by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Improvisation, a compilation of uncertain date — the DVD offered three sets of
copyright dates, including 1996 and 2006 (and imdb.com dates the set from 2004)
— of various films of jazz musicians produced under the aegis of Norman Granz.
The main raison d’être of this disc
was to present two rare film clips of Charlie Parker performing instrumentals
called “Ballade” and “Celebrity.” Film of Parker performing is almost as rare
as audio recordings of Harpo Marx’s voice; he was never in a movie and, though
audio recordings of some TV shows he appeared on exist (and a few of them were
released by the dear departed Stash Records label in the late 1980’s), the one
known kinescope of him is of a performance of “Hot House” with Dizzy Gillespie,
Dick Hyman (piano), Sandy Block (bass), Charlie Smith (drums), Leonard Feather
and an unidentified announcer from the DuMont TV studios in New York on
February 24, 1952. I remember seeing this film for the first time in 1976
during a “Jazz and the Movies” series at the Great American Music Hall in San
Francisco — and there was a galvanic shock that ran through the audience as
this completely unannounced attraction (the clip had just been discovered and
was being shown without notice) came on and everyone in the audience who hadn’t
been around when Parker was alive and active got to see a live performance of
his for the first time ever. The clips here are not quite as galvanic, mainly
because they come from an aborted 1950 follow-up Granz produced to his 1944
Warner Bros. short Jammin’ the Blues.
This one, like Jammin’ the Blues,
was directed by Gjon Mili, whose main reputation was as a still photographer,
but whereas Jammin’ the Blues had
been shot on the Warners lot (albeit with the musicians miming to
pre-recordings they had made on a Warners studio — something that’s obvious
during Marie Bryant’s vocal feature, “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” where
Lester Young’s tenor sax can be heard on the soundtrack while on screen you see
him with the sax either in his lap or him carrying it, but with the mouthpiece
nowhere near his mouth as it would be if he were playing it), this one was shot
in Mili’s own studio.
Since the studio wasn’t soundproofed, Granz had to
abandon his original plan of having the musicians filmed playing in real time
and instead go back to the pre-recording that was the standard system for
filming musical numbers (when I watched the 1996 compilation film The
Art of Singing I noticed how much more
exciting the opera clips were when we got to the TV era and the singers were
performing in real time, and the same applies for the jazz musicians featured
here). Parker is seen performing “Celebrity” with Granz’s house rhythm section
of the time — Hank Jones on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Buddy Rich on drums
(later Oscar Peterson would take Jones’s place — it’s a good section for Parker
and Rich, who played way too
loudly and obnoxiously on the 1950 Diz and Bird session for Granz and thereby weakened its value as
the one recording the three greatest geniuses in the formation of bebop —
Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk — made together, is on his best
behavior here) — and “Ballade” adds Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax. The
recordings were well known because Granz released them on disc — though my copy
of “Ballade” (on a compilation called The Charlie Parker Story,
Volume 3) had the tenor solo misattributed
to Ben Webster! (That’s not too surprising because Hawkins and Webster sounded
so similar they were often confused; the 1964 Hawkins tribute LP Body
and Soul contained a 1939 Lionel Hampton
side, “Early Session Hop,” on which both Hawkins and Webster played but the
solo was Webster’s.) But the films weren’t known at all because Granz, who got
the project as far as a rough cut but then ran out of money to pursue it
further, just sat on the films until he gave them to a French collector to
curate shortly before his death in the 1990’s.
The rest of the “Mili Studio
Sequence,” as it’s called here, includes an on-the-spot piece called “Ad Lib”
with the Jones-Brown-Rich rhythm section and two jams, one on the song “Pennies
from Heaven” and one an improvised blues called “Blues for Greasy” with Lester
Young (showing off the same icon-of-cool look he had in Jammin’ the
Blues) and Joe “Flip” Phillips as the tenor
saxophonists, Harry “Sweets” Edison (Young’s old band-mate with Count Basie) on
trumpet, Bill Harris on trombone (for some reason Harris, who had a major
reputation as one of the stars of Woody Herman’s First Herd in the 1940’s, fell
from grace with the jazz intelligentsia thereafter — oddly, because he’s in
excellent form here, fully worthy of his more prestigious confreres — with the same rhythm section backing them up and
Ella Fitzgerald coming in on a scat vocal on “Blues for Greasy.” (I admire
Ella’s ability to improvise with her voice and hold her own with major jazz
instrumentalists, but I’d much rather hear her at slow and medium tempi singing
actual words and using her musicianship and phrasing to put over great songs.)
