[Dixielandjazz] FW: "The Soundies: A Musical History" reviewed

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This one from my mate, Denis King, who runs the Australian Dance Bands list.
The ŒThursday¹ mentioned is presumably this week, for you lucky people in
the US.
We in Australia and Europe may not get to see it for some time, if ever.
Should be worth looking out for.
Kind regards,
Bill. 
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Panoram Killed the Radio Star

by Will Friedwald
New York Sun, March 5, 2007

Duke Ellington's "Cottontail" is primarily known as a virtuoso
showcase for the amazing tenor saxophone of Ben Webster. Yet my
favorite moment in the piece occurs just after that legendary solo:
In what classical musicians would call a "tutti" passage, all the
brass players reunite to play a vigorous, ascending series of
phrases (derived from the chords to the bridge of Gershwin's "I Got
Rhythm").

The pure sound of the number alone is inspiring enough, but in
the "soundie" (I will explain in a minute) for "Cottontail," we are
shown a group of jitterbug dancers; at the moment when that phrase
occurs, three girls fly into a series of gravity defying
somersaults, transforming into superhuman projectiles that flash
across the screen in perfect rhythm.

I saw that scene for the first time some 30 years ago, and ever
since then, I have watched it hundreds of times, nearly as often as
I have played Ellington's classic 1940 recording. More important,
every time I hear the song, whether played by Ellington or someone
else, in concert or on a recording, I replay that image in my head,
of those nine dancers moving to the swinging majesty of the
Maestro's masterpiece.

This moment is the opening salvo of "The Soundies: A Musical
History," a 76-minute documentary making its premiere ** Thursday on
PBS**, hosted by the singer and pop music authority Michael Feinstein.
As Mr. Feinstein and Mark Cantor (the world's premier historian on
the subject) explain, the soundies were a series of three-minute
films made by the Mills Novelty Company between 1940 and 1947 --
about 1,865 in all. The soundies were made to be exhibited
in "Panoram" machines, innovative audio-video jukeboxes in which 16
mm film was projected through a series of mirrors onto a screen
roughly the size of a TV set or computer monitor for a dime a throw.

During the war years, as Panoram machines were installed in bars,
roadhouses, diners, and other public establishments, the soundies
were so popular that studios had trouble turning them out fast
enough: Three studios were set up, in New York, Hollywood, and
Chicago, with the objective of producing eight of these three-minute
filmettes a week. Performers would record the audio portions first,
then lip-synch to them on camera a few days later.

The Mills Novelty Company didn't have access the biggest names, such
as Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, or Tommy Dorsey -- except among the
black community, where it could get top talent like Ellington, Cab
Calloway, Count Basie, and a young Nat King Cole (shown singing "The
Frim Fram Sauce" while seated at a table in a restaurant, trying to
get the attention of a waiter and, in a surreal move, interacting
with himself on a panoram screen).

As the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern explains in the film, the
soundies catered to every taste, from romantic crooners such as
Buddy Clark, to country acts such as Merle Travis, to comedy
musicians like Spike Jones and Mel Blanc, to all manner of swinging
big bands, and vocal groups and dance acts. Nothing beats the
amazing combination of the Ellington band and the famous swing dance
troupe, Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. At the opposite end of the spectrum
is the Martins, a marvelous vocal group led by future songwriter
Hugh Martin, whose lovely harmonies are misdirected into a novelty
instrumental by Raymond Scott; in the background, a bizarre ménage
à trois involving a drunk, an obese woman, and a duck makes things
even stranger.

Contemporary documentarians and video producers inevitably compare
the soundies phenomenon to MTV, and PBS's show does the same. The
idea is to make them seem more relevant to a modern audience, but
with MTV having largely abandoned the music video in favor of
lowbrow reality shows in recent years, the producers should instead
have noted that soundies were the YouTube of the 1940s. (Naturally,
hundreds of soundies are currently available for viewing on
youtube.com.)

Likewise, it's an obvious tactic to get some contemporary musical
figure to talk about the performers in the soundies -- and it makes
perfect sense to have Mr. Feinstein and Wynton Marsalis here as
talking heads. But why do the producers think the 60-year-old smooth
jazz keyboardist George Duke and the lead singer of a group called
Wall of Voodoo, Stan Ridgeway, will appeal to the younger
demographic -- why not John Pizzarelli or Diana Krall? In fact, the
producers sabotage "Cottontail" by cutting to Mr. Duke at the
climax, just so he can say the name "Duke Ellington" three times, as
if it were "Beetlejuice." It would have made more sense to have Jay-
Z tell us that Cab Calloway was the original rapper.

Yet this cheesiness is part and parcel of the soundies tradition:
PBS's program features excellent segments dedicated to the use of
jingoistic flag-waving visuals, the copious amounts of cheesecake
and soft-core porn (there are feasts for any eyes that appreciate
women in uniform, such as Lois Collier and the Glamourettes), and
black performers surrounded by iconography that isn't so much
politically incorrect as blatantly racist (e.g. the great dancer
Dorothy Dandridge doing the jig in the jungle in Hottentot drag
while a bespectacled cannibal stirs a pot with his trombone). We
also see the magnificent Louis Armstrong and his orchestra togged
out in respectable dinner jackets in front of a giant shoeshine
stand -- there's no shortage of watermelon, dice, and burnt cork
faces.

But of course, there are also soundies featuring the marvelous Nat
King Cole Trio, with a beautifully shot close up of his hands
working their musical magic; the frenetic energy of Louis Jordan and
his Tympany Five; and Claude Thornhill's forward-thinking orchestra,
complete with French horns. And there's a segment for old movie
buffs with a very young Cyd Charrisse and Yvonne DeCarlo, as well as
Doris Day before she had her teeth fixed and Walter Liberace before
he ditched his first name.

But the best moments are when the editors wisely intercut new
interviews of surviving soundies performers -- like Kay Starr, Les
Paul, the conductor Van Alexander, the pianist Irving Fields, and
the singer Ginny Mancini of the Mel-Tones -- with vintage soundies
footage from 60 years ago. Surprisingly, no behind-the-scenes
personnel are interviewed or even mentioned -- not even James
Roosevelt, the president's son, who was one of the original partners
in the venture.

"The Soundies" has its faults, but it's a worthwhile effort, helping
us to understand what this incredible music looked like to the
generation that created it.

--- End forwarded message ---