Playing to the Camera

Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema

Thomas Cohen

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231501804
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Playing to the Camera is the first full-length study devoted to the musical performance documentary. Its scope ranges from rock concert films to experimental video art featuring modernist music. Unlike the 'music under' produced for films by unseen musicians, on-screen 'live' performances show us the bodies that produce the sounds we hear. Exploring the link between moving images and musical movement as physical gesture, this volume asks why performance is so often derided as mere skill whereas composition is afforded the status of art, a question that opens onto a broader critique of attitudes regarding mental and physical labor in Western culture.

COOL JAZZ, HOT JAZZ AND HARD BOP ON A SUMMER’S DAY

‘A jazz band! What could be less filmable?’

– Oswell Blakeston (1928: 39)

Although Monterey Pop or perhaps Woodstock most readily comes to mind as the archetype for the music festival film, that honour actually belongs to a film from the previous decade: Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Bert Stern’s documentary on the fifth annual Newport Jazz Festival. Although that film was Stern’s first (and would be his only) feature-length effort, viewers expecting a neophyte’s clumsiness will discover instead remarkable sophistication. Despite the absence of portable sync-sound technology, this earlier film employed technical resources unavailable to either D. A. Pennebaker or Michael Wadleigh.¹ Stern had at his disposal five cameras shooting 35mm colour negative film, resulting in strikingly beautiful pictures and providing excellent coverage of the musical performances. This milestone of the cinema was nevertheless nearly abandoned when Stern, after scouting the location, declared that he had found ‘nothing to shoot’. The fact that Stern had yet to observe the musical performances before making and consequently rescinding his decision to abort the project suggests that he attached little value to them. One contemporary review of the film by Alfred Appel Jr praises Stern for ‘proving jazz, per se, can be cinematically interesting’ (1960: 56). However, the photographer’s initial reluctance to make the film suggests that Stern himself had to be convinced of the aesthetic value of moving images showing musicians making music.

Aside from his slight experience with moving pictures in the Army Signal Corps, Stern had made his career as a still photographer working in the fashion and advertising industries. Possessing a keen eye for an arresting tableau, he would understandably become captivated by the gorgeous landscape of Newport, Rhode Island. Indeed, the finished film testifies that Stern found the summer’s day as compelling as the jazz. Visual distraction was easy to find that weekend. Concurrent with the jazz festival in Newport was the America’s Cup Yacht Show, a sailing competition between the United States and England. The film’s numerous cutaways to shots of the boating event imply as much concern for yacht racing as for an art form once known as ‘race’ music. These cutaways evidence a lack of sympathy for the performances that seem to support rather than to challenge Kracauer’s objections that films dedicated to concerts are not truly cinematic (1960: 146).

In contrast with Hollywood’s treatment of jazz as music-under for scenes involving sex, drugs or crime, Stern offers positive images of music making.² Appel praises the refreshing, simple recipe of ‘a jazz background accompanying jazz musicians!’ (1960: 56). If Appel has correctly identified Stern’s ‘breakthrough’ as the linking of music with the bodies that produce it, cutaways to the yacht race only detract from that achievement. This inference has not escaped Appel, who calls attention to the ‘unsuccessful attempts at synchronising jazz improvisation with boat racing’. One of these instances occurs during the segment that features tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt, whose ‘searing, up-tempo solo on “The Blues” [actually titled ‘Loose Walk’] is about anything but yachting’ (1960: 57).³ I want to ponder this ‘anything but’ that Stitt’s music is supposed to be about. As Ronald Radano (among others) points out, music brings with it an accompanying discursive universe comprised of ‘countless other signs and images’ (2003: 22). What is the blues about? To answer such a question, we might examine the themes and images expressed verbally through the song lyrics. We find that, in the urban blues, whereas sex comes up often (see, for example, Big Maybelle’s ‘All Night Long’ segment in Stern’s film), sailboats come up rarely, if at all.

