Jammin’ the Blues (Warner Bros., 1944) and Spreadin’ the Jam (MGM, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Stormy Weather Turner Classic Movies showed two shorts that more or less related to it. One was an acknowledged classic: Jammin’ the Blues, produced by Warner Bros.’ shorts department in 1944 and featuring one of the jazz giants, Lester Young. The other was a rather silly but still fun attempt by the shorts department at MGM to do a film of a rent party, Spreadin’ the Jam, in which a young aspiring singer (Jan Clayton) is about to be thrown out of her room by the stereotypical battle-axe landlady (Helen Boise) when her fellow tenants organize a rent party for her. They include various musicians – all of them white, and all played by actors who don’t evidence any clue that they knew what to do with these instruments beyond holding them – who accompany Clayton on the title song and ultimately get the landlady to join the party, show off her own dancing skills and let everyone stay there rent-free for the next year. The most interesting person associated with Spreadin’ the Jam is its writer, Sid Kuller, who had worked on the Broadway show Meet the People and had been one of Duke Ellington’s collaborators on his 1941 musical Jump for Joy, Ellington’s attempt to do a show that would explode and destroy the racist stereotypes of Blacks in entertainment and culture in one fell swoop. (One of the song’s titles would indicate what Ellington, Kuller and lyricist Paul Francis Webster were after: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-In Now.”) Kuller made it to Hollywood as a writer of special novelty songs for the Ritz Brothers and he’s probably best known as a co-writer on the Marx Brothers’ last movie for MGM, The Big Store (1941). The director of Spreadin’ the Jam was Charles Walters, a close friend of Judy Garland who took over as her director when her therapist told her one of her problems was that her husband, director Vincente Minnelli (Liza’s father), was also her boss. He was apparently one of the Gay men who got pressed into service to escort the trophy wives of Hollywood bigwigs who didn’t want their much younger spouses going out with straight guys who might potentially sedice them.

Jammin’ the Blues is something else again, a dazzlingly inventive movie that begins with a scene that shows two concentric circles filling the screen under the credits. Then the camera pulls back and the “circles” turn out to belong to Lester Young’s trademark pork-pie hat as he plays a haunting slow blues and a narrator (who, after the opening bit of scene-setting, blessedly shuts up) explains that we’re watching a jam session in which hot musicians get together after hours for what “might be called a midnight symphony.” The film consists of three songs, the opening “Midnight Symphony,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” with singer Marie Bryant, and a closing free-for-all called “Jammin’ the Blues” in which the band changes drummers in mid-song (Sid Catlett replaces Young’s old band-mate from his days with Count Basie, Jo Jones) and Young plays the opening tenor sax solo but the close featured the far more frenzied, less lyrical tenor sax of the great “honker” Illinois Jacquet. Like the final sequence of Stormy Weather, this is a harbinger of the changes to come in music in general and Black music in particular, as Black audiences were getting less interested in jazz and more interested in rhythm and blues. Jammin’ the Blues is also notable for its director, Gjon Mili, who had made a major career as a still photographer for Life magazine but had never made a movie before. Aided by the great cinematographer Robert Burks (who would work with Alfred Hitchcock from 1951 until his death in a household accident in 1964), Jammin’ the Blues largely set the template for how jazz would be depicted on film: the fumata effects from the musicians’ cigarettes, the stark chiaroscuro lighting, the shadowy visuals (more shadowy in the case of guitarist Barney Kessel, the only white musician in the cast; his long-shot is done as a virtual silhouette and for the close-ups of him fretting and plucking his guitar, his hands were stained with prune juice so he’d look more like the other musicians) and even a few prototype music-video effects, including showing Marie Bryant first horizontally (with her striped dress making an almost abstract pattern on screen) before the camera rights itself and we see her standing up.

Though some of the multiple images had been used in jazz videos before – notably Dudley Murphy’s Black and Tan (1929) and Fred Waller’s Symphony in Black (1935), both starring Duke Ellington – Jammin’ the Blues remains a classic, not only for the illustrious talent (besides the ones mentioned above, trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, bassists Red Callender and John Simmons, and Marlowe Morris, who was a pianist when he made this movie but later played electric organ exclusively) but the overall “look” that defined for several generations of filmmakers what a jazz performance should look like on screen. Though Gordon Hollingshead, the overall head of Warners’ shorts department, was listed as the overall producer, the film was actually made by Norman Granz, who in 1942 had promoted a jazz concert to benefit the defense of the “Sleepy Lagoon” arrestees and had built a brand called “Jazz at the Philharmonic” after a concert he held in Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles in 1944. He pioneered the recording and release of actual live jazz concerts and became a very rich man from the success of his labels, Verve and Pablo. Also there’s been some uncertainty as to when Jammin’ the Blues was made and in particular before or after Lester Young’s psychologically devastating stint in the U.S. military in 1944 – they must have been getting really desperate for manpower if they drafted someone as outrageously unsuited for military service as Lester Young. The standard view of Young’s career is that his military stint (most of which he spent in the detention barracks after he was caught making a homebrew concoction of medicinal alcohol and cocaine he’d stolen from the base infirmary; his first post-war record, “D.B. Blues,” paid tribute to his stint there) wrecked his mental state and led him to a quieter, more laid-back style of playing, but in the opening of this film, almost certainly recorded before he was drafted, he’s playing with the sensitivity and laid-back lyricism of his post-war style.