Jazz As Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image 9781350986923, 9781786731005

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Endorsement
Title page
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Len Lye: The Sensual World
Embracing the culture industry
Mapping modern Britain
The sensual world
2 Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost
Jazz finds Mili
Mapping the imagination
Dances, glances and the extra-musical
Editing jazz
3 Jazz 625: Inform–Educate–Entertain
Before Jazz 625
Jazz on BBC2
Jazz as television
Jazz 625: non-representational signs and visual dissonance
After Jazz 625
Conclusion
Dissonance and coherence
Notes
Introduction
1 Len Lye: The Sensual World
2 Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost
3 Jazz 625: Inform–Educate–Entertain
Conclusion
Bibliography
Film and Television Programmes Cited
Case studies
Other film and television cited
Index

Citation preview

i

Nicolas Pillai is a researcher of jazz and the media at Birmingham City University, UK, and also teaches at the Birmingham Conser­ vatoire and the University of Warwick. He has lectured on this sub­ ject at the National Jazz Archive in Loughton, UK, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, Germany, and the London Jazz Festival. His work has been published in The Soundtrack, Darmstadt Studies in Jazz and Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.

ii



‘This thoroughly researched and elegantly written study demon­ strates a deep understanding of film, television and jazz. Telling some great stories along the way and challenging the myths that have always defined the music, it comes highly recommended!’ – Krin Gabbard, Columbia University and Stony Brook University, USA, and author of Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema ‘Through in-depth examinations of visual materials that jazz scholars have commonly given short shrift, Pillai expands our understand­ ing of music and the musical experience. His sophisticated, multilayered, film scholar’s interpretations of sound, image and meaning are rare in the study of jazz creativity.’ – Tom Perchard, Goldsmiths, University of London

iii

NICOLAS PILLAI

JAZZ AS VISUAL LANGUAGE FILM, TELEVISION AND THE DISSONANT IMAGE

iv

Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2017 Nicolas Pillai The right of Nicolas Pillai to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of the Moving Image 34   ISBN: 978 1 78453 344 1 eISBN: 978 1 78672 100 6  ePDF: 978 1 78673 100 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

v

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix 1



1 Len Lye: The Sensual World

23



2 Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

51



3 Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

83

Conclusion

117

Notes Bibliography Film and Television Programmes Cited Index

v

131 149 161 171

vi

vii

Illustrations 0.1 The transom as cinema screen in Young Man with a Horn.

9

0.2 Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) peers into a motel bathroom in Psycho.

10

0.3 Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) peers into a conservatory bandroom in Whiplash.

10

0.4 Billie Holiday listening intently in The Sound of Jazz.

21

1.1 Visual elements evoke materiality in A Colour Box.

25

1.2 Stencilled sprocket holes in A Colour Box.

27

1.3 Texture and liquidity in A Colour Box.

33

1.4 Criss-​crossing weights and prices in A Colour Box.

41

1.5 A thumbs-​up and cry of ‘Oi!’ in Swinging the Lambeth Walk.

46

2.1 Lester Young’s pork-​pie hat as abstract still-​life in Jammin’ the Blues.

54

2.2 Young within a space of imagination in Jammin’ the Blues.

63

2.3 The reflection of Marie Bryant in Jammin’ the Blues.

71

2.4 Bryant watches Young in Jammin’ the Blues.

74

2.5 A post-​production effect multiplies Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison in Jammin’ the Blues.

76

2.6 Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker in Improvisation.

79

3.1 Steve Race, the first presenter of Jazz 625.

85

vii

viii

Illustrations

3.2 Humphrey Lyttelton, the second presenter of Jazz 625.

85

3.3 Duke Ellington (left) and Cootie Williams (right) in Jazz 625.

99

3.4 A slow dissolve between Christopher Wesley White (bass) and Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) in Jazz 625.

110

3.5 A halo around Bob Brookmeyer’s trombone in Jazz 625.

111

viii

ix

Acknowledgements Jazz, film and television are collaborative art forms and equally this book has been enriched by the contributions of others. I would like to begin by thanking two friends and colleagues at the University of Warwick who have provided counsel and encouragement from the project’s inception to its conclusion, Charlotte Brunsdon and Roger Fagge. Roger and I jumped into jazz studies together; I could not have asked for a better or more generous companion. It was Charlotte who gave me the confidence to transform a set of ideas into a book proposal (‘It’s the jazz book, isn’t it?’) and our many conversations have helped me to define the book’s scope and mode of enquiry. I am grateful to my two editors at I.B.Tauris –​Anna Coatman, who commissioned the book, and Maddy Hamey-​Thomas, who has steered the manuscript to completion. At the review stage, Maddy and my two anonymous readers provided focused, insightful feed­ back which improved the manuscript immeasurably. Over the course of writing, I was lucky to make contact with jazz researchers at Birmingham City University and the Birmingham Conservatoire. Post-​doctoral funding from BCU’s School of Media allowed me to complete this book. More importantly, the opportunity to work alongside Nicholas Gebhardt and Tim Wall gave me an understand­ ing of what sensitive and rigorous jazz scholarship might look like. Their enthusiasm, good humour and dynamism have lifted me when my spirits were low. I have been fortunate to receive the assistance of skilled archi­ vists and film/​television historians. Jeff Walden at the BBC Written Archive furnished me with endlessly fascinating material, Paul ix

x

Acknowledgements

Brobbel at the Govett-​Brewster provided resources and contacts, while David Nathan at the National Jazz Archive was a tireless and convivial host. I  have been overwhelmed by the kindness of pri­ vate collectors and enthusiasts, all of whom volunteered informa­ tion and expertise: I would especially like to mention Louis Barfe, Frank Collins, Walter Dunlop, Mike Fletcher, Selwyn Harris, Barrie Kendrick, Peter Neill, Paul Pace, Michael Rose, Colin Smith and Mike Telega. My work on jazz on television was enriched through my friendship with Pedro Cravinho, whose doctoral work shed new light on Jazz 625. José Arroyo, Cath Feeley, Tad Hershorn, Roger Horrocks, Paul Long, Victor Perkins, Loes Rusch, Karl Schoonover, Alyn Shipton and Luke Smythe offered insight and scholarship that deepened my understanding of my case studies. The opportunity to present my research at various conferences and public events invariably generated constructive and challenging feedback. Sections of this book were presented at Rollins College, the University of Warwick, the National Jazz Archive, the British Music Experience, Cardiff University, Birmingham City University, the Birmingham Conservatoire of Music, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt and the London Jazz Festival. During this time, I was honoured to review film-​related CD releases for Seb Scotney’s LondonJazz blog and to curate a season of jazz screenings at the Vortex Jazz Club at the invitation of Daniela Gerstmann and Oliver Weindling. It has been my pleasure to share many of the films and television episodes discussed in this book with friends and the conversations that ensued provided fresh ideas and new perspectives. Special men­ tion must go to Rowan Abbott, Hannah Andrews, Gregory Frame, Vivan Joseph, Erik Perera, Adam Phillips, Michael Pigott, Hannah Roscoe, E. Charlotte Stevens, Lauren Jade Thompson, Tom Voce and Owen Weetch for their honest and irreverent observations but also for their friendship. In addition, I wish to single out three others, whose contribution to this book has been inestimable. John-​Paul x

newgenprepdf xi

Acknowledgements

Nixon has been my most trusted ally and confidant for some ­fifteen years –​I have learned more about American culture from him than from anyone. Whenever inspiration failed, Richard Wallace pro­ vided a new avenue for thought and reflection. His eclectic and rig­ orous scholarly mind has enriched this book immeasurably and I am indebted to him for his meticulous and sensitive annotations to an earlier draft of the manuscript. Finally, my brother Dominic Pillai, whose tastes in jazz were impeccable even as a twelve-​year-old and whose warmth and talent bring comfort to all those around him. Two life-​changing events occurred during the writing of this book: my marriage and the death of my grandfather. I thank my wife, Róisín Muldoon, for every day of laughter and adventure –​ you guide me over the stepping stones. Róisín’s parents, Eugene and Stephanie, and her siblings Daniel, Colleen and Kelly, have welcomed me warmly into their lives. To my own family –​Gillian and Gregory Pillai, Jean Welstead, Graham Welstead and Melissa Jacob –​I am especially grateful. Their support has been uncon­ ditional and unfailing. Inevitably, I regret that my granddad, who introduced me to so many books and films and pieces of music, did not live to see this book in print. A self-​taught man of letters, Peter Welstead loved artistry, wit and musicianship. I  dedicate this book to him.

