• The Five Pennies (1959)

• Loring "Red" Nichols (Danny Kaye) is a cornet-playing country boy from, yes, Ogden, Utah, who goes to New York in the 1920s full of musical ambition and principles.  He plays in Wil Paradise's band and gets a whiff of New York nightlife.  A speakeasy becomes his first encounter not just with mooch---they serve 90 proof in tea cups---but also with Louis Armstrong, about whom he says: "Next to my father [a Professor of Music at Weber Academy], this is the greatest  trumpet player I've heard my whole life."  Eventually, pursuing his dream of playing Dixieland jazz, he forms the "Five Pennies" which features his wife, Bobbie Meredith, as "society chanteuse." At the peak of his fame, Red and Bobbie's daughter, Dorothy, develops polio. Red quits the on-the-road music business to move to Los Angeles where the climate is better for Dorothy and where he finds employment as a dock worker. As Dorothy becomes a teen, she learns of her father's musical past, and he is persuaded to open a small nightclub which is failing until some names from his past, among them, Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey, come to help out. --- Truly, Red played with them all, including Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Gene Krupa . . . . The clowning between Louis and Red is superb; a must see for all Utah jazz fans!.

• Stormy Weather (1943)
  
  

  Dancing great Bill "Williamson" sees his face on the cover of Theatre World magazine and reminisces: just back from World War I, he meets lovely singer Selina Rogers at a soldiers' ball and promises to come back to her when he "gets to be somebody." Years go by, and Bill and Selina's rising careers intersect only briefly, since Selina is unwilling to "settle down." Will she ever change her mind? --- Full of jazz greats, the film briefly (and perhaps unwittingly?) retraces some interesting facets of  the history of jazz music, such as James Reese Europe's return from Europe with the 369th Regiment Military Band (the "Harlem Hellfighters"), 'Bojangles' Robinson's light-footed dancing to some jazzy tunes on a Mississippi Riverboat, Fats Waller's virtuosity (and antics) on the piano, and a concluding big band jazzaganza with Cab Calloway, among others.

  
  

• New Orleans (1947)
  
  

  Music's greatest legends re-eact a Hollywood version of the birth of jazz in this resounding tribute to the town where much of it began: New Orleans.  Suave Nick Duquesne (Arturo De Cordova) is the king of Storyville/ Bourbon Street whose gambling club provides the mythic stomping grounds for Louis Armstrong and his band, as well as his bluesy sweetheart Endie (Billie Holiday). As newly arrived debutante Miralee (Dorothy Patrick) falls for both the music and for Nick, we get interesting glimpses into the cultural geography of Storyville and the French Quarter, into the boundary oscillations between high and low art (opera and jazz), Miralee's own dream of mingling jazz and classical music, and the gambler's transformation into a jazz promoter in Chicago and New York.--- Contrasting the squalor of Storyville with the genteel parlor music played in "respectable" casinos, the film is noteworthy for its lack of ostensible racial stereotypes and high caliber musical performances, including several songs by Holiday, gigs by Satchmo's band, and, late in the film, Woody Herman and his orchestra.           The DVD version features additional period shorts showcasing Armstrong in "A Rhapsody in Black and Blue" (1932) and Holiday (and Duke Ellington) in "Symphony in Black" (1935); it also includes a insightful essay on the making of New Orleans, which originated as a project for Orson Welles.

  
  

• Young Man With a Horn (1950)

  To see in Rick Martin (Kirk Douglas) an impersonation of cornet genius Bix Beiderbecke, as is commonly claimed, is even by Hollywood standards a fantastic stretch.  Yes, Douglas plays a gifted musician who lives for his music and who fetishizes his rather phallic trumpet, and his life at the end unspins toward total dissipation, but unlike Bix, who never got married and who died from an oral fixation of a different sort---the bottle---our hero miraculously recuperates under the guiding hand of the friend and the woman whom he should have recognized as his guardian angel all along. --- Hollywood mythology aside, Michael Curtiz's film has pretensions to be a art film with numerous witty repartees between Rick and the women hovering around him.  "There is something about jazz that releases inhibitions.  It's a sort of cheap mass produced narcotic," Rick's nemesis, wannabe psychiatrist, and short-time wife Amy North (Lauren Bacall) explains, and Rick, struck as he is by such (over) intellectualizing, is never short of a, however fumbling, answer.  Flush with psychoanalytic overtones, an interesting musical score, and numerous (admittedly slender) insights about jazz, Young Man With a Horn is worth seeing, after all.  While Beiderbecke may have provided the cliche of the self-destructive genius for this film---the film is based on Dorothy Baker's 1938 novel of the same title---the storytelling frame of Beiderbecke's real-life friend and biographer Hoagy Carchmichael gives it still a touch of biographical authenticity.  There is more than meets the eye---at least at first glance.

