[Dixielandjazz] Great Day In Harlem

[John Farrell]

In addition to the books and articles about this famous photograph a
60-minute VCR tape (VHS format) of Jean Bach's Oscar-nominated movie "A
Great Day In Harlem" was released in 1995 by Wienerworld Limited (WNR 2055)
featuring the story of how the picture was set up and interviews with some
of the participants.

Lots of great OKOM on the soundtrack.

One of my kids gave it to me as a Christmas present some years ago.

John Farrell
http://homepages.tesco.net/~stridepiano/midifiles.htm

-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Spencer
Jackie McLean wasn't in the picture--see below
Graham, Charles. The Great Jazz Day. np., Da Capo Press, 2000. 143 pp.,
illus.

. The liberal, descriptive text that accompanies the many photographs in
this large (12"x 9") book is in three sections:;

I. The Big Picture--a 73-page account of the production and content of the
truly classic tiered photograph of the 57 famous jazz musicians who, on a
mid-August morning in 1958, stood on the steps of a brownstone house on New
York City's 126th Street.

II. The Trumpet Players in Central Park--a 20-page story of the 1961
photograph of 22 hornmen clustered around the tables of an outdoor café. The
front row shows Buck Clayton; Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie
Shavers.

III. The Golden Age: Time/Past. Manners and Morals at Mintons, 1941: The
Setting for a Revolution-a 44-page summary of a time that followed the
traditional "golden age" prized by "moldy figs."

This book is replete with biographies, and articles by Whitney Balliett,
Ralph Ellison, Gary Giddins, Dan Morgenstern, and Milt Hinton, who, with his
wife Mona, filmed their own supplementary pictures.

There is also a videotape of this momentous gathering. In 1988, Life
Magazine commissioned a re-creation of the picture, featuring the 12
survivors of the 1958 occasion. Sonny Rollins was in Europe so only 11 were
photographed.

Benny Golson, 75, a saxophonist survivor of The Great Jazz Day, plays
himself in Great Day in Harlem, a projected, possibly current  (2004),
Steven Spielberg movie about a fictional Eastern European citizen who wants
to collect the autographs of all the musicians in the original photograph.
In a June 13, 2004 interview with Golson in the New York Times, Ben Ratliff
said "There are several other notable jazz musicians from that photograph
who are still alive: Sonny Rollins, Hank Jones, Marian McPartland, Horace
Silver."

"Brooklyn's Jazz Renaissance", an article in The Institutes for Studies In
American Music Newsletter (Volume 33, No. 2, Spring 2004) contains a
photograph of "A Grear Day in Brooklyn" showing some 50 unnamed jazz
musicians.

Cheers.
Fred