xi

xii

1

Introduction

Jazz was never just a music. From its beginnings, live performance promised spectacle: musicians wielding instruments, physical inter­ actions between performers and audiences, systems of looks and gestures that communicated complex meaning. Posters advertised these gigs, with conventions of design and typeface developing according to environment and culture. The LP sleeve provided a canvas upon which this iconography was advanced. Jazz musicians were photographed, filmed, even immortalised in comic strip form. A product of the mass media age, jazz was always insistently visual. In the plastic arts, jazz provided inspiration to artists as diverse as Henri Matisse, Aaron Davis, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock.1 For Alfred Appel Jr., this relationship between media is one of straightforward assonance, so that, of the painting Broadway Boogie-​ Woogie (1942–​1943), he is able to write, ‘Mondrian’s basic geometry is boogie-​woogie […], the left hand’s “vertical” bass line ostinato (propulsive repeated figures) playing against the right hand’s “hori­ zontal” dotted eighth or sixteenth notes’.2 Appel’s overly enthusias­ tic collision of media is given more nuance in Richard Pells’ study 1

2

Jazz as Visual Language

Modernist America, in which he notes the often ‘stereotyped and contradictory’ visions of jazz created by European artists and intellectuals. It is the uses to which jazz has been put by other art forms that often produce disquiet amongst musicians and critics. Pells describes jazz as a cultural space into which desire and anxi­ ety can be projected  –​‘sensual, impulsive, uncerebral, and there­ fore un-​European […] an emblem of the modernity and cleverness of America’3 –​but in defining this space so excludes much of the music, particularly the cerebral European variety. In Jazz in American Culture, Peter Townsend provides numer­ ous examples from literature and the visual arts of creators in other fields claiming affinity with the jazz improviser. Townsend argues that these generalisations ignore important technical differences between art forms and so fundamentally misrepresent jazz. In a section on jazz photography, for example, he contrasts the tempo­ ral stasis of the image with the progression of music in real time: ‘Jazz’ is reduced to the message that can be read off the image of its charismatic performers, or of its typical visual. As with other mythological operations, this one allows for swift appropriation without the need to engage with the contradictions and ambiguities of history, the complications of the subject, and in this case, even to lis­ ten to the music.4

Disregarding the pejorative language used by Townsend in relation to visual culture, one is struck by the oddity of this formulation, which enforces an idealised and totalised music as autonomous from the culture that surrounds it. Indeed, in taking this critical stance, Townsend explicitly sets himself against the New Jazz Studies, inter­ disciplinary scholarship of the 1990s which posited jazz as a cultural construct and was sometimes criticised for neglecting the music and musicians. Writing of the New Jazz Studies scholarship, Deborah Mawer observes that while it can sometimes ‘grossly undervalue the musicians concerned’, the overwhelming outcome of this critical 2

3

Introduction

turn has been the move towards ‘viewing jazz positively rather than defensively across relevant wider arenas’.5 Mawer’s warning against defensiveness is telling when we com­ pare it to Townsend’s rhetoric of ‘depth and power’.6 Mawer seems more closely aligned with the position taken by film theorist Richard Dyer in his polemical defence of ‘entertainment’. Entertainment became identified with what was not art, not serious, not refined. This distinction remains with us –​art is what is edifying, elitist, refined, difficult, whilst entertainment is hedonistic, democratic, vulgar, easy. That the distinction is harmful, false to the best in both what is called art and what is called entertainment, has often been commented upon.7

In this book, I have rejected distinctions that close culture off into hierarchies of taste. I have not assumed precedence for jazz over the media which portray it; rather, I have identified cultural moments in which interactions between jazz, animation, film and television have proven mutually transformative. Throughout, my aim has been to view jazz not as a music separate from the world around it but rather as a force within that world, and one that can inspire not just musicians and fans but also those audiences who, in Nicholas Gebhardt’s words, have ‘heard it [jazz] only in passing, or shut it out of their lives, or missed it altogether’.8 The studies which follow offer three examples of jazz in film and television. In contrast to the majority of the existing literature on this subject, I have concentrated on non-​narrative case studies. My reason for this is threefold. This selection permits a focused analysis of formal elements rather than the familiar condemnation of dra­ matic infelicities; a generic ‘progression’ from the abstract, through the staged performance, to the supposed documentary; and, perhaps most importantly, reflection upon a varied set of visual approaches to the question of what jazz is and what it means to the culture in which it exists. Where is the ‘jazz’ in ‘jazz film’ or ‘jazz television’? Is it the 3

4

Jazz as Visual Language

music that we hear? Is it our sight of musicians playing? Is it associ­ ated with certain kinds of lighting, shades of colour, camera move­ ment, or even a particular behind-​the-​camera sensibility? These are questions which have guided my research, and to which I return in my Conclusion. I have also tried to write about jazz in a way that is not overly reverent –​after all, listening to jazz often makes me laugh. Keeping Dyer’s words in mind, we might note that the defensiveness and intellectual insecurity of some jazz writing is exemplified by its fail­ ure to engage with laughter. In a study of Thelonious Monk, Gabriel Solis writes, The lack of attention paid to humour elsewhere in histori­ cal musicology seems to be, in part, a result of the invest­ ment modernist aesthetics has made in music as a serious intellectual endeavour, and a corresponding discomfort with humour and playfulness, both of which are seen as debased modes of expression. It may also be in part a result of musicology’s focus on abstracted musical texts.9

Observing that musicians frequently communicate non-​musically to ‘signal both creation and appreciation’, Solis suggests that ‘musical humour requires more than mere sound’.10 With a similar attention to physicality, elsewhere I have chastised Frederick Garber for taking at face value a joke at the lead character’s expense in the Hollywood film Young Man with a Horn (Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros., 1950).11 Laughing at or with jazz can help us understand how complacently we define it. As Townsend has it, jazz is a music in a state of con­ stant reinvention yet its surrounding cultural myths fix and limit it. In contrast, I would argue that the dissonant images of film and television representation challenge our tendency to identify (and so constrain) jazz through reference to our own individual tastes. ‘My jazz’ cannot encompass the variety of a music that is always drawing upon the culture that defines it. Screen parodies of jazz subculture 4

5

Introduction

which mine solipsism for humour are invariably met with protes­ tations of outrage and accusations of philistinism. Of course, this just makes them funnier. Jazz is voracious, always generating new hybrids; contra The Fast Show’s Louis Balfour, it is never just ‘nice’. Yet sometimes we need a Balfour to remind us of that.12

Watching men play: visual pleasure in the Hollywood jazz film There are two glaring ironies in much of the writing about jazz film  –​first, that it is often conducted by those who know quite a lot about jazz and very little about film; second, that it replicates much of the language that Theodor Adorno used to demean and debase jazz, simply transferred onto Hollywood as the mass cul­ ture hate object. Happily, these tendencies have been challenged by writers within the New Jazz Studies (primarily Krin Gabbard and Arthur Knight), who have productively drawn upon the vast theo­ retical literature established by the academic discipline of film stud­ ies. Nevertheless, old habits die hard in jazz journalism and here I would like to offer some thoughts on Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, Sony Pictures Classics, 2014)  which will measure its achievement against film aesthetics rather than the minutiae of jazz history or spurious notions of realism. In his landmark study Jammin’ at the Margins:  Jazz and the American Cinema, Krin Gabbard asserts that representations of jazz ‘ought to be seen as products of particular cultural moments and ideologies’.13 Using psychoanalytic film theory, Gabbard argues that jazz films deny the fetishistic pleasures of recorded music, chiefly the ‘disarticulation of sound and image’. For many fans, whatever is gained by the reintegration of sound and image is lost in the subordination of jazz to narrative and the attendant ideologies of the American cinema […] Since narrative is indisputably what most 5

6

Jazz as Visual Language

audiences crave, then a film about jazz or a film with jazz cannot dwell on the music for too long. The music gets shoved aside to make way for the action, or worse, the music continues, barely audible in the background.14

Gabbard’s account of frustration rests on two assumptions:  that jazz and Hollywood narrative are formally incompatible, and con­ sequently that successful jazz films are those which subvert or undermine Hollywood’s patterns of classical film narration. While admirably attentive to mise-​en-​scène, performance and jazz as con­ struction, Gabbard’s approach can risk the over​determination of themes identified by sociologist Herman S. Grey as no longer rel­ evant to black cultural politics:  ‘preoccupations with positive and negative images, questions of representational accuracy, stereotypic exaggeration, and the bounded conceptions of the nation’.15 These preoccupations characterise the meeting of jazz and film, the impro­ vised and the recorded, as a problem to be solved. In the chapters that follow, I have instead asked what pleasures the jazz film may afford us and how thinking through these meetings might tell us something important about music’s role in society. The popular acclaim for Whiplash was in striking contrast to the suspicion with which it was met in the jazz press. Respected com­ mentators professed the film to be ‘regressive’, ‘all wrong’, ‘grotesque and ludicrous […] despicable nonsense’ and ‘retrograde’.16 These heartfelt criticisms were largely musical or historical and so failed to locate Whiplash within its most important context, a tradition of expressionistic cinema devoted to male obsession [e.g. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers, 1948), Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer, 1950) and Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, United Artists, 1980)]. Like these films, Whiplash dramatises the fire of creative torment, visualised through delirious colour, staccato editing and sweeping camera movement. To invoke a cavil levelled at The Red Shoes, Whiplash’s