The point is that, beyond its formal musical properties, the hard bop style Stitt plays calls up a discourse of aggression, toughness and blackness totally at odds with the refined discourse of yacht racing. I want to suggest that we do not need pictures of black urban life actually to appear on screen, for they are already present in the ‘anything but yachting’ Appel mentions. Of course, the music might spark a great variety of associations.⁴ Nevertheless, this broad domain contains a set of gritty images that contrasts with the pretty ones that Stern offers, and Appel hints that the image and sound of a black horn player represents these. Stern claims that he envisioned Jazz on a Summer’s Day as an alternative to typical cinematic depictions of jazz as ‘something downstairs in a dark room’. I maintain, however, that Stern failed to bring jazz out of dingy nightclubs into the brilliant sunlight as he hoped. Those sinister images he attempted to banish continue to haunt this ostensibly upbeat film.

The idyllic setting of this staid New England town seems less suitable for music decidedly urban than for yachting. Scenes of wealthy ‘squares’ frolicking on the water clash with those of hip landlubbers attending the festival. Who today can fail to notice the exclusive whiteness of the former group in contrast with the racially integrated festival crowd? Oddly, the production notes on the DVD release of Jazz on a Summer’s Day neglect to mention racial difference, even as they inform us that ‘the film offers unusual shots of audience reactions by individuals whose social, economic and age differences over the entire scale from Brooklyn teenager to Newport dowager’. In fairness to Stern, he does point out the controversy that images of blacks and whites casually mingling might cause in 1958, a time that he nevertheless characterises as an ‘up’ period (see Stern 2000). As a child of the 1950s myself, I recall the decade with fond nostalgia, thanks to an idyllic childhood with a loving family. However, I now understand that the atmosphere of cheerful hope I experienced existed almost exclusively for white males in post-war America.

Racial discord lies just beneath the patina of harmony in Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Even as it attempts to repress the racial tensions straining jazz at that historical moment in American history it continually calls attention to them. Discord is in fact evident from the opening credit sequence. Following a serene image of moored cabin cruisers, the camera tilts down to focus on abstract images of the boats and the dock reflected in the water. Over these the credit sequence rolls, ending with the word ‘Newport’ reflected in the waves. This image gives way to a shot of the Jimmy Giuffre Three on stage, revealing the source of the non-diegetic music we have heard playing under the credits. This group consists of valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and guitarist Jim Hall along with Giuffre on tenor sax. On screen, black faces are conspicuously missing. What does it mean to begin a documentary on jazz with a performance of three white musicians associated with the ‘west coast’ cool style? This scene sets the tone for the film as a whole. In fact, Jazz on a Summer’s Day is marked by a whiteness conspicuous today, after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. (Yet how many contemporary spectators would have recognised this?)

For this distortion, neither Stern, musical director George Avakian nor his brother Aram, who edited the film, deserves the entire blame. Like the majority of feature-length movies, the film represents a collaborative effort. Festival founder Elaine Lorillard recruited Stern, who was neither a jazz buff nor a lawyer. He thus relied on Avakian, then at Columbia Records, to determine which performances to capture. Jazz critic Alan Kurtz (2007) claims that Avakian ‘literally called the shots’ regarding the choice of artists, and Kurtz adds acidly that Stern was ‘poorly advised’ by Avakian in these matters. Stern does allow for the possibility that ‘there was a little influence by who belonged to Columbia’ (2000).

Decisions regarding which artists to include required more than musical taste and familiarity with the jazz scene, for Avakian was responsible for clearing the performance rights. Legal complications might explain the film’s agenda and answer Appel’s query as to why Thelonious Monk is allowed one song and Louis Armstrong four. Of all the musicians represented, it was Armstrong who commanded the largest fee ($25,000). Perhaps the filmmakers attempting to get their money’s worth accounts for Armstrong’s considerable screen time; however, agreeing to pay such a high fee shows that they placed extraordinary value on this performer. Stern in fact calls Armstrong ‘the most important jazz artist there is in history’ (2000). Now, although Armstrong’s contribution to jazz history is undeniable, by the 1950s, his music was decidedly antiquated, as was his stage act and public facade. The bebop generation had rejected Satchmo’s tomish stage antics. As Lorenzo Thomas notes, ‘in the bebop era of the 1940s, that old jazzman’s grin was not even found on stage’ (1995: 260). On stage, young black players such as Miles Davis regarded audiences with a detached, haughty reserve. Neither did the difficult music Miles or Monk play make solicitous gestures toward the audience. (Stern himself admits that he considered Davis’s music too ‘far-out’ for his taste (1999).) ‘Hot’ was out of style and ‘cool’ was in fashion, although a cool stage persona did not imply a laid-back musical style. As an attitude, ‘cool’ provided African Americans with armour against the white world, allowing them to reject the stereotype of the ‘Stepin-fechit’ Negro hurrying to carry out the master’s commands. Unfortunately, as Imamu Amiri Baraka points out, white music critics appropriated the term to represent instead ‘a tepid new popular music of the white middle-brow middle class’ (1963: 213).

