Getting real

Jazz films that aim to be true

by Chris Fujiwara

"JAZZ MANIA: A TRIBUTE TO RHAPSODY FILMS," At the Harvard Film Archive January 9 through January 27.

Movies have generally showed jazz to be an art of outsiders, of the marginal and the dispossessed, but the moral and political implications of this marginality have varied. If Hollywood films of the '40s, '50s, and '60s sometimes used the rhythms and instruments of jazz to import the sleazier connotations of sex and danger, they just as often used its harmonies to imply sophistication and superiority. Director-producer Otto Preminger proved himself the supreme master of the latter gambit, first when he commissioned David Raksin to write the theme of Laura (1944) and again when he showed the James Stewart character in Anatomy of a Murder (1959) to be too hip for the backwater town he's in by sitting him on a piano bench beside Duke Ellington.

The collection of Rhapsody Films (a company run by filmmaker and attorney Bruce Ricker) that the Harvard Film Archive is showcasing this month reveals much about what jazz and film can mean to each other. Mainly, what film can mean to jazz, because most of these films are jazz films first and films second. All of them seek to document and interpret the experience of creating music and the communication between musicians and their audience. A number of themes run through the films: jazz as an American art and as an art created by African-Americans; the loss of jazz's status as mass entertainment in the '40s; its creators' subsequent struggle to keep the form alive without popular or government support.

Among the concert films in the Harvard series, Roger Tilton's 1954 Jazz Dance (January 9 at 2 p.m. and 19 at 9:15 p.m.) stands out. With now-venerable vérité director Richard Leacock, no less, as cinematographer, the film documents a Manhattan concert by trumpeter Jimmy McPartland, clarinettist Pee Wee Russell, and pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith. They play in a traditional, early-jazz style in a post-bebop, barely pre-rock-and-roll era, but the audience members, who appear to be mostly in their 20s, give no hint of retro posing. Because of their uninhibited reactions and the way the movie captures them, this seemingly casual, out-of-nowhere film may be unsurpassed in its evocation of music as a communal activity and a source of pure pleasure.

Jazz Dance uses the event to structure the film, a tactic also employed in Bruce Ricker's elegant, ingratiating The Last of the Blue Devils (January 23 at 3 p.m. and 24 at 3:30 p.m.). Here, veteran Kansas City musicians -- among them Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, and Jay McShann -- converge on a Kansas City union hall to participate in what appears to be a semi-private informal concert. Although the tone of the film is overwhelmingly affirmative, especially whenever Turner sings, Ricker makes us aware of the decrepit, deserted condition of a city here remembered nostalgically as a non-stop festival of music where, as one raconteur has it, "there was no Depression."

The full-length biographical documentary is a form with many pitfalls -- few of which are avoided, unfortunately, by Harrison Engle's 1989 Benny Carter: Symphony in Riffs (January 13 at 7 p.m.), a routine affair in which alto-saxophonist/trumpeter Carter spends a few days being followed around by a camera crew as he performs, records, reminisces, and picks up awards. In Arthur Elgort's 1991 Texas Tenor: The Illinois Jacquet Story (January 12 at 9:15 p.m.), however, the velvety black-and-white photography seals off the raucous tenor-saxophonist in a sensuous alternate universe of his own, where Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" is a spiritual and existential touchstone.

Charlotte Zwerin's 1988 Straight, No Chaser (January 24 at 1 p.m.) is an unexpectedly revealing portrait of the reclusive Thelonious Monk, mainly because the filmmakers used copious, astonishing footage taken of the pianist in late 1967. At a Columbia record date, Monk gives producer Teo Macero shit for not taping a rehearsal; in Europe, he manages to pull together an underrehearsed octet with a leadership style that looks like laissez-faire. Hans Hylkema's 1991 Last Date (January 26 at 7 p.m.) is a quietly persuasive attempt to conjure the spirit of the mercurial, virtuoso multi-reed player Eric Dolphy. Immersing us in Dolphy's music and life through long musical passages and long camera takes, Last Date is a kind of shrine, and it has an apposite airiness and multidimensionality.