6

7

Introduction

stylistic excess was deemed vulgar and so, implicitly, were the pop­ ular audiences who had enjoyed the film.17 The naivety displayed regarding how films make meaning, and how audiences consume these texts, was profoundly dispiriting. Elsewhere, I have suggested that scenes of jazz performance are structured around patterns of looking, gazes between musicians and audiences that are sometimes mutual, sometimes yearning, some­ times unacknowledged and hidden.18 My understanding of these moments draws upon a foundational work of film scholarship, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.19 Psychoanalytic theory was appropriated by Mulvey as a political weapon, intended to demonstrate ‘the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’.20 Using examples taken from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Mulvey demonstrated that Hollywood cinema was structured by a male gaze which positioned women as the object of study, relying upon the idea of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. Woman became ‘bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning’, as close-​ups fragmented the female body into an erotic object.21 By identifying these processes of scopophilia and narcissism, Mulvey aimed to deconstruct, and so destroy, the means by which Hollywood generated visual pleasure. Using Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Paramount, 1958), she demonstrated the way that the hero’s constant covert observation of the heroine enacts a sadistic objecti­ fication which imposes the patriarchal rule of law, resulting ultim­ ately in her death. In the Hollywood jazz film, however, the male performing body is the primary object of the gaze. As Gabbard has noted, the bearer of meaning is often the black jazz musician who ‘transfer[s]‌sexual power to the protagonist’.22 In Young Man with a Horn, for exam­ ple, we initially see the protagonist as a child displaying voyeuris­ tic curiosity in his older sister’s sex life. However, her discomfort at his observation leads to the boy transferring his yearning gaze onto

7

8

Jazz as Visual Language

black jazz musicians. Denied access to the adult world of sex, young Rick finds himself outside a jazz club where, perched in the transom above the door, he can look in on a scene of hot music, dancing, drinking and casual pick-​ups. As Rick watches the bandleader Art Hazzard (Juano Hernandez), his mounting interest is signaled by increasingly closer shots cutting between them. This is not a scene of homosexual desire but rather one that uses Hollywood conven­ tions of heterosexual longing to reinforce the place of jazz within the child’s erotic development. In a sequence of shots familiar from Mulvey’s analysis of Hitchock, the projection of desire onto the black male body is rewarded with climactic satisfaction –​once when Hazzard solos and the camera swoops up to Rick’s blissful appreci­ ation and again when Hazzard hits a high note, raising his trumpet erect as he does so. Similarly, shots which align the film audience with Rick’s point of view behind the glass transom suggest the cin­ ema screen itself as a metaphor for the white child’s projection of ego onto the black musician (Figure 0.1). Thus, jazz offers Rick what home could not, an unsupervised and unregulated form of voyeur­ ism where the black male body assumes the erotic potential of the white female. This movement from trauma to pleasure is illustrated by a visual assonance:  the earlier shot of Rick framed within the back window of a car driving away from his parents’ graves sup­ planted by the framing within the nightclub transom, looking down upon the musicians. We might go so far as to say that Whiplash takes as its subject the shot-​reverse-​shot structure noted above in the analysis of Young Man with a Horn. Indeed, the film rigorously illustrates the two forms of gaze identified by Mulvey, casting teacher Terence Fletcher (J. K.  Simmons) as sadistic objectifier, the narcissist, who takes pleasure in the humiliations of his charge Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller). Neiman, on the other hand, is positioned as the scopophilic voyeur, defined by his desire to watch unobserved. In an early scene in the bandroom, Neiman watches as another musician kisses his 8

9

Introduction

Figure 0.1  The transom as cinema screen in Young Man with a Horn.

girlfriend, Chazelle fetishising the moment of the caress in close-​up and slow motion. Neiman’s healthy relationship with his father (Paul Reiser) is defined through their shared love of cinema, a condoned ‘watching together’ that is permissible through an absent mother. Little wonder that Neiman attempts a doomed romance with a woman on display at each of his cinema visits –​the popcorn vendor Nicole (Melissa Benoist). After their first scene together, Neiman looks back at Nicole in her popcorn booth, framed side-​on to evoke Whistler’s maternal Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1. Neiman’s Oedipal frustration is encapsulated by Chazelle in a sequence of shots that closely mimic Hitchcock’s Psycho (Paramount, 1960). Neiman is Hitchcock’s Norman, peering in not at a bathroom but a bandroom, ever excluded (Figure 0.2 and Figure 0.3). It may be more productive, then, to think of Whiplash as a horror film than as a jazz film. Accepting this categorisation unsettles any 9

10

Jazz as Visual Language

Figure 0.2  Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) peers into a motel bathroom in Psycho.

Figure 0.3  Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) peers into a conservatory band­ room in Whiplash.

fixed definition of what the ‘jazz’ in jazz film might be and so sharp­ ens our awareness of how particular films use jazz metaphorically or symbolically. In Whiplash, Fletcher’s elaborate cruelties reveal themselves slowly, his mental instability revealed through music in

10

11

Introduction

a manner recalling the manipulative Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, Strong Heart/​Demme Productions, 1991). A similarly gradual process of revelation discloses Neiman’s relationship with his instrument as essentially masochistic, with body horror vividly evoked through repeated extreme close-​ups of sweat and blood. Indeed, what Whiplash present us with is a fantasy of stepping from observer to actor, from watching to touching, slapping, hitting. The sanctity of the voyeur is continually violated and the fascination of the film lies in the way these roles constantly shift between Neiman and Fletcher, from ‘bearer of meaning to maker of meaning’. The film cues us to view it as Hitchcockian melodrama through direct allusion; in a later scene at a jazz club, Neiman watches Fletcher play piano in a series of shots that recalls James Stewart’s observation of Kim Novak at Ernie’s Bar in Vertigo. Drawing upon classical Hollywood just as jazz draws upon the Great American Songbook, these shots that closely recall Vertigo and Psycho are the cinematic equivalent of riffing on a jazz standard. Like Novak, Fletcher is pictured in profile: an enigma, unknowable. In the film’s celebrated final scene, the exchange of looks dramatises a handing over of the reins, as one monster begets another. The male body is a machine in frenzy. Blood, sweat and a single tear.

The dissonant image In Hollywood film, then, dynamic performance relationships  –​ between musicians, audiences and the social world  –​invite us as viewers to see jazz as part of a larger cultural landscape, where Hollywood codes of queer and heterosexual representation prove eminently suitable for a music defined by flamboyance, display, social exclusion and close intimacy between men. The sketch of Whiplash above aims to show how narrative films about jazz might be opened up when we think of them as films; the following chapters similarly

11

12

Jazz as Visual Language

attend to medium specificity, addressing the particular formal and aesthetic demands of animation, musical short and television pro­ gramme. My selection of case studies is not intended as a claim to canonicity. While I believe the animations of Len Lye, the films of Gjon Mili and the BBC series Jazz 625 to be seminal moments in the history of jazz, my selection might well have taken another form. A similar book might take as its subject the animations of Norman McLaren, the films of Shirley Clarke and the KQED/​NET series Jazz Casual with no discernable loss of effect. I should like to read that book. My point here is that while the subjects of these chapters are distinguished creators of artworks which I consider important, the aim of the book is larger than their veneration. This book intends to demonstrate how methodologies from film and television studies can enrich our understanding of these texts, and how, by viewing them merely as records of performance, we diminish them. Indeed, in reviewing my case studies as a group, one is struck by a set of similarities. Each observes a tension between jazz as live and recorded music, expressed through the visual (Lye’s ‘improvised’ brush strokes, Mili’s ‘ad-​lib’ pre-​recordings, Jazz 625’s transmission into domestic space); each positions jazz as emblematic of ideas of nationhood or transnationalism; and each was produced under the auspices of a large institution, either public (the GPO, the BBC) or private (Warner Bros.). Despite their wildly different preoccupa­ tions and techniques, these three moments of jazz on screen cohere around an imperative to reflect on the music’s continuing social relevance. The following analyses are linked by my notion of a ‘dissonant image’, a phrase intended not to collapse distinctions between media but rather to focus attentions on textual moments in which mean­ ing is created through the confluence of audiovisual jazz elements. In attempting to define jazz’s inherent dissonance, Ajay Heble has argued that ‘landing on the wrong note […] can be a politically and culturally salient act for oppressed groups seeking alternative models 12

