ABSTRACT
Jazz was to make a spectacular entrance in the form of filmed music with the early talkies. 1929 proved to be a seminal year for filmmakers inspired by black music, ranging from BLACK AND TAN, Dudley Murphy’s recreation of the stage at the Cotton Club, featuring the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Bessie Smith’s lovelorn Honky Tonk in Murphy’s SAINT-LOUIS BLUES to the numerous musical sequences in King Vidor’s HALLELUJAH, with its famous all-black cast. 1 Apart from the kaleidoscope in which Murphy tried to find a visual equivalent to Ellington’s polyrhythmic orchestrations, 2 however, filmmakers were far more fascinated by the photogenic aspect of jazz than by the soloists’ individual performances. In the wake of the Harlem Renaissance Movement, the Jazz Age and Broadway’s black musicals, the cinema was attracted by jazz as collective entertainment, the highly individual gesturality of the band leaders (such as Ellington’s Jungle Band) and the virtuosity of the artists in their eccentric new dances proving secondary to the carefree eroticism that characterised the Cotton Club and the Revues Nègres. Hollywood soon latched on to the creative potential of this new musical form as big bands featuring white musicians made the musicals go with a swing and Fred Astaire popularised and revitalised the steps of Bill Robinson’s tap dance invention. Meanwhile, black artists (notably Louis Armstrong) were relegated to a few quasi-exotic appearances in major studio productions, to shorts designed for coloureds-only theatres and from the early 1940s, to soundies, 4 screened in bars, restaurants and hotels. There was one notable exception, however: JAMMIN’ THE BLUES (1944), a short feature by photographer Gjon Mili, shot by the remarkable chief cameraman Robert Burks, who went on to work with Alfred Hitchcock. Mili and Burks immortalised the poise of the postures and the elegance of each musician’s gestures, 5 focusing particularly on saxophone soloists Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet and singer Mary Bryant. While it is perfectly true, as has often been said, that JAMMIN’ THE BLUES represented a landmark, offsetting the obvious photogenic qualities of jazz by the extraordinary harmony and boldness of its musical staging, Mila also succeeded in highlighting the nature of jazz as a form of individual expression by breaking down the shots and capturing the facial expressions of each musician. JAMMIN’ THE BLUES coincided with the beginnings of bebop, a movement that marked a return to small musical formations following a decade in which increasingly imposing dance bands had reached a peak. The status of jazz musicians as creative entities was now recognised for the first time in cinema, just as the musicians’ own awareness was kicking in with a vengeance: jazz was now hailed as a black and American art form, in a society in which segregation still featured in the Constitution and in Hollywood’s own censorship codes. While the major studios continued to ensure the success of jazz-entertainment, 6 the discords and bitterness of the bebop improvisers were gradually finding their place in films noirs that explored the other side of the coin, ‘the cursed side of the American Dream’, as Jean-Louis Comolli put it. 7