The rest of the disc is bits and pieces of later performances: the marvelous
film of Duke Ellington and his trio (bassist John Lamb and to my mind the best
drummer Ellington ever had, Sam Woodyard) in the sculpture garden of the
Foundation Maeght at the Côte d’Azur in southern France playing a piece listed
here as “Blues for Joan Miró” but later recorded by Ellington as “The
Shepherd.” Alas, the version of it we get here is a rough cut of Ellington’s
actual performance — it’s nice to have but I miss the full version we got on
the Côte d’Azur movie, released by National Educational Television (the
precursor of PBS) at the time, which was briefly available on Video Yesteryear
(though with Ella Fitzgerald’s contributions deleted), which featured some
marvelous cut-ins of the sculptures, including a quite nice scene in which some
quick cuts between angles and reverse angles of sculptures by Giacometti made
it look like the Giacometti figures were dancing to Ellington’s music. (That
whole movie should be reissued on DVD; it contains some of Ellington’s most
remarkable late performances, and it would be nice to see Ella’s contributions
at long last!)
Then there were jam sessions from the Montreux Jazz Festivals of
1977 and 1979 — the only clips here that were in color — including a trio blues
by Count Basie with Roy Brown and drummer Jimmie Smith (though when I heard
that name announced in the credits I was hoping it would be the far more famous
electric organist Jimmy Smith!),
which Basie played in a much fuller style than usual (probably because he
didn’t have his faithful second, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, bolstering the
section) and leaped into two interludes of pure stride piano that reminded us
that Fats Waller was one of Basie’s teachers. These also featured some jams,
including the Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson blues “Kidney Stew” with a vocal by Roy
Eldridge (close to Louis Armstrong’s level as a trumpeter but far below him as
a singer, though his voice was serviceable enough for a song like this) and an
all-out performance that, since this took place right after the famous
world-championship prize fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Basie
called “Ali & Frazier” when it was released originally on LP. The
participants included Eldridge, alto saxophonist Benny Carter (who also
performed an amazing version of “These Foolish Things” with Basie and the
rhythm section), tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims and trombonists Vic Dickenson and
Al Grey. There’s a kind of relentless competitiveness to these sorts of
sessions, which Granz had been famous for since his first Jazz at the
Philharmonic concert in 1944, but they can still be fun.
Interspered with these
clips were shots of guitarist Joe Pass performing solo versions of Fats
Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss” (oddly,
these are in black-and-white even though they were dated 1979) and Ella
Fitzgerald doing a medley of two more Ellington tunes, “Do Nothing ’Til You
Hear from Me” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” with her regular
accompanists c. 1979: Paul Smith (piano), Keter Betts (bass) and Mickey Roker
(drums). Though Ella’s voice had clearly lost some of its sheen between 1950
and 1979, her superb musicianship remained and, as I noted above, I’d much
rather hear her doing this type of singing, eloquently phrasing a lyric and
showing off her musicianship within the context of a great song (or two)
instead of doing that rapid-fire scatting I admire more than I actually enjoy.
(I remember when Verve Records released an LP in the 1980’s of Ella’s
recordings with Jazz at the Philharmonic from 1949, 1952 and 1954 — records
Granz hadn’t been able to issue at the time because he didn’t yet have Ella
under contract — and as she does some of the most delicate, sensitive,
beautiful ballad singing of her life on songs like Ellington’s “I’m Just a
Lucky So-and-So,” insensitive boors in the audience are calling for her big
scat feature, “How High the Moon.” I joked once that these were the parents of
the kids who yelled “Free Bird!” at the Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts.) The Pass
pieces are also remarkable, especially “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” a typically
rambunctious Waller song Pass transforms into a sensitive, eloquent ballad.
(He’s equally eloquent on “Prelude to a Kiss,” but that song we expect to hear as a ballad.)
Improvisation is a mixed bag of clips, none of them truly
deathless jazz masterpieces (though the Parker and Pass tracks, as well as the
Carter/Basie “These Foolish Things,” come close), and the implication on the
tape — especially in the long, sententious introductions by Nat Hentoff and
Granz himself — that the assemblage will somehow have something to say about
how jazz musicians take a piece and remold it in their own image by improvising
on it doesn’t really materialize, but still it’s a fascinating sampler of
filmed jazz history, including rare glimpses of under-filmed people like Lester
Young (whose only other surviving footage is in Jammin’ the Blues and the 1957 CBS-TV special The Story of
Jazz, yet another legendary jazz movie that
isn’t available complete on DVD and deserves to be) and Charlie Parker (who was
so under-filmed that no footage
of him was known to exist until the DuMont “Hot House” surfaced over two
decades after his death in 1955). The reason Parker’s other TV appearances are
lost is probably that they were strictly local shows, and therefore there was
no reason to kinescope them (a kinescope was simply a film from a camera stuck
in front of a TV screen, and it was used to be able to show national shows on
the East and West Coasts in the same time slot: the show would air live on the
East Coast and the kinescope would be flown across the country to be shown
three hours later on the West Coast, albeit in much worse image quality: reason
enough for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball to want I Love Lucy to be done on film, so the image quality would be
consistent everywhere in the U.S.), and as I told Charles the holy grail of
Parker’s known TV appearances would be his guest shot on the first Jerry Lewis
muscular dystrophy telethon in 1953, when he was only supposed to be on for 15
minutes but got so into the spirit of the thing he played for a full hour.