   

•   Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) 

  In 1919, returning soldier Pete Kelly wins a cornet in a crap game. By 1927, he has a small jazz band playing in a Kansas City speakeasy. Gangster Fran McCarg wants extortion money from Pete; hot flapper Ivy Conrad wants Pete in person; but Pete just wants to keep the band together. Against a background of Dixieland jazz, pervasive corruption and angst may finally force Pete to take action.

• Swing Kids (1993)
  Hamburg. Nazi Germany. 1939. Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), Thomas (Christian Bale), and Arvid (Frank Whaley) are three "Swing Kids" -- young rebel Germans who have fallen in love with the forbidden: American movies, British fashion, and Swing music. When the evil specter of Nazism hovers over them in the form of a seemingly-benign member of the Gestapo (Kenneth Branagh), Peter and Thomas must re-evaluate their priorities and values, and decide whether or not to take their rebellion beyond the dance floor.  Directed by Robert Carter, with music by James Horner (of Lion King fame), Swing Kids has a multitude of problems, the most glaring of which is its loose treatment of history and the Nazis. While it's undeniable that members of the Hitler Youth and the Gestapo were goons, Swing Kids portrays them as such in a cartoonish manner. They are simply nasty, not chillingly menacing. Motivation is not a major concern, but that's usually the case with one-dimensional bad guys. The kind of mentality that sent millions of Jews to their deaths is only weakly in evidence. The need to sanitize this film to make it palatable to multiplex audiences has robbed Swing Kids of its power. click  L for a full review

     King Vidor, The Crowd (1928)

The Crowd tells the story of John Sims (James Murray)---a modern day Everyman born on the Fourth of July, 1900---as he grows up and tries to become a "big man." Tracing his difficulties as he moves to New York City, The Crowd documents the struggles of the individual to rise above the masses depicted as both sinister and sheltering.  Separating oneself from the crowd is how one can become wealthy and powerful, but getting out of step with it can result in disaster and ruin.  The film offers numerous fine perceptions of the Roaring Twenties' consumer culture and gender expectations.  The stark geometric set design echoes is borrowed from German Expressionism and expresses Johnny's anonymity---he is a faceless amoeba swimming in the crowd, after all.  The filming on location in New York records urban life in the 1920s with a realistic touch and looks forward to the "neo-realist" filmmaking a generation later.   => Film History of the 1920s

• The Saxophone (Film for the Humanities & Sciences FFH 6677)
  This short film traces the history of the saxophone from its early use in French military bands to orchestrations by 20th-century composers and American jazz bands.  It also looks at the creator of the saxophone, the Belgian music maker Adolphe Sax, who envisioned a whole series of other wind instruments.  Viewers get a glimpse at saxophone production facilities in France and Germany, and the classical and jazz history of the saxophone is drawn, in broad brush, by Iwan Roth (Professor of Saxophone at the Conservatoire in Paris) and German saxophone composer Klaus Doldinger.  While initially engineered for classical music, the Academy---excepting brief moments of recognition, such as when Marcel Mule held a chair at the Conservatoire in Paris---did not consider the instrument "classical" enough (if you will) for serious study.   A proposed chair for the saxophone at the Frankfurt Conservatory in 1927, for example, was rejected on grounds that the sound of the saxophone is perverse.  The film makes mention of some of the major jazz saxophonists, beginning with Sidney Bechet (soprano sax), Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, to name just a few, and concludes with footage of the Berlin Jazz Festival: viewers can hear a virtual re-play of Coleman Hawkins's raspy sound in a solo played by Illinois Jacket; a stunning performance by the World Saxophone Quartet, playing Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood," concludes the program (28 min).

