[Dixielandjazz] Not all OKOM but a little movie nostalgia

[baglady4 at juno.com]

 Hollywood's never quite known what to do with all that jazzBy Mark Feeney, Globe Staff  |  January 20, 2008
Jazz and Hollywood are the sound and the fury of America in the 20th century. Almost exact contemporaries, they quickly captured the imagination of much of the rest of the planet.
So why have such cultural counterparts so rarely connected?
An old question, it comes up again with the two-week engagement of Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost" at the Brattle, which starts Friday. In trumpeter Chet Baker, Weber has a subject with movie-star looks for his camera to feast upon. Baker once had movie-star looks, anyway. He is perhaps even more compelling in ravaged decline than in impossibly handsome youth (Weber shows him both ways).
Jazz would seem more comfortable with reality - and its artistic possibilities - than Hollywood ever has. That may be one reason why so many of the best jazz films, like "Let's Get Lost," have been documentaries. Bert Stern's "Jazz on a Summer's Day," about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival; Charlotte Zwerin's "Straight, No Chaser," about Thelonious Monk; Jean Bach's "A Great Day in Harlem," about the most famous photograph in jazz history; best of all, maybe, Bruce Ricker's "Last of the Blue Devils," about Kansas City swing: All take the music at face value and see no reason to try to dress it up in narrative or as star vehicle.
Not that there haven't been feature films about jazz or with explicitly jazz elements. The plot of Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal" hinges, in fact, on the photograph from "A Great Day in Harlem." Spielberg has the good sense to address jazz obliquely. Too often, when Hollywood does deal with jazz, it does so head on - with leaden results. Ricker's documentary, for example, does much more to conjure up the miracle that was Vine Street in the '30s than Robert Altman's feature "Kansas City" does.
Consider just the list of biopics: "The Fabulous Dorseys" (with the brothers playing themselves), "The Glenn Miller Story" (James Stewart in the title role), "The Gene Krupa Story" (ditto Sal Mineo), "The Benny Goodman Story" (ditto, uh, Steve Allen). More ambitious but not all that much better is Clint Eastwood's "Bird," about Charlie Parker or "Lady Sings the Blues." The latter isn't so much a Billie Holiday biography as a Diana Ross career move. Holiday comes across more vividly in a studio throwaway like "New Orleans," where she's 12th billed and plays a maid.
Jazz was still commercially potent in the '50s, but that didn't make movies like "Young Man with a Horn" or "Pete Kelly's Blues" (Jack Webb plays Dixieland?) any less awkward as evocations of the music. Four decades later, Spike Lee has his own problems, in "Mo' Better Blues" - such as the movie's borderline anti-Semitism (those club owners, oy!).
One of the few movies to get across a credible jazz flavor is Bertrand Tavernier's "Round Midnight," thanks to Dexter Gordon's magnificent performance as a fading jazz great. But where the biopics suffer from Hollywood crassness, Tavernier's melodrama has the opposite problem: It's jazz genuflection. That's not an issue in Martin Scoresese's "New York, New York." Goodman's onetime tenor player Georgie Auld is nastily terrific as a hard-bitten band leader; and Robert De Niro communicates the unnerving intensity of bop. You don't just hear his obsessive talk about searching for the perfect chord. You feel it, too.
Hollywood's been most comfortable with jazz when it's on the soundtrack. Blaring brass and squalling reeds are as much a part of film noir as duplicitious dames and dumb saps. "Crime jazz," which reached its apotheosis in John Barry's James Bond theme, became a genre unto itself. Close your eyes, and when the music works you could be hearing the Basie band. When it doesn't, you get Stan Kenton bombast.
The most expert practitioner may have been Elmer Bernstein, with such scores as "The Man with a Golden Arm" and "Sweet Smell of Success." The latter has the further distinction of including a jazz subplot (Martin Milner plays history's most improbable jazz guitarist) and an actual jazz band (the Chico Hamilton Quintet).
Sometimes a score anthologizes previously recorded tunes. Woody Allen has been using jazz cuts on his soundtracks for decades - and never more gloriously than with Basie's jubilant rendition of Benny Carter's "The Trot," in "Hannah and Her Sisters." Eastwood (who mucked up "Bird" because he loves jazz not wisely but too well) uses several Johnny Hartman vocals to excellent effect in "The Bridges of Madison County."
Denzel Washington's acting aside, is anything in Lee's "Malcolm X" as good as his use of Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" in the Roseland Ballroom sequence? Certainly, nothing in "Jerry Maguire" can match the look on Tom Cruise's face when he hears the feral thunder of Charles Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song," urged upon him as a romantic aid on his first date with Renee Zellweger. Who knows, maybe it was still sounding in Cruise's ears when he started jumping up and down on Oprah's couch.
A surprising number of jazz musicians have composed movie scores. There's a pleasing jazz symmetry in Louis Malle's first and last features being scored by, respectively, Miles Davis ("Elevator to the Gallows") and Joshua Redman ("Vanya on 42nd Street"). John Lewis's theme for "Odds Against Tomorrow" became a Modern Jazz Quartet standard. Excepting Marlon Brando's performance, Gato Barbieri's gorgeously overripe music is the best thing about "Last Tango in Paris." Terence Blanchard has been Lee's go-to composer for more than 15 years.
Sonny Rollins had his biggest hit with "Alfie." The peak of Freddie Redd's career was his score for "The Connection." Ornette Coleman's music made for a fitting triangulation with William Burroughs and David Cronenberg on "Naked Lunch." Wynton Marsalis scored "Tune in Tomorrow," as Eddie Sauter did "Mickey One." In a class of its own is Duke Ellington's sinuous, strutting "Anatomy of a Murder," a perfect aural expression of James Stewart's canniness and Lee Remick's prurience.
Ellington makes a cameo in "Anatomy" - the sight of him and Stewart sharing a piano is a wondrous pairing of American icons, a kind of prefiguration of Magic and Bird exchanging high fives. If there's one way Hollywood has done well by jazz, it's been by letting us glimpse the greats. Yes, that's Roy Eldridge on the bandstand, in "Ball of Fire." Yes, that's Miles Davis, as one of the street-corner musicians, in "Scrooged." Benny Golson shows up in "The Terminal."
Louis Armstrong, as befits the Sun King of jazz, is in his own category: stealing "High Society" from Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and "Paris Blues" from Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier. He shows up in "Hello, Dolly!," too, and Barbra Streisand looks as happy to see him as we are.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney at globe.com. 


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