13

Introduction

of knowledge production and identity formation’.23 Similarly, I will argue that film and television can produce ‘wrong notes’, disrup­ tions of tone or spatial coherence that challenge our understanding of what jazz can be in the wider world. ‘If anything,’ writes Heble, ‘improvisation teaches us by example that identity is a dialogic construction (rather than something deep within us), that the self is always a subject-​in-​process’.24 I am not suggesting that film and television’s dissonant images are in any way improvised (to do so would fundamentally misrepresent their distinct production pro­ cesses); however, it is my contention that, even within discrete texts, the relationship between sound and image is similarly a ‘subject-​ in-​process’. On screen, jazz is in constant dialogic exchange with its framing medium, be that film or television, so that the emphases placed on jazz, of tone and cultural positioning, are ever in flux. Any consideration of jazz in film and television must contend with the temporal dissonance created by editing. In an explana­ tion of his film montage theory, Sergei Eisenstein drew compari­ sons with ‘the stunning effect of Negro syncopated jazz, where the rhythmic principle was usually in contrast to what the European ear had been taught’.25 For Eisenstein, then, the startling, politi­ cised effect of montage was inherently jazz-​like; like jazz rhythm, the film sequence designated radical new meaning. There are, of course, obvious and immediate differences between the live expe­ rience of music, sound recordings and their appearance in film or television. Frederick Garber has productively drawn upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ (that which remains of an original in reproduction) to argue that, as a product of mechanical repro­ duction, ‘film, like any photograph, is radically indexical, and the ideologies of jazz privilege conditions of immediacy where no film can go, conditions especially stringent about qualities of time and place’.26 This seeming formal incompatibility is especially marked by post-​production processes like editing which exacer­ bate distance between sound and image. Garber posits  that the 13

14

Jazz as Visual Language

freedoms of European cinema permit greater sympathy with jazz performance, citing the oft-​repeated claim that ’Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, Little Bear/​ PECF, 1986)  benefited from recording sound and image concurrently. The sounds would be authentic in a Benjaminian sense because they were the sounds of someone who, by virtue of his continuing presence, confirms the purity of authen­ ticity; and they would be authentic in still another sense because the music was made in front of a contemporary camera and what that camera recorded was the moment of the music’s making (the making that, as Tavernier points out several times, was never the same before or after). Tavernier seeks to overcome […] the fracturing in the relationship between sight and sound. He gets as close as one can to the moment of making, hearing and seeing it.27

I remain dubious about the idealised state which Garber describes.28 What Garber longs for –​the erasure of temporal distance between the live and the filmic –​is an essential repudiation of the cinematic apparatus. His preoccupation with the auratic manifests itself in passages that deplore the process of film-​making as mass culture.29 Again, we detect the critical tendency to shrink from analysing audi­ ovisual media on their own terms and to denigrate their formal traits. The authenticity with which Garber defines live jazz is a shaky construct in itself. Garber’s reification of the moment of performance neglects the deep connection to mechanical processes inherent in jazz creation. As Joel Dinerstein notes, in developing jazz as music and dance, ‘African-​Americans stylised machine rhythms and aesthetics through inquiry, experiment, and social experience’.30 The length and tempo of commercially recorded songs was dictated by ‘commercial and technological’ requirements, as Kenneth J. Bindas makes clear: The musician or band found that the hotter, or more impro­ visational, a song, the harder it was to record because of 14

15

Introduction

shifts in timing, missed cues, and fluctuating volume. […] Engineers now exerted increased influence, as it was their job to use the recording technology in the most efficient and profitable manner in order to create a consumable item as defined by the producer. By the height of the swing era, musical production relied as much on the producers, engineers, jukebox operators, radio stations, and record executives as it did on the performers.31

Bindas’ account is especially useful in reminding us of the constant mediation of jazz performance, and the impossibility of unfiltered, ‘authentic’ experience. To criticise jazz on film for its separation of sound and image is, I would suggest, to misunderstand both what jazz is and how screen media operate. If, as Pells has suggested, ‘[…] modernism means the effort  –​ beginning in the twentieth century –​to invent a new language to describe the scientific, political, and social upheavals of the mod­ ern world’, then we must be sensitive to how this new language was articulated.32 The moving image, clearly one of the dominant forms of communication in the modern era, relies upon the process of editing to describe onscreen space and relations between bodies. In film and television, the relationships between jazz musicians and their audiences and the visualisation of accomplishment and pleas­ ure produce readings of what jazz means in the mechanical age, where physical markers like bodily interaction with an instrument, the sweat of hard work, toes tapping and bodies dancing hold rich symbolic and metaphorical meaning. As V.  F. Perkins argues, the collaborative process of movie-​ making can be likened to the work of jazz musicians, in which the end product is generated by the interaction of personalities and tal­ ents.33 We might extend his comparison to take in television pro­ duction, noting that the invisible labour of production crews and publicity departments is often overlooked in the analysis of jazz on screen. While textual analysis is part of this book, I  have also 15

16

Jazz as Visual Language

attended to the institutional and production processes which per­ mitted the works discussed. Again, my intention here has been methodological: to challenge the perception of film and television as transparent and to encourage consideration of the decisions made by media professionals regarding jazz and its visual presentation. In his discussion of film form, Perkins notes that ‘direct linguistic analo­ gies’ are largely unhelpful in understanding the medium.34 Similarly, Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith expresses doubt over the use of language to account for the entirety of the film experience.35 Yet language as a metaphor for systems of meaning is common in both media studies and jazz studies. For example, Heble uses the term ‘language of jazz’ to define ‘both the musical conventions within which it operates and the discourses that are produced about it’ and this metaphor of language is common among jazz performers.36 An additional ben­ efit of attending to ‘the dissonant image’ is found in the way that it collides these metaphors of language and questions their useful­ ness. If jazz onscreen constitutes a visual language, then how is that language articulated? How do we understand its rules and limits? The dissonance generated by the interaction of screen and sound is one that alerts us to the ways in which each text articulates the social construct ‘jazz’ differently. Dissonance, then, is a metaphor which might extend our understanding of language in both filmic, televisual and jazz contexts. Its surprising qualities, its radical attack and its generative possibilities allow us to understand the strategies with which film and television conceive jazz and transform it.

Remembering the music As I noted earlier, a recurrent criticism (and misreading) of the New Jazz Studies was that it displaced musicians from the centre of jazz and relegated them to mere functions of culture and society. While I maintain that there is much work still to do in charting jazz as a cultural form, it would be dangerous to depreciate the achievement 16

17

Introduction

of music-​makers themselves. Another problem of language then reveals itself: how to resolve the vocabularies established by the vari­ ous fields of film studies, television studies, jazz studies, musicolo­ gists and hugely varied musicians? To reverse the slight aimed at critics of Whiplash above, the claims made by media scholars about jazz can sometimes seem naive or self-​evident to those involved in the production of music. For many audiences, watching jazz musicians (some long dead) perform on screen can be an end in itself and the production values of these performances may be merely a frustration or distraction. I was made conscious of differences between the way I watched jazz television and the way others watched it during a series of screen­ ings at The Vortex Jazz Club in 2014. In my role as curator and pre­ senter, I was naturally concerned with questions of image and sound quality; for the audience, however, these elements were secondary to the opportunity to see (for example) Thelonious Monk in his prime. I  do not recount this experience to suggest a hierarchy of viewing, but rather as a way into some reflections upon how we view musicians’ bodies on screen –​how those bodies augment the music and how audiences project emotion onto them. In doing so, I will compare recollections of a very famous piece of jazz television: the CBS-​TV special The Sound of Jazz (1957). While this television programme featured an unprecedented number of jazz stars in one broadcast, it is invariably the sequence featuring Billie Holiday and Lester Young which commentators single out. In these accounts of televisual jazz, the technical proficiency of the broadcast is seen to permit emotional revelation. As Tim Wall and Paul Long note, The Sound of Jazz was one of a series of CBS arts programmes themed around the title The Seven Lively Arts, drawing on the Gilbert Seldes book of 1924 which had placed popular and ‘high’ art in parallel. The sophisticated visual design of the programme not only provided unparalleled candid access to musicians in performance, it also invoked past attempts to 17

18

Jazz as Visual Language

represent jazz history and performance within the broader cultural contexts of photography and the concert hall: It was shot using what were then high-​definition cam­ eras reproducing the shallow depth of field and key-​lit imagery that had become established in jazz photogra­ phy and setting up a narrative diegesis which explored the role of the blues across the history of jazz in a similar vein to how the 1924 Aeolian Hall and 1944 Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts had presented the history of jazz on the concert stage.37

