State of the Art

Jazz Mania: A tribute to Rhapsody Films

by Chris Fujiwara

Encompassing concert footage, documentaries on musicians, and fiction films, the Harvard Film Archive's upcoming series, "Jazz Mania: A Tribute to Rhapsody Films," adds up to an entertaining history of jazz and a gripping, sometimes melancholy, survey of the struggles of a minority, quasi-underground culture to create and sustain it.

Rhapsody head honcho Bruce Ricker himself directed the most ingratiating of the concert films, The Last of the Blue Devils (1979, screening January 23), which elegantly tells a casual history of Kansas City jazz in between performances by singer Big Joe Turner, pianist Jay McShann, and Count Basie and his orchestra. This is not to be missed; nor is Roger Tilton's Jazz Dance (1954, screening January 9 and 19), a stirring cinéma-vérité chronicle of a traditional jazz concert by trumpeter Jimmy McPartland, clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, and pianist Willie "the Lion" Smith.

Three outstanding short studies of musicians will be shown together on Wednesday, January 27: Johan van der Keuken's Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (1967); Dick Fontaine's David, Moffett, and Ornette (1966), on the Ornette Coleman Trio; and Ken Levis's Jackie McLean on Mars (1979). These films show how three American artists fought to cope with the indifference of an American music scene from which all three, at the periods covered in the films, had more or less become exiles. Similar in theme, Thomas Reichman's disturbing Mingus (1968) intercuts footage of Charles Mingus and his band at a 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.

On a larger scale are biographical studies such as Harrison Engle's portrait of alto saxophonist and trumpeter Benny Carter (Benny Carter: Symphony in Riffs, 1989) and Arthur Elgort's of tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet (Texas Tenor: The Illinois Jacquet Story, 1991). Charlotte Zwerin's Straight, No Chaser (1988), the most commercially successful of these films, makes extensive use of astonishing footage taken of pianist Thelonious Monk in late 1967 in recording studios, in concert, and in private life. Other documentaries in the series spotlight drummers Art Blakey and Elvin Jones; pianists Jaki Byard, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Bill Evans, and Sun Ra; guitarist Jim Hall; saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, and Archie Shepp; and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The oddball in the Rhapsody collection is Herbert Danska's Sweet Love, Bitter (1966), an independent feature film in which comedian and activist Dick Gregory plays a self-destructive genius saxophonist named Eagle who appears to be a fictionalized version of Charlie Parker. The unrelieved grimness of tone, offset only by pianist Mal Waldron's lyrical score, would later be adopted by Clint Eastwood for his own movie on Parker, Bird (1988). The Eastwood film will also be shown in the Harvard series, as will Otto Preminger's vastly more entertaining Anatomy of a Murder (1959) with its magnificent Duke Ellington score.

"Jazz Mania: A Tribute to Rhapsody Films" will run from Wednesday, January 6, through Wednesday, January 27, at the Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge. Call 495-4700.