Jammin 'the blues

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Movie
German title Jammin 'the blues
Original title Jammin 'the blues
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1944
length 10 mins
Rod
Director Gjon Mili
production Gordon Hollingshead
camera Robert Burks
occupation
Lester Young, appearance in New York's Famous Door (ca.September 1946; photography by William P. Gottlieb )

Jammin 'the Blues is a 1944 American jazz music short film that features musicians from the jazz scene of the time such as Lester Young , Red Callender , Sweets Edison , Marlowe Morris , Sid Catlett , Jo Jones , John Simmons and Illinois Jacquet . Also present (but not recognizable) is Barney Kessel . The documentary is considered the first Hollywood film to show the artistry of African American jazz musicians.

Story of the film

In 1944 the jazz impresario Norman Granz advised the photographer and filmmaker Gjon Mili on the realization of the musical short film Jammin 'the Blues for the Warner Brothers . Granz, who coordinated the film project, brought together musicians from the Count Basie Orchestra who were in Los Angeles with musicians such as Marlowe Morris, Red Callender and Barney Kessel.

For the film, sound material for the film was initially recorded in the Warner Studios in Burbank in August 1944, as it was technically not yet possible to record music and images at the same time. While Basie's musicians continued their tours in northern California, Granz and Mili selected the songs from the pool that they wanted to put on film. After the Basie musicians came back to Los Angeles, the film recordings were made and Gili synchronized them with the soundtrack.

At the beginning of the film the voice comes from the off : “This is a jam session . Quite often teses great artists gather and play ad lib hot music. It could be called a midnight symphony " . First the musicians play the two ballads Midnight Symphony , with the soloists Lester Young (with his pork pie hat ) and Sweets Edison, as well as On the Sunny Side of the Street , sung by Marie Bryant, with another solo by Lester Young. This is followed by the up-tempo number Jammin 'the Blues (soloists: Jacquet, Edison, Kessel and Morris), in which a dance contribution by Archie Savage and Marie Bryant is shown.

The dance interlude was a compromise between Granz / Gili and the Warner studio bosses, who originally wanted "hundreds of jitterbug dancers" in the film, which the two filmmakers did not want to get involved with. Warner wanted an all-black group of musicians; Granz, however, got the white guitarist Barney Kessel through; the compromise then turned out to be such that the film was recorded in deep shadows. For the final scene, the Warner studio managers insisted that Kessel's fingers be colored with berry juice.

Warner distributed the film to theaters across the United States. For the young Norman Granz, the film, released at the end of December 1944, represented free publicity for his concert series Jazz at the Philharmonic , which he had started in July of that year at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles , and in which most of the musicians from Jammin 'the Blues occurred.

Mili and Granz worked together again in 1950 on a film project ( improvisation ), which, however, was not fully realized. In it Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins appeared together.

The film also boosted the career of cameraman Robert Burks , who became known from the 1950s for his work on Alfred Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest and Vertigo .

Awards

Gordon Hollingshead was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Short Film category for its 1945 production . The film was listed in 1995 as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in the National Film Registry .

reception

Compared to other music films with black musicians, the film received an unusually strong response. When it came out, the film was received positively by American magazines such as Life , Time , Ebony and Downbeat ; For example, the magazine Ebony reported in a four-page article that the color limit had now been exceeded for the first time. However, he did not succeed in creating a stylistic trend in the production of similar music films in Hollywood. Arthur Knight sums up the critical voices; the film was described as a "milestone", as "one of the few honest motion pictures about jazz" (according to Whitney Balliett ) and "the greatest film to depict jazz musicians in their natural habitat."

Arthur Knight argued in his study of Jammin 'the Blues that the “ look of the music” influences how listeners classify what they hear. The critic Josh Kun accused him of not having dealt primarily with the music of the film, but rather with the "colored social bodies who are playing the music that the viewer sees and hears."

Daniel Eagan limits that Jammin 'the Blues, in contrast to the then popular soundies, adopt the "pedantic tone of an educational film" that wants to celebrate jazz as a high culture. The portrayal of the musicians in the film is also said to have turned them into "mysterious and romantic figures"; this is how Lester Young becomes a film noir figure, enveloped in cigarette smoke. Many jazz musicians would have used this role as a template for their own (stage) performance.

According to Krin Gabbard, the film helped make Lester Young a "great jazz icon". In the public eye, he was not perceived as the typical happy go-local entertainer , but as a demi-monde artist who did not fulfill the racist stereotypes about African-Americans of the time. Although the cinematic portrait of Lester Young was followed by more conventional depictions of black musicians such as the laughing Jo Jones, with whom the film ends, Jammin 'the Blues portrayed the artists as hipsters and part of the avant-garde. Mili adapted expressionist forms of German film from the Time of the Weimar Republic , embodied in Hollywood by Fritz Lang , Billy Wilder and Jacques Tourneur .

Dave Gelly points out how Gili used special cinematic means to leave the conventions of the music film of the time behind him: For example, Lester Young can be seen in the opening scene alone in an empty room, but when the camera returns to him he is sitting in the middle of it Band .

Web links

Further literature

  • Arthur Knight: Jammin 'the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944 . In: Representing Jazz , ed. Krib Gabbard, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 11-53

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Preston Whaley Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the Transformation of US Culture Harvard University Press 2004, p. 105
  2. a b c d e Dave Gelly: Being Prez: the life and music of Lester Young 2007, pp. 95 ff.
  3. Information at NPR Jazz (2012)
  4. ^ David Meeker: Jazz in the Movies , 1982, Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-76147-5
  5. ^ A b Arthur Knight: Disintegrating the musical: Black performance and American musical film , Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 196 ff.
  6. ^ David Butler: Jazz noir: listening to music from Phantom lady to The last seduction , p. 45
  7. ^ A b c Daniel Eagan: National Film Preservation Board (US): America's film legacy: the authoritative guide to the landmark movies , p. 375 f.
  8. improvisation. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .
  9. Information on film and video at Open Culture
  10. Thomas Cripps: Making movies Black: the Hollywood message movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 199 ff.
  11. Jam Session in Movie Land: Jamming Jumps the Movie Line Ebony 1 (November 1945): 6-9
  12. Krin Gabbard: Representing jazz , p. 13 f.
  13. Jump up ↑ Josh Kun: Audiotopia: music, race, and America (American Crossroads) ISBN 978-0-520-24424-5 , p. 118
  14. Krin Gabbard: Jammin 'at the margins: jazz and the American cinema ISBN 978-0-226-27789-9 , pp. 110 ff.