The sensitivity with which the programme was conceived can be attributed to the expertise of those involved in its production. Noted jazz writers Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff served as music consultants, while its producer Robert Herridge had previ­ ously created the experimental arts series Camera Three for CBS in 1953. Interviewed by The Oxnard Press-​Courier about his aspira­ tions for the programme, Herridge averred, ‘We want to offer jazz for itself, as an experience in sound. We want to steer clear of the gimmicks and camera techniques that have burdened its presenta­ tion in the past’.38 Noting the challenge of marrying jazz, ‘an art that works through the ear’, with TV, ‘a medium that works primarily through the eye’, the interview further quoted Herridge as saying: I’ve been to jazz concerts myself and I know how deadly they can become after you’ve watched for an hour or so. […] But we’re going to use our cameras to get away from that feeling of sitting in the 20th row. Instead, we want to give viewers the feeling that they’re sitting right inside the group –​right between Count Basie and Coleman Hawkins.39

By comparing the descriptions of Wall and Long with that of Herridge, we detect an immediate tension: between the contrivances of depth of field and lighting and the transparency of ‘sitting right 18

19

Introduction

inside the group’. In separate recollections of the shooting, Hentoff and Balliett repeat significant details:  the novelty of the spare set; Holiday discarding her $500 gown for slacks; the freedom of the musicians to smoke, wear hats and move around the ‘big, bare two-​ storey studio at Ninth Avenue and Fifty-​sixth Street’.40 Yet both writ­ ers frame their accounts of this unfettered production with praise for the technicians involved. Balliett attributes the ‘brilliant visual side of the show’ and the ‘excitement of the camera-​work’ to direc­ tor Jack Smight and his team of five camera operators.41 Hentoff describes ‘cameramen who could improvise […], who were free to respond to the music and so considered themselves a creating part of the show’.42 The success of the programme, described by Balliett and Hentoff respectively as ‘never […] equalled’ and ‘the truest jazz program ever on television’,43 lies then in a delicate balance between docu­ mentary observation, improvisational practice (amongst musicians and crew) and the artful contrivance of the casual. This careful con­ struction is summed up in a poetic passage from Balliett’s account: There was cigarette smoke in the air, and there were cables on the floor. A  ladder leaned against a wall. Television cameras were moved like skaters, sometimes photo­ graphing each other. The musicians were allowed to move around: Basie ended up watching Monk, and later Billie Holiday went over and stood beside Basie.44

Writing of a William Gottlieb concert photograph of Billie Holiday, Peter Townsend demurs ‘the workings of myth’: the effacement of history in the glamour of images, the consolidation of a timeless ‘essence’ out of mytholo­ gised visual details. The motif of cigarette smoke (what Gary Carner calls the ‘Marlboro man in jazz’ motif) is particularly interesting:  it links jazz with a particular set of postures, from movies and fashion photography, 19

20

Jazz as Visual Language

and sustains the underworld exoticism jazz has been cou­ pled with ever since the 1920s.45

We may infer that it was a similar intuition that led Benny Carter to chastise Hentoff for The Sound of Jazz. But where Carter saw a degrading construction (‘It’s an insult to see people smoking and wearing their hats on a jazz program’), Hentoff insisted ‘that the dig­ nity of jazz was made entirely clear by their music and their faces’.46 Hentoff even quotes the journalist Eric Larrabee’s judgement that ‘[…] The music was good, yes, but what lifted The Sound of Jazz to a level hitherto unattained was the sight of it being made’.47 We see, then, that these readings portray the CBS special as a contested site, exemplary of the division between realism and myth in representa­ tions of jazz onscreen. Nowhere is this more apparent than in accounts of the perform­ ance of ‘Fine and Mellow’ showcasing Billie Holiday and Lester Young, which often omit the contribution of Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan and Roy Eldridge. Balliett singles out ‘Billie Holiday’s expression as she listens to her old friend [Young], an expression somewhere between laughter and tears’.48 In a simi­ larly speculative mood, Humphrey Lyttelton pondered, ‘as she nod­ ded or shook her head at every turn of his solo, was it in sadness or regret, as it appeared to be?’49 This desire to understand and encap­ sulate Holiday’s interiority is present too in a set of photos taken by bassist Milt Hinton, some of The Sound of Jazz recording, others of a later recording session of which he writes: The shots I got on one of those last dates were taken while Billie was listening to playbacks. Looking at her, I could see how disappointed she was about she sounded. I don’t think it was her intonation or phrasing that bothered her. The quality of her voice was gone, and she knew it bet­ ter than anyone. As she listened, her eyes would fill with tears, and I  had the feeling she was imagining how she 20

21

Introduction

Figure 0.4  Billie Holiday listening intently in The Sound of Jazz.

had sounded twenty years earlier when she’d sung the same song. She seemed to be so wrapped up in listening that she was completely unaware of me and my camera.50

Linking these recollections is an attempt to understand, contain and so possess the perceived tragedies and intimacies of Holiday and Young’s lives. As noted above, the fascination with the Holiday–​ Young relationship excludes the fact that (for example) more screen time during the ‘Fine and Mellow’ performance is given over to Holiday’s reaction to Ben Webster’s playing (Figure  0.4). The expressivity of the numerous close-​ups of Holiday, then, pro­ voke a desire to read beyond the music or to gauge a larger auto­ biographical meaning. This desire is projected onto the shots of musicians playing, not present within them, a process akin to that which film theorist Béla Balázs used to describe the effect of movie close-​ups. Now facial expression, physiognomy, has a relation to space similar to the relation of melody to time. The single 21

22

Jazz as Visual Language

features, of course, appear in space; but the significance of their relation to one another is not a phenomenon per­ taining to space, no more than are the emotions, thoughts and ideas which are manifested in the facial expres­ sions we see. They are picture-​like and yet they seem outside space; such is the psychological effect of facial expression.51

For Balázs, screen images of the body have an additional impact, one that isolates expressions into ‘emotions, moods, intentions and thoughts, things which although our eyes can see them, are not in space’.52 As Balázs’ metaphor of melody implies, this is a process which is also inherent to music and so we might infer that the addi­ tional framing and re-​framing of the television camera compounds and exaggerates an already musical quality. Jazz is an adaptive process, in constant dialogue with the cul­ ture that encompasses it. In the following chapters, the workings of myth are not treated as effacements of history but as contributing elements to the histories told about jazz and the histories which it generates itself. Indeed, as Steve Tromans has argued, myth is built into the creative processes which musicians deploy to make jazz.53 The audiovisual representation of jazz is not ‘a second-​order lan­ guage’ as Townsend attests.54 It is not oppositional or reductive. It is a primary articulation of jazz’s cultural contribution, forming one basis for how we appreciate and understand music.

22

23

1 Len Lye: The Sensual World

Len Lye’s three-​minute A Colour Box (GPO Film Unit, 1935) is an acknowledged classic of abstract animation. Made in the UK as an advertising film for the General Post Office Film Unit, its vibrant colours and shifting patterns still retain the power to startle and amuse audiences. Lye’s prominence as an early exponent of ‘direct’ film-​making (in which an artist marks directly onto celluloid, thus circumventing the use of a camera) was but one part of his artis­ tic practice, which included kinetic sculpture, painting and poetry. However, it is as a film-​maker that Lye remains in the popular mem­ ory and it is as such that this chapter treats him. Most writing on Lye notes his enthusiasm for jazz and his use of it on film soundtracks; I  have elected to position the jazz in A Colour Box as an engage­ ment with contemporary constructions of nationhood. I argue that Lye uses jazz in a polysemic manner, interacting rhythmically with a cinema of attractions which nevertheless has a strong ideological basis. A Colour Box abnegates technology but, in doing so, makes technology central to its project. It is a film that embraces the cul­ ture industry. If, as Rhythm magazine claimed, Lye ‘translates jazz 23

24

Jazz as Visual Language

into celluloid’, we must then ask: what was the purpose of this inter­ pretive act, and who did it benefit?1 As Catherine Parsonage has argued, the British public’s early understanding of jazz was fundamentally racial, polarised between aficionados seeking to elevate the music by spuriously repositioning it within the history of the European classical tradition and those that realised that these manoeuvres were ‘unnecessary, superficial, and even racist’.2 The landscape was made yet more complex by the plethora of jazz-​infused dance musics vying for popularity from the Americas and the Commonwealth, all of which depended for their appeal on danceable rhythms and an exaggerated romantic exoti­ cism.3 In some quarters, imported culture was a cause for concern; this was the era of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and a time when public debate on eugenics was ongoing. Meanwhile, the British demotic was being transformed by American slang (popularised through the cinema) and the pidgin forms of immigrants. The latter process of compression and reinvention was termed ‘creolisation’ by anthropologists, a suggestive term when we consider the title of the song that Lye selected for A Colour Box, ‘La Belle Creole’ (performed by expatriate Emilio ‘Don’ Barreto and his Cuban Orchestra). In keeping with the preoccupations of modernism, A Colour Box draws attention to the circumstances of its creation. As Peter Vergo has observed, the early decades of the twentieth century saw a turn in Western art towards convergence between once-​distinct crea­ tive practices, a breaking down of form in the pursuit of mysterious internal truths and a similarly inward-​looking preoccupation with ‘the structural principles that underlay each art’.4 This self-​referential quality is evidenced in A Colour Box through visual elements that evoke the film’s materiality (dots and lines which stand in for dust motes or hairs in the projector gate; stencils that mimic the sprocket holes of the celluloid strip or the shape of the scalpel Lye used upon it; the very liquidity of the paint itself), but also through the film’s formal characteristics (Figure 1.1). If, as Andrew Higson argues, 24

