This month the Film Center is inaugurating a monthly “Music Movies” series, five programs that will play on Sundays and Thursdays. The focus in August is jazz films, and the programs include four classics I first saw years ago and four others I’ve just seen for the first time. The worst film in the bunch (Cannonball) happens to be the newest one, and the two most interesting (Cry of Jazz and Black and Tan) are the oldest, though I don’t see any particular trend in this.
None of these problems show up in Thomas Reichmann’s Mingus (1968), but then Reichmann knew bassist-composer-arranger Charles Mingus and followed him around with a camera–at club dates, in the park, in his apartment (where Mingus occasionally plays piano and sings along, sometimes with his little girl in tow), and eventually out on the street when he was being evicted. Mingus took advantage of Reichmann’s presence, holding forth, musically as well as verbally, and often turning out to be his own best listener. Sometimes he goes too far in exploiting the situation, as when he brandishes a rifle and fires a hole through his ceiling, seemingly out of boredom or simple perversity. But the man and the music both come across loud and clear, and there are few jazz personalities as striking or as multilayered.
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The film in the series with the best all-around playing (Mingus takes second place) is Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1989), showing on August 12 and 16. Most of the footage was shot in black and white in 1968 during Monk concerts and studio sessions by German documentary filmmakers Michael and Christian Blackwood; it was discovered two decades later by Bruce Ricker–a tireless maker, promoter, distributor, and facilitator of jazz films, who understandably called this priceless material “the Dead Sea Scrolls of jazz”–then Charlotte Zwerin turned it into a feature with supplementary interviews and footage of two other pianists playing Monk tunes.
It’s also quite dated, though this adds to its interest. For the past 40-odd years I’ve been hearing this didactic film characterized as an antiwhite polemic, which isn’t so much wrong as incomplete, for it’s also implicitly integrationist. Most of it takes the form of an impromptu lecture on jazz at an informal interracial gathering, delivered by a black musician named Alex (George Waller) to white friends. He argues, among other things, that whites can be great jazz players only if they’ve suffered as much as their “Negro” counterparts.
Black and Tan is playing with Robert Drew’s serviceable TV documentary On the Road With Duke Ellington on August 19 and 23. Drew shot his film in 1967–the year Ellington picked up honorary degrees at Yale and Morgan State College and the year Billy Strayhorn, his principal collaborator, died–and slightly updated it in 1974. It’s valuable mainly for the portrait it offers of Ellington as a person, pianist, and composer, in roughly that order, though not so much as a bandleader. Insofar as Ellington’s main instrument was his orchestra, this is a limitation, but On the Road is still valuable for giving us aspects of the man neglected elsewhere. We learn that he started every day with a cup of hot water rather than coffee or tea and that he composed a lot of fugitive pieces for his band that were performed in public only once and never recorded, one of which we hear. We also see him performing a few of his standbys; “Take the ‘A’ Train” is played with his band on a train in a clip from the 1943 Hollywood musical quickie Reveille With Beverly, then as a waltz on piano in 1974, and finally in a more up-tempo 4/4 extended solo around the same time. In the latter solo the camera focuses not on the keyboard but on Ellington’s features as he listens and responds to his own playing, providing us with a kind of intimacy we don’t ordinarily get in his film appearances. (Bearing in mind that he was Mingus’s main influence as a composer, the views we get of Mingus noodling at the piano in Mingus and Ellington in this film are quite complementary.)
The close-ups of her listening to them are the most powerful reactive images I know in any jazz film. They’re followed by another remarkable point-of-view shot showing Ellington at her side as he gradually becomes blurry, fading like a guttering candle; uncannily and beautifully, this blurred shot returns after she dies, as if to underline the persistence of her gaze and by extension the continuation of what she hears.