In the 1950s, various ‘schools’ of jazz were vying to inherit the legacy of bebop, a contest perhaps devised by journalists and critics rather than musicians. The main antagonists fought under the banners of cool jazz or hard bop.⁵ The former dates from the Miles Davis/Gil Evans 1949 collaboration Birth of the Cool, a project that featured West Coast ‘cool’ players such as saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz. Associated with sunny California, cool musicians subscribed to a chamber music aesthetic; their subdued approach was usually described at best as cerebral and at worst as bloodless.⁶ In contrast, hard bop’s strong, aggressive sound was considered appropriately tough for the streets of New York City.⁷ Pioneered by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Horace Silver, hard bop bore the influence of gospel, blues and rhythm & blues and anticipated the funk and soul music of the 1960s. Unlike bebop, which had evolved into music to be listened to rather than danced to, it communicated with the urban black working class.

It is tempting to explain the tensions between the cool and hard bop schools as mere stylistic differences, yet an analysis of style should take into account the racially marked bodies of the musicians. The truth is that the critical convention was to divide the camps along colour lines, and musicians as well as critics formulated the difference in racialist terms. Dizzy Gillespie, for example, calls cool jazz ‘white people’s music’ played by musicians who ‘never sweated on the stand’ (quoted in Meadows 2003: 247). In his book Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955–1965, David H. Rosenthal notes that, despite the participation of black musicians such as Miles Davis, cool jazz was ‘overwhelmingly a white phenomenon’ (1992: 23). Baraka ridicules the music as primarily ‘a kind of white mood music’, even as he acknowledges Miles Davis’s important contributions to the style (2001: 11).

In the seminal essay ‘Jazz and the White Critic’, Baraka points out the paradox involving the racial constitution of the music’s practitioners versus that of its historians and critics, lamenting that ‘most jazz critics have been white Americans, but most important jazz musicians have not been’ (1963: 179). Baraka insists on the importance of social context in determining musical expression. The apparent formal differences between cool and hard bop styles actually ‘represent not only two very divergent ways of thinking about music, but more importantly two very different ways of viewing the world’; according to Baraka, the ‘failure to understand [this divergent worldview] is at the seat of most of the established misconceptions that are daily palmed off as intelligent commentary on jazz or jazz criticism’ (1963: 185). Now, although Stern’s aesthetic experiment does not pretend to function as social criticism, I consider it a fair question to ask whether Jazz on a Summer’s Day represents a failure to understand or a refusal to acknowledge the difference Baraka points to.

In a companion piece to ‘Jazz and the White Critic’ entitled ‘Jazz and the White Critic: Thirty Years Later’ (2009), Baraka extends the category of critic to include documentary filmmakers. Specifically, the ‘brain trust’ assembled by Ken Burns for his documentary series on jazz is characterised as ‘largely white, mainly unhip’ (2009: 151). Unfortunately, complains Baraka, these experts are regarded as ‘the paradigm for the intellectual source for any lasting analysis and measure of this music and that is the deepest content of its vulgar chauvinist presumptions’ (ibid.). Like Burns, Stern and the Avakian brothers have rendered judgements of inclusion, exclusion and emphasis. Such decisions are not value-free, and these values are represented visibly through the order of performances, the time allowed to various artists and the depictions of the musicians on screen. As Kurtz points out, by relying too heavily on a single expert for musical guidance – George Avakian and Wynton Marsalis respectively – Stern and Burns were bound to commit ‘errors of omission’ (2010). I think, however, that Kurtz may be wrong to place the burden of blame so thoroughly on Avakian. Various statements by Stern reveal the conservative bent of his musical taste. Moreover, while acknowledging the vital contributions of Aram and George Avakian, whom Stern calls ‘a great musical director’, Stern takes pains to point out that the Avakian brothers ‘did not direct the movie’. According to Stern’s testimony, ‘all the ideas that make it [the film] what it is are my ideas’, and he takes credit for ‘decid[ing] what went in and what didn’t go in’ the movie. In definite terms, Stern insists on claiming Jazz on a Summer’s Day as his film (2000).