25

Len Lye: The Sensual World

Figure 1.1  Visual elements evoke materiality in A Colour Box.

the GPO Film Unit’s output was largely defined by a sanctioned ‘public gaze’ articulated through montage editing, Lye’s elision of not only camera but also cutting might be seen as disconnected from the Film Unit’s social purpose.5 This is certainly the way that Lye’s work has been positioned in previous accounts of the GPO Film Unit, as an interesting, but eccentric and contradic­ tory, side-​note. In this chapter, however, I will argue that Lye’s abstract films of the 1930s speak directly to those questions of race, identity and belonging that dominated public debates around British jazz at this time. I will suggest that A Colour Box belongs to a tradition in which ‘jazz, the image of jazz, and British jazz musicians have subverted and transformed narratives of nation’.6 In the aftermath of the First World War, this unsettling of nationhood reflected a much larger crisis of Western identity; Richard Overy notes that the ‘popularisa­ tion in the 1920s of the notion of entropy, for example, [had] under­ mined any sense of certainty or durability about the wider universe’.7 For many, jazz provided liberation from this ennui but, in his 1936 25

26

Jazz as Visual Language

paper ‘On Jazz’, Theodor Adorno decried what he saw as its illusory freedoms. To Adorno, jazz was the ultimate commodity, betraying the pursuit of reconciliation between the individual and society by presenting that ideal as having been achieved. For Adorno, improvi­ sation was mere ornamentation, ‘fundamentally ridiculous and heart-​rending’ since the expressivity of the performer was confined by the restrictions of the jazz form. As Robert W.  Witkin argues, ‘[w]‌hen Adorno rails against the products of the culture industry, against jazz and popular music, he is thinking of them […] as mani­ festations of objective and external force, as oriented to the bringing about of affects in the body of the subject and as undermining the subject at the level of the latter’s expressive agency’.8 It is striking that Witkin’s account of Adorno’s critique of jazz matches so closely those qualities which Lye found desirable in the music. I am not suggesting –​as Adorno does with jazz –​that this evidence of human expression (Lye’s inscriptions on the celluloid, or the rhythmic pulse of ‘La Belle Creole’) masks the film’s ideo­ logical project. Nor am I  accepting Lye’s own quasi-​cosmic con­ ception of his audience’s surrendering to the sensual experience of the films. Both models assume an elision of technology. I would suggest rather that A Colour Box ensures that the circumstances of its creation are evident to audiences, creating a double address. The abundant sensual pleasures of the film are underpinned by constant reminders of the cinematic apparatus: a title that recalls antique technologies of sound and vision, imagistic brush strokes and stencilled sprocket holes (Figure  1.2), a deconstruction of language that is framed by conventional film titles listing infor­ mation and signalling ‘The End’. Undeniably this foregrounding of technology serves an ideological purpose, shared by so many GPO films. What surprises perhaps is the boldness with which this ideological identity is announced; not skulking, like Adorno’s jazz, but dancing.

26

27

Len Lye: The Sensual World

Figure 1.2  Stencilled sprocket holes in A Colour Box.

Embracing the culture industry Of eleven films directed by Lye between 1934 and 1940, nine have jazz soundtracks repurposed from commercially available records. Each soundtrack structures its film (with Lye sometimes credited as providing mere ‘colour accompaniment’ to the music), and the contribution of Lye’s musical collaborators  –​first Jack Ellitt, then Ernst Hermann Meyer –​cannot be overstated. In 1938, Lye’s friend the poet Laura Riding published a monograph entitled Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films, which devoted some space to his soundtracks. ‘Len Lye does not regard jazz as the ideal film music,’ she wrote, ‘but, until a theory of music develops that can be wholesomely adapted to films, he prefers to rely on jazz for sup­ port where music is necessary in a film’.9 Riding predicted a turn in his work toward tribal folk music, which Lye adopted in later films Rhythm (1957), Free Radicals (1958) and Particles in Space (1958). In her admittedly patronising attitude to the ‘masses’, Riding saw jazz manifesting the contemporary moment, meeting the modern 27

28

Jazz as Visual Language

audience’s ‘urgent and continuous need for confirmation of their being alive in this (to them) amazing world’.10 If we can ignore the elitism, Riding’s perspicacity must be applauded. The jazz in A Colour Box is transformed from its recorded state, enlivened by the audience’s experience over the film’s duration. In this section, I examine Lye’s aesthetic achievement in A Colour Box as part of the GPO’s institutional project and interrogate its status as both art and advertising. Appointed to develop creative work for the Empire Marketing Board which would promote mutuality and co-​operation, John Grierson oversaw a creative team of film-​makers whose subjects depicted social realities in a fresh, poetic way. From the very begin­ ning, Grierson’s conception of a British documentary movement was rooted in a paternalistic ideal that, as Ian Aitken notes, never­ theless ‘offered a thorough intellectual critique of capitalist moder­ nity’.11 Drifters (1929), directed by Grierson, depicts the spiritual connection between fishermen, wildlife and the sea in ‘a generalised and impressionistic account’ which lends its subjects ‘metaphysical significance’.12 This film established a model that would continue to influence the work of the GPO Film Unit, in which the documen­ tary observation of quotidian existence evinced symbolic and meta­ phorical visions of the nation, increasingly defined by depictions of benign bureaucracy. The closure of the EMB Film Unit in 1933 led to a transferral to the Post Office, where Grierson’s new GPO Film Unit benefited from carrying over some film-​makers (e.g. Basil Wright, Stuart Legg, Harry Watt) and recruiting new talent (Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Lye). These newcomers were not always responsive to Grierson’s vision, with especial tension devel­ oping between Grierson and Cavalcanti. However, it is to Grierson that the credit must go for encouraging a collective spirit of experi­ mentation –​later in his life, Grierson would describe the arrival of Lye as ‘one of the happiest circumstances of our lives’.13 Basil Wright remembered the GPO Film Unit as a moment of opportunity which 28

29

Len Lye: The Sensual World

‘meant a chance for Len Lye’, while Stuart Legg suggested that ‘Grierson was really training people’.14 For Len Lye, the patronage of the GPO Film Unit was hugely significant. His life in London had been ‘dogged by poverty’ and the GPO commissions provided ‘a measure of security’.15 After com­ pleting his studies in New Zealand, Lye had moved to Sydney in 1922, taking on commercial art commissions and learning adver­ tising techniques.16 However, Lye had found more fulfilment in personal side projects, such as the building of a kinetic theatre,17 and his burgeoning friendship with the experimental musician Jack Ellitt, who was ‘strongly involved in modern music and art’.18 In 1926, on a whim, Lye took passage as a stoker on a ship bound for London. He quickly fell in with an artistic crowd –​Kanty Cooper, Eric Kennington, Laura Riding, Robert Graves –​who thought him ‘completely unspoilt, a real savage’, an outsider status that he played up to and which was to be reflected in his eventual status within the GPO Film Unit.19 A year later, Ellitt followed Lye to London. After working as stagehands, Ellitt and Lye did ‘fill-​in’ work for animated advertise­ ments, using their employer’s rostrum camera to begin work on their first film. Tusalava (1929) was a short cel animation consist­ ing of around 4400 photographed drawings.20 It took two years to make and garnered a mixed response. The experience was not a happy one for Ellitt, who saw his plans for an intricate synchronised score for two pianos dwindle to a perfunctory live performance by one piano at the film’s eventual first screening. In frustration, Ellitt destroyed the score.21 By the time of A Colour Box, Ellitt had made substantial contributions of his own to British film culture. His collaboration with experimental photographer Francis Bruguiere, Light Rhythms (1930), developed his interest in the structural con­ nections between image and music and by 1933, Ellitt was ‘using a home-​made rostrum camera to photograph drawings onto the soundtrack area  of film stock, as well as hand drawing patterns 29