(Alas, not even an audio recording is known to exist of that one!)
Improvisation is presented as a two-DVD set, with the jazz clips
on disc one and an odd set of bonus features on disc two: a half-hour of silent outtakes from the 1950 Mili film (which is
interesting but gets quite wearing after a while), including one song that was
not included in the rough cut and whose soundtrack frustratingly does not
survive: Ella Fitzgerald singing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Ella didn’t record
the song commercially for another 12 years, when Granz produced a pair of
albums with Nelson Riddle arranging for her, Ella Swings Brightly
with Nelson and Ella Swings
Gently with Nelson; “I Only Have Eyes for
You” is on the Swings Brightly
album and she does it uptempo, with a typically brassy Riddle arrangement that
just tends to get in the way (he wrote some great charts for Ella on the
Gershwin songbook album they’d done together in 1959, but this one is him at
his loud, obnoxious worst, setting up a cacophonous din behind her; Frank
Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole and Judy Garland could fight back against a Riddle
arrangement like this, but Ella’s more delicate art didn’t stand a chance),
while even without the soundtrack (with subtitles giving the lyrics) one can
tell that Ella is singing this very
slowly, stretching vowel sounds over several notes (a sort of ornamentation
that was one of her trademarks). Some of director Mili’s close-ups of her in
this sequence are utterly haunting; usually Ella was photographed either from
miles away or through diffusers to smooth out her somewhat craggy face, but
Mili’s lights burn all of her features, flattering or otherwise, into our
consciousness and rub against the common view of Ella as a great singer but one
far less emotionally committed to her art than, say, Billie Holiday. What a
pity the soundtrack recording did not survive! (Ella’s commercial recording is
available from archive.org at https://archive.org/details/LouisArmstrongVellaFitzgerald-IOnlyHaveEyesForYou,
but for some reason it’s identified as an Armstrong-Fitzgerald collaboration
even though he had nothing to do with it.)
The bonus disc also features a
transfer of Jammin’ the Blues
(welcome but the video quality is oddly inferior to the version currently shown
occasionally on Turner Classic Movies) and some interviews with Hank Jones,
Harry “Sweets” Edison and Clark Terry about the 1950 Mili film and with Jay
McShann (with whom he made his first commercial recordings), Phil Woods, record
producer and critic Ira Gitler, James Moody, Slide Hampton, Roy Haynes and
Jimmy Heath about Charlie Parker. It’s amusing to note that at first Hank Jones
wasn’t even sure he was in the
Mili film; he remembered participating in the pre-recordings but not actually shooting the film — midway through the
interview someone must have shown him either a clip or a still from the film
and Jones realized he had been in
it, but still had no recollection of it — while the Parker interviews are
fascinating and a welcome antidote to what’s become the standard view of him,
reinforced by the biographies (especially Ross Russell’s Bird Lives) and Clint Eastwood’s magnificent film Bird, which for all its skill at reproducing the nighttime
atmosphere of the jazz world and Forest Whitaker’s incredible portrayal of
Parker (he and Diane Venora, who played Parker’s partner Chan Richardson,
didn’t get the Academy Award nominations they deserved and Whitaker eventually
won the Oscar for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland which he’d deserved for playing Charlie Parker 18
years earlier) did sometimes make
it seem like the great tragedy of Parker’s life was that the Betty Ford Clinic
didn’t yet exist.
The Parker of legend is a barely functional basket case who
had to be filled up with drugs and propped up on a bandstand to be able to
perform at all; the Parker these people (all of whom knew him personally and at
least two of whom, McShann and Haynes, worked with him for years) remembered
was a literate, intelligent man with an amazing command of music that allowed
him to learn a song and be able to play deathless improvisations on it after
hearing it just once. There are innumerable stories of Parker sitting in during
big-band concerts and playing an unfamiliar band book as if he’d been
rehearsing with them for months — and at least one such appearance, with Woody
Herman’s Third Herd in 1951, was released on LP — and Woods’ stories of him are
perhaps the most fascinating of all. Woods recalled that when he first met
Parker he was playing an alto sax and was disappointed with the mouthpiece, the
reed, the ligatures that hold the two together — and he recalled Parker playing
a gig on baritone sax and asking to borrow his alto. Woods lent him the
instrument, and Parker played such a breathtaking set with Woods’ horn Woods
finally realized, “The problem isn’t the instrument. It’s me. I need to practice more.” Overall, Improvisation is a fascinating movie for jazz fans — the Parker
sequences alone make it self-recommending — though it’s far from the first jazz
video I would recommend to anyone just coming to jazz “fresh” without a
thorough background in the music and its history.