BLACKS, WHITES AND THE BLUES

As the film’s opening act, Jimmy Giuffre’s quiet, drummer-less trio is the very epitome of cool. In ‘The Train and the River’, the three musicians improvise subtle contrapuntal lines around the key of D major. Although much of the sonic material comes from the stock repertoire of blues riffs, and despite Jim Hall’s bluesy dominant 7th chords and Brookmeyer’s gruff, wailing trombone, the composition has a distinct European flavour to it, resembling the experiments of European composers such as Darius Milhaud or Claude Debussy. In fact, Giuffre cites the latter composer’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp as his inspiration for forming the trio in the first place. Here the audio-visual medium proves an invaluable aid in revealing the meaning derived from the kinematics of playing an instrument. For instance, the steep angle of the horn’s neck and Giuffre’s flattened chin typify the ‘legit’ embouchure of classical woodwind technique. Biting just the tip of the mouthpiece’s beak produces the soft, breathy sound called ‘subtone’, and visually suggests a reserved approach to the instrument. Contrast the segment featuring saxophonist Sonny Stitt that appears a few minutes later. Shown in profile like Giuffre, Stitt virtually swallows the entire beak of the mouthpiece, creating both a loud, aggressive sound and an assertive visual image. Between phrases, Stitt takes huge gasps of air, as if such were needed to support his vigorous and powerful sound. Jazz on a Summer’s Day invites us to contrast the two musicians, so we should look at the historical context that accompanies the sounds and images.

Figure 1 – Sonny Stitt plays the blues

Giuffre’s career began in earnest with his 1947 composition ‘Four Brothers’, which he wrote for Woody Herman’s Second Herd.⁸ The original ‘brothers’ were four white saxophonists: Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward and Serge Chaloff. The unconventional orchestration of three tenors and one baritone sax ensured that the harmonic voicings would remain close together and tend toward the mellow side.⁹ In 1956, Giuffre formed a drummer-less trio with Jim Hall and bassist Ralph Pea, who was later replaced by trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. Soon after the Stern film, Giuffre would start a group with keyboardist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow that played a kind of experimental improvisational music that bore little resemblance to normative notions of jazz. It is impossible not to note that these ensembles were composed of exclusively white members, although this fact in no way proves Giuffre and his cohorts guilty of racism. Over a career lasting half a century, Giuffre acquired a reputation as a ‘serene oddity’, as Ben Ratliff puts it in the musician’s obituary in the New York Times (2008). Ratliff’s piece indulges in the type of rhetoric characteristic of jazz criticism. For instance, he describes Giuffre’s clarinet sound as ‘pure but rarely forceful’, the kind of qualification one expects to encounter in a piece on a ‘cool’ musician (to his credit, Ratliff avoids the word ‘cerebral’). Yet I would not disagree with Ratliff’s assessment. While acknowledging Giuffre’s ‘European inspiration’, he notes correctly that Giuffre’s trio could ‘convey a sense of rustic, bluesy Americana’. To my ear, ‘The Train and the River’ sounds at least as bluesy as Stitt’s offering, yet, admittedly, it strikes the listener as considerably less forceful.

Sonny Stitt’s career does indeed contrast wi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Epigraph
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction: In Praise of Performance
• 1. Cool Jazz, Hot Jazz and Hard Bop on a Summer’s Day
• 2. Wild Guitarists and Spastic Singers: Virtuosic Performance on Film
• 3. Direct Cinema, Rock’s Public Persona and the Emergence of the Rock Star
• 4. Instrumental Technique and Facial Expression On Screen
• 5. Free Jazz Meets Independent Film: Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America
• 6. ‘I’m Looking at Them and They’re Looking at Me’: Observation and Communication in Sex Pistols: Live at the Longhorn
• Conclusion: Simple Gestures and Smooth Spaces in Robert Cahen’s Boulez-Repons
• Bibliography
• Index