[Dixielandjazz] Fwd:More on "The Jazz Singer" reviewed

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
Another interesting review of the new 'Jazz Singer/Vitaphone' DVD set.
If you want to see the cover mentioned in the first paragraph, go to:
   http://www.littlewonderrecords.com/little-wonder-sheet-music.html
Kind regards,
Bill.

> The Jazz Singer (Warner)
> by Jan Stuart
> Newsday, October 7, 2007
>
> An absurd relic adorns the wall opposite my tub, a framed piece of
> sheet music from an old Al Jolson show. The illustration depicts
> Jolson on a tropical island, dressed in overalls and farmer's hat,
> his broad smile outlined by blackface makeup. His arms embrace a
> donkey standing on its hind legs, grinning conspiratorially and
> clasping a bottle of hooch. Above the chummy couple, the song's
> suggestive title asks "Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on
> Saturday Night?"
>
> I keep this curio as a kind of provocation: It's at once so
> ridiculous and potentially offensive that it demands some sort of
> response. But my visitors are invariably too polite to take the bait.
> It remains the elephant in the bathroom, a conversation piece that no
> one wants to talk about.
>
> That silence resounded as I watched Jolson's "The Jazz Singer," the
> 1927 musical drama that heralded the ascension of talking pictures,
> on an extraordinary new three-disc collection. Among its manifold
> treasures are a splendid documentary on the evolution of sound
> pictures and a gold mine of musical Vitaphone shorts that bring to
> audible life the final gasps of vaudeville.
>
> For all the hours of priceless historic footage, there was preciously
> little discussion on the subject of Jolson's trademark blackface.
> There were no end of shorts from the 1920s devoted to demystifying
> the then-emerging sound technology. Nowhere to be found, however, was
> a single documentary focusing on the life of the Lithuanian-Jewish
> Jolson (nee Asa Yoelson) or the minstrel-show aesthetic he
> popularized. There were a few obligatory remarks in the "those were
> very different times" vein from commentators Ken Hutchinson, a
> Vitaphone Project co-founder, and Vince Giordano, orchestra leader
> and pop musicologist. But the moving-right-along briskness of their
> comments exemplified the discs' head-in-the-sand approach to social
> history.
>
> Why, in 2007, would one restore and re-release a movie whose
> signature moment is that of a white man on his knees in white gloves
> and burnt-cork makeup, singing "Mammy," without troubling to
> seriously contextualize that tradition for new generations? Who are
> these discs intended for, and what should be their purpose?
>
> If entertainment is the goal, "The Jazz Singer" may still have some
> value for the few old enough to have seen Jolson in a live theater,
> where he was purportedly a dynamo. For the rest of us, it's a little
> more difficult to glean why he was known as "the world's greatest
> entertainer" (which world are we talking about?), or comprehend the
> prolonged ovations that followed each song at the film's premiere on
> Oct. 6, 1927.
>
> Based on a Broadway play starring George Jessel (who was slated to do
> the film until he dickered for more money), "The Jazz Singer" tells
> the dumbfoundingly lachrymose story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a cantor's
> son who breaks with five generations of family tradition -- and
> alienates his father in the process -- by running away to become a
> nightclub singer. Years later, a successful Jakie (now Jack Robin) is
> summoned to sing at the synagogue in place of his father, who shows
> the ultimate contempt for his son's vocational path by falling
> mortally ill on the eve of Jakie's Broadway debut. "It's the choice
> between giving up the greatest chance I have," exclaims the prodigal
> son, weighing his options, "and breaking my mother's heart!"
>
> An inventory of cliches, to be sure. What is genuinely remarkable
> about "The Jazz Singer," however, is its in-your-face portrayal of
> Jewishness and Jewish assimilation in America, particularly show-
> business America. Spurred on by the de-ethnicizing Production Code
> (aka the Hays Code, a reactionary set of moral guidelines imposed in
> 1930 by the industry as a way of policing itself), that assimilation
> process effectively wiped movie screens clear of the shtetl pride on
> display here: Orthodox synagogue congregants singing "Kol Nidre" on
> Yom Kippur, or a throwaway line about a Rosie Levy who had to change
> her name to Rosemarie Lee to make it in the "the-ay-ter."
>
> Hutchinson and Giordano briefly touch on celluloid ethnic stereotypes
> of the day and the sanitizing effects of the code, but young
> filmgoers need to know more: What exactly did the code have to say
> about ethnic representation in the movies, and were its restrictions
> coming from a place of bona fide concern for the humanity of
> minorities, or a more pernicious desire to see them neutralized on
> screen altogether?
>
> In the matter of Jolson's blackface, Giordano plays the apologist.
> Jolson was merely highlighting his facial features by "blacking up,"
> he explains, so that he could be better seen in the rear of the
> theaters; unlike other white vaudeville performers of the day, who
> indulged in caricature, Jolson was doing his songs "straight," minus
> affectation or accent.
>
> But that explanation proves disingenuous as we watch "A Plantation
> Act," an accompanying Vitaphone short which would be Jolson's
> audition piece for "The Jazz Singer." Jolson appears before a slave-
> shack set, blacked up and dressed down in straw hat and overalls. He
> sings three numbers, interspersed with patter spoken in an
> unmistakably slurry drawl.
>
> As one delves deeper into this DVD set, a subtext begins to emerge
> which begs deconstructing: that of the nexus between Jewish and black
> performers at the dawn of sound film. It's there, waiting to be
> mined, in the ethnic stew of singers who appeared in early sound
> shorts: among them, Eubie Blake, Eddie Cantor, Abbie Mitchell, Ethel
> Waters.
>
> It's there, most hauntingly, as Jolson's Jack Robin blacks up in his
> dressing room and suddenly feels a yen to return to the synagogue of
> his youth. "There's something, after all, in my heart," he
> speculates, "maybe it's the call of the ages, the call of my race."
> Was "The Jazz Singer" saying that for a Jew to find his soul in 1927,
> he had to hide behind a borrowed soul? That's a startling can of
> worms, one which this archivally essential collection is regrettably
> unprepared to open.
>
> --- End forwarded message ---