MTV launched in 1981 with a video for the Buggles song “Video Killed The Radio Star,” and the medium of music has never been the same.
Most music that is. Music at the edges and in the niches that line mass, popular culture has been little affected by music videos. Opera and experimental Western art music have been working with visual mediums since the 1920s, so MTV was no revolution for them. And though there are the occasional jazz promotional videos, jazz is not well-suited for short form visuals. It is an abstract and non-narrative musical genre, a tricky vehicle for concise sequential storytelling. Yes, jazz can be used to tell stories and for dramatic purposes, but that’s a layer of artifice over the roots.
But the visual is all we have during this pandemic, that’s how we’re getting “live” music. This column has already looked at the streaming situation, performances that can be experienced in real time or via archives, which fits into the bell curve standard of some good on one end, some bad at the other, with a bulge of indifference in the middle.
There is jazz in the middle of the two poles of live performance and music video, a substantial catalogue of filmic jazz, old and new, that you, the viewer who is kept by circumstances from the live experience, can enjoy from your own home. Most of these are immediately available.
Vocalist Sara Serpa has a new album, Recognition, out on Biophilia records. She has made more than just an album. The music serves as the soundtrack to a film of the same name by director Bruno Soares. Serpa is one of the great contemporary singers, her voice has a clear-toned beauty, her delivery is unadorned and opens up the weight of her sound, and, like an instrumentalist, she uses phrasing as her means of expression. That is the classic jazz singer’s resume.
Her album, with tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist David Virelles, and harpist Zeena Parkins, is both delicate and dark. Listen to it alone and the sense that it is about something comes through with uncanny force. It is superb accompanying Soares video, which is about 52 minutes long. The director puts together footage of physical labor (including worker bees), with intertitles that create a hard-eyed, critical view of the racist exploitation of African workers. The film sources Serpa’s own family’s Super8 footage, and there is an aching distance between the camera’s eye and these suffering people, now lost to time. This is a hybrid of documentary and art that is more revealing and abrading than any obvious polemic could be. The album is available at http://biophiliarecords.com as a digital download, with an included code to stream the video.
More on the standard performance side are videos from saxophonist Kamasi Washington and pianist Fred Hersch. Amazon Prime Video hosts Kamasi Washington, Live at the Apollo Theater, a concert from Washington and his Next Step band that was live February 2019. It’s not a streaming archive, it’s a concert film, so the on-stage scenes are interspersed with still photos, backstage footage, and comments from Washington himself—he sounds like he’s answering questions that have been left off the soundtrack. The music is cooking, he and his musicians are masters of high energy spiritual jazz, and the production is excellent, with full, detailed sound and direction that is anchored on Washington while cutting to the types of details that give you a solid feeling for his musicians’ personalities.
What the film does well that most of the live-streaming fails at is changing the camera view in a way that shows the interplay between the musicians. Live in the club, you can take it all in with your eyes and ears simultaneously, but the screen chooses for you, and it has to be as jazzy as the music, and for Live at the Apollo Theater, it is.
Hersch’s My Coma Dreams is not new, it’s a musical theater work that was released on DVD in 2014, and as of July is now available for free on YouTube (https://youtu.be/f1e-AynJvhk). Hersch has had HIV for a long time now, and in 2008 he was so ill that he was put into a medically induced coma. While in the coma, he dreamt, and for this piece Herschel Garfein shaped these dreams into a book and libretto, along with narration delivered by the character of Hersch’s partner Scott (this is a one-man performance, with singer/actor Michael Winther playing all the roles; Fred’s dreams, Scott, bits about how comas are portrayed in TV shows and movies, and what they are really like, including an upsetting number of tubes that invade the body).
The video is a recorded live performance, like that Hamilton movie that you’ve probably seen, featuring multiple cameras, close-ups and long views, peeks in on the musicians—Hersch leads the ensemble and there’s plenty of space in the piece for improvising inside his own score. This is a terrific piece of musical theater that hits all the knowing stylistic notes, with many loving, down-home touches. It stands on its own, and is even more powerful if you know that Hersch had to relearn how to play the piano after he regained consciousness, and is, at least in this critic’s opinion, an even finer musician than he was before 2008.
