Young Lions and Historical Fictions 1990–2000

The young generation of musicians such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis who shook up jazz in the 1980s arrives on screen in the following decade. Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and the cable-TV movie Lush Life fictionalize successful musicians of the era. Underage players also show up, as in 1940s movies: a teenage Toronto trumpeter gets advice from good and bad mentors in one, and a young pianist grapples with Tourette’s syndrome in another. In the 1990s, we see an outbreak of historical tales with unreliable narrators: a sometimes fanciful biopic of early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and Woody Allen’s extended tall tale Sweet and Lowdown, one of two 1990s films with a guitarist beholden to Django Reinhardt. In several particulars, Robert Altman’s Kansas City parallels his earlier film named for a musicians’ hub, Nashville, but in Kansas City, jazz doesn’t invade the main story.

Spectacles 1972–1984

Between 1972 and 1984, Hollywood produced several lavish jazz-related films. The failure of Lady Sings the Blues to do justice to the life or music of Billie Holiday is detailed. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is a swing-era musical about a clash of artistic temperaments and of musical styles, reinforced by a disjunction between stylized sets and naturalistic acting. Gangsters and musicians mix in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about Harlem’s historic Cotton Club. In the 1970s, low-budget features are also produced: TV biopics of Louis Armstrong (with Ben Vereen) and Scott Joplin (Billy Dee Williams), and the Afrofuturist spectacle Space Is the Place, starring bandleader Sun Ra as an interstellar traveler come to rescue Earth’s black people.

Young Men with Horns: The Jazz Biopic’s Golden Age 1950–1959

A 1950s fad for biographical films about jazz musicians is sparked by the box-office success of The Glenn Miller Story. Subsequent biopics depict the lives of Benny Goodman, W. C. Handy, Red Nichols, and Gene Krupa. Often, their subjects take on signature attributes of the actors who play them. Two fiction films focus on characters derived from existing sources: Young Man with a Horn, based on Dorothy Baker’s novel, and Pete Kelly’s Blues, based on Jack Webb’s radio series. The relationship between Benny Goodman’s memoir Kingdom of Swing and the script to The Benny Goodman Story is detailed. The life of W. C. Handy, as told in his autobiography, is compared to the movie version, 1958’s St. Louis Blues.

Suffering Artists 1984–1989

The 1980s sees a mix of independent and studio jazz pictures, and a few nonjazz films with jazz characters. Warner Bros. releases two stylish, high-profile pictures: Director Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight intertwines the lives and personalities of jazz greats Lester Young, Bud Powell, and the film’s star Dexter Gordon, in the story of an expatriate saxophonist in Paris; Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird tells the bebop founder’s story in jumbled chronological order, prefiguring later jazz biopics. Date movie The Fabulous Baker Boys draws a parallel between prostitution and playing insincere commercial music. In the UK’s Stormy Monday, a Polish free-jazz band bedevils an American capitalist. Two low-budget features chronicle unsuccessful bands: in one, amateur dixielanders get and lose a professional job; in another, a New Jersey wedding band fails to graduate to New York jazz clubs.

Independents in Black and White 1961–1967

In the 1960s, jazz is increasingly viewed as art music as opposed to popular music, and now it inspires art movies not pop entertainments: a wave of low-budget independent films in black and white. This chapter limns the influence of filmmaker John Cassavetes, via his low-budget film Shadows, and looks at how the director’s jazz story Too Late Blues is really a meditation on his film career. Two English films are discussed, one a horror anthology in which a jazz musician visiting the Caribbean engages in reckless cultural appropriation; the other is a jazz version of Othello featuring a Duke Ellington character. Ellington himself, as soundtrack composer, hijacks the ending of a studio jazz picture. Sammy Davis Jr. shoots a gritty jazz film after hours while starring on Broadway and comedian Dick Gregory plays a fictionalized Charlie Parker.

The Jazz Musician (and Fan) as Character 1951–1961

Characters who play or love jazz turn up in many films that aren’t about jazz itself. Hollywood loves the colorfully seedy milieu, and all that feeling jazz folk put into the music. In the 1950s, jazz folk turn up all over: in film noir, musical, sex comedy, cartoon, social-issue “problem picture,” and on TV. A representative sampling is discussed. Also, the 1950s saw the emergence of rock-and-roll, whose partisans display hostility to jazz fans in Blackboard Jungle and Jailhouse Rock. Three screen narratives in which Tony Curtis plays a jazz musician are briefly recounted, also one where he torments a jazz musician. The nominally “crummy” all-woman band in the period comedy Some Like It Hot is defended, and placed in the context of other women’s jazz bands. Actor/director John Cassavetes plays a TV jazz musician/detective on Johnny Staccato, and a few episodes are examined.

Origin Stories 1941–1947

This chapter examines 1940s jazz films that depict the early days of jazz and its spread from the African American community to white musicians and audiences. These films are placed in the context of early research into the music’s origins, and of the 1940s dixieland revival. Two films feature child prodigies. Parallels between the plots of 1942’s Syncopation and 1947’s New Orleans are highlighted, and the ways they depict the closing of New Orleans’ Storyville prostitution district are compared. The George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue erases the direct influence of African American musicians on Gershwin’s development as composer. The 1943 black musical Stormy Weather is briefly discussed, noting its portrayal of ragtime-to-jazz bandleader James Reese Europe.

Duke’s Day and First Features 1929–1940

A survey and analysis of films taking jazz as a topic, from early talkies through the birth and development of the swing era. Such films include two innovative 1929 shorts by director Dudley Murphy, one featuring Bessie Smith and the other featuring Duke Ellington. Smith and Ellington play fictionalized versions of themselves. Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw play their not-quite selves in feature films. Controversy over jazz in the African American community is explored in Broken Strings. Musicians “swing the classics” there and in another film. The 1937 feature Champagne Waltz includes an early instance of a stock jazz-film ending—a big New York concert that reconciles people and/or musical styles in conflict. That ending is tweaked by placing it at Carnegie Hall in 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Other films are also discussed.

Print the Legend

As described in this short chapter, movies about jazz sometimes inspire impressionable viewers to become professional musicians. Such films may even influence the specific ways they play. In addition, screen portrayals of jazz may influence how musicians (such as Sidney Bechet and Nina Simone) talk about their own lives, or about the music they play—though the evidence is often circumstantial.

Bands of Brothers 1941–1948

Several jazz films made just before, after, or during World War II draw or suggest parallels between jazz bands and military units. Some jazz bands benefit from a strong sense of mutual support and commitment to the greater good, as in Blues in the Night. Bands in others movies are challenged by wartime problems: sabotage, mutiny within the ranks, and personality clashes among the leadership (in films involving, respectively, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey). Two films by director Howard Hawks are examined, Ball of Fire and its remake A Song Is Born, focusing on the latter’s (mis)use of critic Winthrop Sargeant’s analytical work Jazz: Hot and Hybrid. Other films are also discussed.