• Recording History (Film for the Humanities & Sciences FFH 8565)
  When America's inventor extraordinaire, Thomas Alva Edison, developed a technology to capture and replay sounds ("Mary Had a Little Lamb"), he thought he had revolutionized data processing for the business world: a dictation device to speed up the generation of  business letters. Little did he know that (Dracula notwithstanding), the sound revolution he had, quite literally, implemented would usher into the (r)evolution of the modern entertainment industry and the portability of music storage. Beginning with Edison's remarkable invention (which was anticipated, by the way, by European inventors), sound became a storable and thus sellable commodity, and has so every since;  Edison's vigorous marketing of the device, in fact, was the second half of his techno-economic genius.  This video traces the astonishing history of recorded music, from its inception through the Jazz Age (and the original recordings of the ODJB) to the Swing Era and World War II, Rock 'n' Roll and rap.  (By the way, the Berkley School of Music in Boston now offers a course on scratching, thus bringing the advent of sound storage full circle: the turntable as playback medium becomes a true instrument itself, a means of both musical pro- and reproduction).  We get brief "sound bites" from the first recorded superstar, Enrico Caruso (who earned $2 million from his early record sales), Bessie Smith (whose "Crazy Blues" ushered into the Blues craze), Bing Crosby (among the first to "croon" into the microphone), Elvis, and Beatles ("Britain's revenge for the Boston Tea Party"), and others; as well, we get brief scholarly commentaries on the cultural effects of the phonograph, such as its replacement of the piano as the dominant form of domestic entertainment and the consequent redefinition of amateur musicians into passive consumer of music who get de-skilled in the process.  (William Gaddis would later describe the parallel phenomenon with regard to piano rolls in this country in his posthumous novella Agape Agap‘).  While frequently seen as separating generations and ethnicities---the 1920s "race records" were engineered for well defined ethnic markets---the gramophone also serves as an engine of integration that laid the ground, or, rather, sound work for the Civil Rights Movement later in the century.  Beginning with the cross-fertilization of listening audiences (esp. the blues in the 1920s, which cut across an exclusively African-American clientele), Victrolas became an early motor of multiculturalism, just as juke boxes democratized music by giving consumers several dozens of musical choices at one time.  If Doris Day and Frank Sinatra were national favorites across the generational spectrum in the 1940s and early 50s,  Elvis Presley and Fats Domino, the vanguard of Rock 'n' Roll, polarized the country's musical tastes by pitting young against old in a pattern visible to this day (28 min).    => suggested complementary sites: 
       TechnoPop: The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music (NPR text and audio)
       'Playback': 100 Years of Music Machines (NPR text and audio)
   
• Tom Dowd & The Language of Music (Mark Moorman 2004, NPR text and audio)
  Tom Dowd had the mind of a rocket scientist, but the ears of a musician. When he died in 2002 at age 77, he left a legacy of recordings that trace the recent history of American popular music and the evolution of modern technology. If you listen to the discography of the Atlantic Records label---from John Coltrane through Eric Clapton---you are hearing Dowd at work, too. Dowd never got rich. His name rarely appeared in print outside liner notes. But what liner notes they were: "Layla" by Derek & the Dominoes. "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. "Free Bird" by Lynrd Skynyrd. And the list winds on through a dazzling variety of genres and artists.
   
• Romare Bearden: Visual Jazz
  Narrated by Wynton Marsalis, this video features the work of Romare Bearden (1911-1988), the visual artist who created collages and paintings in which he sought to redefine the image of humanity in terms of the African-American experience.   The film includes rare footage of Bearden at work.
   
• Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life (PBS 2007)
  Today, historians and scholars agree that Billy Strayhorn remains one of the most under-recognized American composers in history. Born in 1915, Strayhorn chose to live openly as a gay black man. It was perhaps this decision—and his lifelong devotion to Ellington—which contributed to his near anonymity as a major American composer. Ironically, Strayhorn is the composer of many of the world’s most defining and recognizable jazz standards. While Ellington is arguably the most influential and celebrated jazz composer of the 20th century, Strayhorn is unrecognized. BILLY STRAYHORN: LUSH LIFE poses answers to the question of who was Billy Strayhorn, and why is he still relatively unknown?
   
• Anita O'Day, The Life of a Jazz Singer (2007, NYT, and related links to other documentaries of female jazz singers, such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald)

  
  
  

                                                                  This site was created and is maintained by Michael Wutz; last updated 12 November 2009