Many films in the series are small-scale portraits of musicians built loosely around the given time and place of the filming. Three of the most compelling of these will be shown together on January 27 (starting at 7 p.m.). Johan van der Keuken's Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe, very much an available-light film, shows the tenor-saxophonist in a subdued mood in Amsterdam, where he was living at the time (1967). The tortured lyricism of Webster's playing is sufficient to turn this gently threatening mood piece into high tragedy. David, Moffett, and Ornette (1966, directed by Dick Fontaine) is about bassist David Izenzon, drummer Charles Moffett, and altoist Ornette Coleman, who arrive in Paris to record the soundtrack for a movie called Who's Crazy? The portrait of the trio becomes an ironic essay in dignity in the face of insanity. "Mars" in Ken Levis's Jackie McLean on Mars (1976) is Hartford, where the alto-saxophonist, tired of the financial insecurity of the working musician, went to teach. McLean talks about the JFK assassination, heroin, and racism, and he articulates what many of the films in the series hint at: "Jazz flourishes with all the other music in Europe and Japan. This is the country where it doesn't flourish, because they got no audience for it, because everybody is a Big Mac mentally."

Thomas Reichman's devastating Mingus (January 11 at 9 p.m. and 13 at 9:30 p.m.) intercuts footage of Charles Mingus and his band at a 1968 club date with scenes in which the bassist talks about politics, women, and his predicament as a black artist as he waits to be evicted from his Manhattan loft. The film makes itself worthy of its volatile subject, both in its form and in certain of its images. I prefer this less sensitive, high-contrast black-and-white film stock, which sometimes makes the light areas of a composition look as if they'd been burned out of the black, to the richer stock of the Illinois Jacquet film. Frank Cassenti's 1984 Mystery, Mister Ra (January 25 at 9:15 p.m.) finds Sun Ra -- pianist, bandleader, and "Minister of Culture of the Master Creator of the Omniverse" -- in the most implacable of moods, threatening dark consequences for Planet Earth and its inhabitants but shrugging it all off with "I really don't care." Unlike drummer Art Blakey, who sees his band as a school for leaders (Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger will be shown January 9 at 2 p.m. and 19 at 9:15 p.m.), Ra hates it when his band members leave the fold -- just one more thing "that's got to stop before this planet can go any further."

The Harvard series also includes three fiction films about jazz. In Herbert Danska's 1966 independent feature Sweet Love, Bitter (January 23 at 9 p.m. and 24 at 7 p.m.), comedian and activist Dick Gregory plays a self-destructive genius saxophonist named Eagle who appears to be a fictionalized version of Charlie Parker. Unspontaneous and overstated, the film represents an uneasy compromise between Hollywood and a rougher, underground milieu and editing style: the camerawork is slick, but the direction is clumsy. By focusing on a white college professor (Don Murray) who befriends Eagle, the film bears down on its obsessive theme: white liberal hypocrisy about racism. This is interesting, but the only aspect in which the film can be called a success is the lyrical score by pianist Mal Waldron.

In its unrelieved grimness and in concentrating on the relationship between a black man and a white man, Sweet Love, Bitter anticipates Clint Eastwood's better-known Charlie Parker movie, the 1988 Bird (January 23 at 6 p.m.). Both films also dub in the alto saxophone of Charles McPherson to bolster their claims for their central figure's musical stature. Eastwood's film is problematic for many reasons, but it's valuable as an object lesson. Any film that tries to represent the creative process has its work cut out for it. Some films portray the artist as bigger than life and end up suggesting that artistic genius is mostly showmanship (something like this happens in the Illinois Jacquet film). Others throw a discreet veil over the act of making art, implying that what goes on in between the creative impulse and the final product simply can't be shown (Kenji Mizoguchi's 1946 Utamaro and His Five Women, and even Vincent Minnelli's van Gogh bio-pic, Lust for Life). Bird tries to combine the two approaches and ultimately exposes the limitations of both. Despite itself, it makes the artist into an uncomfortable figure, a dreadful spirit that must be exorcised.

I'll merely mention the presence in the series of Otto Preminger's great Anatomy of a Murder (January 7 at 7:45 p.m.), with its magnificent Duke Ellington score. The series offers plenty of other treats, among which special notice should be taken of the sympathetic documentary about pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi (January 13 at 7 p.m.) and a strange educational film from 1966 in which pianist Bill Evans talks with his brother Harry about the teaching of jazz, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans (January 19 at 7 p.m. and 27 at 9 p.m.).