30

Jazz as Visual Language

directly onto the celluloid’.22 Lye and Ellitt made two further films in this period, the stop-​motion Peanut Vendor (1933) and Full Fathom Five (1935, Lye’s first sustained direct film), building a greater mutual influence. For Lye, Ellitt’s formal innovations and his inter­ est in modernism were tremendous inspirations. A friend from the Sydney days described Lye as ‘full of ideas but […] inarticulate’; it fell to the conservatorium-​trained Ellitt to be his first interpreter.23 Lye would form other, similarly symbiotic relationships during his time in London, most notably with Laura Riding and fellow GPO film-​maker Humphrey Jennings. Over June and July 1935, Grierson negotiated a deal that would allow Lye to use his ‘direct’ method in the creation of a ‘GPO parcel post colour film’.24 Grierson’s support was not without precedent; in Germany, Walter Ruttmann had been employed by Excelsior tyres and Kantorowicz liqueur to create ‘part-​abstract colour adverts’.25 However, where Ruttman’s commissions had been from private companies, Lye’s film would be produced with public money: Lye’s fee was initially set at £20 plus the cost of materials, increasing to £30 despite Lye’s insistence that the GPO should hold ‘no rights to exploit the film or technique in any commercial trade sense other than that of GPO governmental purposes’.26 Where previous col­ laborations between Lye and Ellitt had used original soundtracks, this was the first instance of Ellitt being cast in the role of ‘sound editor and synchroniser, […] assisting Lye in his design and formal construction of his imagery’.27 Lye’s biographer Roger Horrocks suggests that ‘the GPO budget did not allow Lye to commission music or to use well-​known groups’, which meant that the film had be synchronised to a commercially available recording. This may have been true in 1935 for a new talent; but by 1937, the GPO had hired Benjamin Britten as its musical director (only twenty-​four years old at the time of his appointment), who drew upon his expe­ rience in crafting BBC radio soundscapes, combining orchestral arrangements, spoken word and ‘found sound’.28 Indeed, according 30

31

Len Lye: The Sensual World

to Grierson himself, most GPO films used original composed scores, largely because they were cheaper than existing record­ ings.29 Whatever the circumstances of A Colour Box, Lye and Ellitt’s continuing commitment to using pre-​existing jazz records in their films between 1935 and 1938 can thus be seen as a conscious diver­ gence from the GPO creative norm; for A Colour Box, they sifted through hundreds of records before coming to a decision.30 Their final selection was Don Barreto’s lively beguine ‘La Belle Creole’.31 Percussive batá drums back a melodious clarinet, an instrument associated more with Martinique than Cuba. This would have not been an unfamiliar sound to British audiences. As two Rhythm articles of 1934 make clear, Latin music was a genre that appealed both to dancers and lovers of ‘light’ music. Barreto’s contemporary Don Rico, the bandleader of a ‘ladies’ orches­ tra’, attributed British interest to radio airplay.32 Fernando Castro noted that the Latin music played in Europe was often a hybrid, incorporating ‘a goodly measure of jazz effects to make it attrac­ tive and pleasing to the ear.’33 Barreto in particular had received repeated plaudits from The Gramophone’s dance record reviewer Edgar Jackson, meriting ten mentions in his column between 1932 and 1935. ‘Why does not someone bring this outfit to London?’ lamented Jackson in one review of the Barreto Orchestra’s work. ‘It would be a most attractive novelty and probably a big broad­ casting success, and I  think it [the orchestra] is no farther away than Paris’.34 Lye was drawn to this kind of soundtrack again in subsequent films: Kaleidoscope (1935) used another Barreto song, ‘Beguine d’Amour’; Rainbow Dance (1936) Rico’s Creole Band; and Trade Tattoo (1937) The Lecuona Cuban Boys.35 Was ‘La Belle Creole’ jazz? It has not been remembered as such (try to find Barreto in any of the standard histories) but it was cer­ tainly understood as jazz by Lye and his contemporaries. In The Gramophone, Barreto was reviewed alongside American masters such as Ellington and Armstrong in Jackson’s ‘Dance and Popular 31

32

Jazz as Visual Language

Rhythmic’ column (from 1935 onwards, retitled simply ‘Swing Music’). A sample 1933 issue of Melody Maker demonstrates how nomenclature and classification were perpetually shifting and contested:  one vendor markets Ellington’s output as ‘Hot Rhythm Records’ at the same time that John Hammond reports on The Cotton Club dubbing the Ellington ensemble a ‘symphonic orches­ tra’.36 On the letters page, a reader asks, ‘how can the compositions of Ellington, [Spike] Hughes, etc., be called “hot”? They are original works, and certainly not transcriptions of anything else at all, and only seem to me to be an advanced series of rhythmic exercises’.37 The editorial response, while admitting the inadequacy of the avail­ able terminology, suggests that ‘jazz’ had merely been a step towards the advanced ‘Rhythm Compositions’ of Ellington. If this tells us anything, it is that we should be wary of teleological simplifications and totalising histories. Reflecting on the changing meanings and ideological implications of the word ‘jazz’, Gabbard wisely counsels, ‘Jazz is the music that large groups of people have called jazz at par­ ticular moments in history’.38 Given that the music in Lye’s films was commonly referred to as jazz by contemporaries and that his close friend Laura Riding devoted over two pages to a discussion of jazz in her Lye monograph, it becomes our task then to ascertain just what ‘jazz’ meant in Lye’s artistic conception.39 ‘La Belle Creole’ is a song without words. It follows the tradi­ tional folk form of the beguine, using jazz inflections to make it commercially appealing, and as such fits Adorno’s category of the rhythmic-​spatial, which ‘does not take the form of the form of genu­ ine thematic development […] but rather consists in a change of ornamentation’.40 However, as Witkin has shown, the culture indus­ try plays an essential role in the distribution of alternate cultural forms –​‘new means of expression that would otherwise be accessi­ ble only to the social groups in which they originated’.41 Lye’s use of an existing commercial record is crucial here, in that the soundtrack came to the film with a set of pre-​existing cultural associations. 32

33

Len Lye: The Sensual World

Figure 1.3  Texture and liquidity in A Colour Box.

Unlike the abstract animations of Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger or the majority of GPO films which used original scores in the clas­ sical idiom, Lye’s use of Latin jazz placed A Colour Box firmly within popular discourse. While Dadaists and Surrealists engaged with jazz culture as kitsch or primitivism, Lye used jazz as part of his efforts to invigorate the sensual experience of cinema, as part of a toolbox which included hand-​made shapes and the vivid hues and liquid textures of paint (Figure 1.3). This fiercely modern vision served to make the GPO Film Unit look and sound contemporary. The film’s title, A Colour Box, alludes to the trappings of its medium: the paint-​box, the gramophone, the kaleidoscope, celluloid itself and the film projector. For Full Fathom Five, Lye had ‘located a brand of lacquer paint that would not crack or peel when run through a film projector’ and he developed this process in A Colour Box  –​ hand-​painting and scratching onto the surface of the celluloid, stencilling patterns and text.42 Ellitt made a detailed ‘chart’ (analysis), then the music was transferred to film and Lye made various cue marks 33

34

Jazz as Visual Language

along the soundtrack. Thanks to a year of experiments, it was not difficult for him to select and paint visual ideas of the required length. Only a couple of splices were needed and Lye was able to paint most of A Colour Box in five days, though the sequence of words at the end slowed him down. Including planning and post-​production the process took a total of two months, but that was a breeze compared with the years spent on Tusalava.43

As Luke Smythe notes, Lye’s direct work posited ‘the film image as a locus for the transfer of energy between bodies and […] cinematic movement as a brand of “vicarious” dance’.44 By marking directly onto celluloid, Lye was making films that were exaggeratedly physi­ cal, recording the shared temporal and spatial presence of artist and medium. Lye set out to transform audience experience by using cin­ ema ‘as a device for enlivening viewers’ bodies via a process he referred to as “bodily empathy”’.45 As in Tusalava, Lye used dot matrices inspired by the Aboriginal art he had studied in New Zealand, imagery evoking ceremonial body painting that is traditionally restricted to the temporality of an initiation dance.46 The shapes which Lye drew onto celluloid were ‘primarily indexical’, evoking human bodies only indi­ rectly through ‘the elusive presence of the gesture, and sensory effect of the figure of motion as it calls attention to itself.’47 So while Lye’s films drew upon a primitivist fascination with the body, they were equally explorations of cinematic materiality. In this way, they exemplify the industrial world’s contradictory obsession with primitivism, in which aboriginal culture was re-​envisioned so that, like jazz in Britain, it could be ‘assimilated, reproduced and experienced by whites’.48 As Parsonage observes, primitivism was ‘a primarily modern idea’.49 Lye’s direct technique radically reconceived the relationship between image, sound, medium and audience. By painting and scratching directly onto a celluloid film strip, Lye was creating an artefact more akin to those found in the plastic arts. Yet, unlike Duncan Grant’s 1914 Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 34

