shame-facedly, as if she’s saying, “No,
don’t treat me like a star. I’m not the star. God is the star.”
Then instead of trying to top “Didn’t
It Rain?” with another rockin’ gospel number, she quiets the mood and sings
Albert Hay Mallotte’s setting of the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Just about every other performance of this song makes it sound like one of the
most putrid, treacly, and downright dull pieces of music ever written — but the
sheer force and power of Mahalia’s voice, her tasteful use of ornaments and
“worrying” (stretching one syllable over several notes), the rapt attention of
the audience and the superb accompaniment of her longtime collaborator, pianist
Mildred Falls (who, alas, is unseen in the film) make this one performance of
Mallotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer” that raises the music to the sheer beauty and
sincerity of the words. There are some lapses in the photographic presentation
— like cropping Mildred Falls out of Mahalia Jackson’s performance (theirs was
one of those collaborations between singer and accompanist where they are so
“tight” together they sound as one) and not showing any shots of Thelonious Monk’s fingers on the piano keys
(as with the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix, what we most want to see in a
movie of Monk is what he did with his fingers to get those incredible sounds!)
— but overall Jazz on a Summer’s Day
is a remarkable movie that holds up excellently and is very much worth seeing.
— 7/22/20