All of the above are worthwhile and cover a lot of jazz ground. The rest are problematic, matching jazz’ own problematic relationship with the movies. It boils down to the question, has there ever been a good jazz movie?
There’s been notable ones, but they’re not very good, full of dramatic flaws and unable to make sense of the music. What’s a jazz story after all? Even This is Spinal Tap can be about the rise and fall of the world’s loudest rock band, but no one turns into a star playing jazz, so where’s the story?
Correction: Miles Davis became a star playing jazz, and in 2015 Don Cheadle released his movie about Davis, Miles Ahead. It’s about Miles in the late ‘70s, when he was in too much pain and on too many drugs to make music, and it’s not good. Cheadle is fine and there are some insightful and intriguing depictions both of historical moments, like Miles in the studio with Gil Evans, and of the man himself, like taking a $20 bill from his date so he could write his phone number on it and give it to another woman. But to make the movie work, i.e. to get it financed, he had to invent a white buddy character, and the plot, which revolves around getting one’s hands on a tape of what Miles has been up to (a real McGuffin in that he hasn’t been up to anything in the movie) devolves into a car chase with gun play. Better to watch the recent Miles Davis” Birth of the Cool documentary, which gives a solid history of the man and his music making (Netflix).
There’s also Clint Eastwood’s Bird. That has a fine performance by Forrest Whitaker as Charlie Parker, and features some great details, like Parker and his Quintet (with Michael Zelniker as Red Rodney), playing a bar mitzvah. But it’s misshapen, and it never tells us much about the man, other than his personal failings, or even why he was one of the most important musicians of the 20th century (Amazon Prime). The rest is mainly fictional stories, though those at times feature real musicians, like Louis Armstrong (not as himself) appearing in Paris Blues, a 1961 vehicle for Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier busting down racial barriers and busting open with the beatniks—though it’s not daring enough to pair off Newman with Diahann Carrol and Poitier with Joanne Woodward. Newman plays a trombonist named Ram Bowen, and that’s pretty much the movie (not currently streaming).
Kirk Douglas stars as a fictionalized Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With a Horn (1950). This is a solid drama with solid music, though it’s more Harry James than Bix (it is James who plays the trumpet behind Douglas). There’s a good connection between music and life, and the supporting cast is stellar: Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Hoagy Carmichael, and Juano Hernandez, and the director is the great craftsman Michael Curtiz (Amazon Prime). Recommended.
More fictional, or more archetypal, is Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, from 1990, with Denzel Washington as trumpeter Bleek Gilliam and Wesley Snipes as saxophonist Shadow Henderson. There’s some ghosts of the Miles Davis-John Coltrane Quintet inside this movie, but it’s also a prisoner of its era. it comes on the heels of the jazz traditionalist revival started by Wynton Marsalis, and it’s just too respectful of the musicians, there’s little grit, and there’s nothing bluesy about the personal melodramas within (Amazon Prime).
The best jazz movie of all, and a very good movie, is currently absent from streaming services: 1986’s Round Midnight, with Bertrand Tavernier directing the great saxophonist Dexter Gordon in the role of Dale Turner, a hybrid of saxophonist Lester Young’s and pianist Bud Powell’s personal history. The supporting cast includes Herbie Hancock, Johh McLaughlin, and Bobby Hutcherson as musicians playing with Turner in Paris. The movie shows the integration of life and music, of making art through and out of dissolution, and follows something of the arc of Gordon’s own career, which was almost cut short through drinking and drug addiction—Gordon received an Academy Award nomination for best actor. This is a quiet, loving, and unsentimental movie with a feeling of reality and plangent diegetic music that works as part of the story. It’s worth seeking out until it, hopefully, comes to a digital platform.
