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<DIV>King of Jazz </DIV>
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<DIV>‘The King of Jazz’ Was on the Cutting Edge of 1930s Film Tech</DIV>
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<DIV>by Will Friedwald</DIV>
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<DIV>Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2016</DIV>
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<DIV>In the 21st century, the cutting edge of cinematic technology is
continually being pushed forward to depict superheroes fighting aliens and
giants, or, perhaps, a jungle boy living with lions and tigers and bears. But
try to imagine a moment in our cultural history when the latest techniques of
the movie magicians were put in the service of singing and dancing. Such a
vintage Hollywood musical is having its final screening at New York’s Museum of
Modern Art on June 14, before moving on to venues around the country and the
world.</DIV>
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<DIV>“The King of Jazz” was the brain child of, and directed by Broadway veteran
John Murray Anderson in 1930. The industry had only recently converted from
silent to talking pictures at that time and color movies were even newer than
that (well before the modern, three-strip process was perfected). It’s a musical
revue built around the most popular bandleader of the era, Paul Whiteman, when
jazz itself had been around for less than a generation and the idea of playing
jazz in the large ensemble format of a concert orchestra was a very recent
development.</DIV>
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<DIV>Every aspect of the movie was innovative, from the orchestration techniques
of the band’s arrangers to George Gershwin’s 1924 “Rhapsody in Blue.” So was the
idea of pre-recording the musical performances, and even Russell Market’s
high-precision choreography was like nothing most audiences had seen before.
>From an animated color cartoon prologue to a miniaturized orchestra emerging
from a giant suitcase and bewitched shoes dancing without benefit of feet,
everything smacked of newness.</DIV>
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<DIV>Today this 86-year-old movie is again on the cutting edge, this time of
digital restoration techniques. To bring the picture and sound back to their
original glory, the experts at Universal Pictures’ digital restoration unit drew
from a wide range of prints, negatives and soundtracks. Now theatrical audiences
can see what hasn’t been seen since 1930.</DIV>
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<DIV>In the late 1920s, Broadway, at the height of its pre-Depression opulence,
was enamored of the revue format, and virtually all the major Hollywood film
studios produced Ziegfeld-style revues -- songs, dances and brief comedy
sketches -- to show off their own stars without long-form narrative. As James
Layton and David Pierce show in their forthcoming book “King of Jazz: Paul
Whiteman’s Technicolor Revue,” the film derives from the parallel careers of two
extravagant showmen: Whiteman, the superstar bandleader, and John Murray
Anderson, a flamboyant Broadway auteur who specialized in thoughtful and
imaginative song-and-dance spectacles.</DIV>
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<DIV>The heart of “King of Jazz” is Whiteman’s orchestra -- the band’s legendary
cornetist, Bix Beiderbecke, had already left, alas, but there’s amazing footage
of the violin and guitar virtuosi Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, as well as of the
soon-to-be-superstar singer Bing Crosby, then ensconced in the band’s vocal
group, the Rhythm Boys. Anderson and Whiteman contrived to make “King of Jazz” a
feast for the eyes and ears, and they succeeded.</DIV>
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<DIV>The original release of the film did less well than Universal was
expecting, since American moviegoers were beginning to tire of the musical genre
after a surfeit of song-and-dance epics, though it made more money overseas. The
movie was re-released in truncated form in 1933, but soon became a semi-lost
film -- there hasn’t been a good print in circulation in over 80 years. (The
film historian William K. Everson owned a copy that, as he once told me, had
formerly belonged to the personal collection of none other than Benito
Mussolini.)</DIV>
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<DIV>One of Anderson’s more infamous sequences is a musical number depicting the
“melting pot” of American music, which includes -- among other international
musical icons -- Irish harpists, Viennese waltzers and dark-eyed
Balalaika-strumming Volga boatmen, but no trace of any African elements. Also
disturbing to modern eyes is the film’s introduction to “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Here, Whiteman does tell us that “jazz was born in the African jungle, to the
beating of the voodoo drum,” but this leads into a prologue in which the white
dancer Jacques Cartier dances to a so-called primitive beat (in reality, these
are some highly sophisticated polyrhythms), nearly naked except for full-body
black makeup. Make no mistake: ”The King of Jazz” i s an artifact of its time --
and tells us more about Broadway than it does about its titular musical genre --
but no less valuable for that. -30-</DIV>
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