35

Len Lye: The Sensual World

a painted scroll ‘several yards long and unrolled through a light-​ box in time to music by Bach’, Lye’s celluloid artefact was not pre­ sented to the public in a gallery.50 Rather, the prints struck from this film object were projected in cinemas, ghosting Lye’s original. Ontologically, then, Lye’s direct films are oppositional to Grant’s scroll or the similar scroll pictures Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling had experimented with in 1919. Noting that connection, Simon Watney observes a contemporary preoccupation with the potential of cinema that made up ‘a shared range of cultural references and practices within the European modernist movement as a whole’.51 Where moving scrolls differ from Lye’s films is in their negation of the technological process of mass reproduction, projection and consumption. The scrolls of Grant, Richter and Eggeling are mod­ ernist art works which privilege the principle of ‘the original’ over the reproduced. In this way, we might see them as indicative of the paradox which Rosalind E. Krauss uses to describe modernism: a culture of rebirth that is nevertheless founded upon ‘repetition and recurrence… [and] the complementary discourse of the copy’.52 Lye’s work might be more productively positioned as a precur­ sor to the American underground films of the 1960s which Peter Wollen argues, subverted the technical and material sub-​structure of cin­ ema –​flicker films, films which showed the dust-​particles and scratches that are part of every film’s destiny, films that blew up the image by re-​filming it until the spec­ tator became aware of the grains of silver embedded in the ­celluloid  –​whose tarnishing from light to dark still remains the essential physical precondition of cinema.53

Structurally, A Colour Box is made up of three segments, lent continu­ ity by the soundtrack. An opening sequence of abstract shapes over­ laid with three text titles (‘The GPO Film Unit presents: –​’, ‘A Colour Box by Len Lye’, ‘Print:  Dufaycolour, Sound:  Visatone-​Marconi’) 35

36

Jazz as Visual Language

[duration 28 seconds]; a main section focused entirely on the move­ ment of shapes and the succession of colours [1 minute 33 seconds]; and overlays of a series of letters and numbers which, when pieced together, form a message about parcel post rates [55 seconds]. In an analysis that attends to the particularities of Lye’s artistic process, Smythe notes that A Colour Box inverts conventional synchronisa­ tion practice in that ‘the soundtrack was recorded ahead of the visu­ als’ and, even more remarkably, that ‘Lye was using visual cues from the soundtrack image to determine the required length of his hand-​ produced segments, rather than aural cues from the music itself.’54 Usefully, Smythe pushes his discussion beyond binary relationships ‘between figural motifs and instruments’, towards a consideration of an ever-​shifting visual field that provides ‘a supplementary layer of visual instrumentation, whose counterpoint movements, rhythms and chromatic harmonies serve to elaborate, alter and revise the primary experience of the music.’55 Rather than acting as mere illus­ tration, the visual elements of the film engage in dialogue with its soundtrack. One suspects that Adorno would have disapproved of A Colour Box. His polemical stance against mass culture, grounded as it was in a keen awareness of the dangers of authoritarianism, may have been affronted by the instructional intent of the GPO Film Unit. Grierson’s ideal of bureaucratic oversight and education of the populace was undoubtedly problematic in terms of ‘democratic accountability’,56 and Lye’s attempts to engender bodily empathy in his audiences closely match the prescribed emotional effects Adorno observed within the culture industry. As an exponent of formal integrity and the integral connection between textual elements, Adorno ‘deplored the absence of dialectical process in the visual arts dominated by the principle of collage/​montage and by the transgressive anti-​art practices originally associated with Dada and Surrealism’.57 As noted above, Adorno reserved particular scorn for jazz, arguing that it commodified individual 36

37

Len Lye: The Sensual World

expression and propagated racist stereotypes. Lye’s appropriation of Aboriginal art and his firm association between jazz and the body could, indeed, be seen as examples of opportunistic primitiv­ ism. Certainly, Lye’s tastes in jazz were determined by assumptions about racial authenticity  –​‘his favourite musicians were always black’ with very few exceptions, and he bemoaned ‘the growing shift in popular taste towards white musicians, big bands and swing music’.58 For Smythe, reconciliation between Lye’s work and Adorno’s ide­ als is possible since ‘the musical material with which Lye worked was just one strand of a considerably more sophisticated and anar­ chic ensemble’.59 However, to consider A Colour Box primarily as an artwork distorts its purpose and actuality. Lye’s film has a dual address: as an art film but also as a piece of advertising. If we view the final third of the film, in which advertising text and prices float across the screen, as the witty communication of content rather than a ‘regrettably obliged’ imposition,60 we can more assuredly position Lye within a framework of mass culture. As I have suggested, Lye’s artistic development was shaped by his work in advertising. In Sydney, Lye had worked for Filmads Ltd., ‘one of the few local companies that produced animated advertisements’,61 and it was here that he first began experiment­ ing with film. [Lye] became interested in the scratches and other acci­ dental marks that he saw on leaders (the pieces of film at the beginnings of reels). He was so impressed by the way these marks wriggled that he made some ‘fiddly scratches’ of his own on a strip of film and stayed behind after work to project them.62

By attempting to replicate the random movement of these imperfec­ tions, Lye made the texture of celluloid a subject of his films. But inherent to the process of mass reproduction and distribution was 37

38

Jazz as Visual Language

the promise of new, unpredictable scratches and imperfections. The inherent degradation and wear of celluloid is one of the conditions of watching film; with each run through a projector, each print of A Colour Box would aggregate new marks and texture, unique to the individual print and a host of variables individual to the projec­ tion booth. In this way, Lye’s direct films resolve Krauss’ paradox of modernism. Their continued temporal existence through repeated projection ensures an evolving work, so that each mass production artefact (each individual film print) remains constantly evolving and transforming. Crucially, however, these films were not sequestered within the avant-​garde but used popular advertising techniques to communicate to a mass audience. While certain advertisers had adopted modernist techniques, Lye’s films were still very unusual, especially when considered against the rise in naturalistic stock photography in 1930s print advertis­ ing.63 This was a time of ‘increased mass visual literacy’ in Britain64 and corporate advertising culture was intertwined with the aesthetic aims of the GPO Film Unit: as well as receiving commissions from the General Post Office, Lye also made films for Churchman’s ciga­ rettes (Kaleidoscope, 1935), Shell (The Birth of the Robot, 1936) and Imperial Airways (Colour Flight, 1938). Paul Rotha and Basil Wright made corporate films as well, strengthening the links between pri­ vate enterprise and the GPO Film Unit, and it is telling that when Grierson resigned his leadership in 1936, he went on to ‘establish film-​making units in various corporate concerns, such as the Shell oil company’.65 In Europe, similar relations between art and com­ merce had been built by proponents of the avant-​garde such as Ruttmann and Fischinger.66 While acknowledging the contradic­ tion, Grierson posited that working within the ideological limits of propagandist messages allowed the film director unparalleled free­ dom due to the opportunities afforded by patronage.67 I wish to suggest that, in displaying the ‘propaganda’ of the GPO as sequences of letters rather than immediately intelligible words, 38

39

Len Lye: The Sensual World

Lye is not subverting it but rather foregrounding its method of con­ veyance. To return briefly to Adorno, this is quite the opposite of the insidious ideological message of the culture industry. Rather, Lye is intent upon establishing to his audience the role of technology in this artistic endorsement of mass communication. I would argue that these elements in A Colour Box unsettle Tim Armstrong’s claim that ‘discursive meaning and narration’ are not features of Lye’s cin­ ema, ‘eschewed for a technology of sensation and being’.68 While Armstrong convincingly posits Lye as working in a Bergsonian mould, ‘re-​presenting’ the present moment, and pays admirable attention to the part of technology in Lye’s process, I  am uneasy with his implication that Lye disregards language and that ‘direct’ film-​making encompasses Lye’s achievements over the decade. The live-​action N or NW? (GPO, 1938) is but one example of a Lye film that involves quite different aesthetic decisions but which is linked to A Colour Box through its consideration of language as mediator. It is instructive to compare Lye’s technique to John Hewitt’s his­ tory of Shell oil advertising, which observes a tendency in the 1930s to advertise the company rather than the product.69 For Shell, this manifested through an oblique association with nature and art and a concomitant suppression of labour and commerce. Hewitt argues that advertising was socially problematic for middle-​class audiences because it explicitly constructed them as consumers; ‘it brought the tradesman’s entrance round to the front’.70 It was also perceived to lack ‘a cultural authority, a form of dignity, even of wisdom, which is superior to any vulgar material interest’, and so was despised by many.71 With these concerns in mind, it is evident that readings of A Colour Box which find fault in Lye’s method, or elide its advertis­ ing intent, are also those which object to the moment when the film repositions the audience from appreciators of modernism to con­ sumers of postage stamps. To do so is to risk missing the considerable wit and invention of Lye’s play with semiotic form. This display of words, letters, numerals 39

40

Jazz as Visual Language

and pecuniary value seems at odds with the tenets of abstract anima­ tion, which, to quote Paul Wells, is often founded on a premise of ‘the absolutely individual expression of the artist’ and ‘seeks to represent inarticulable personal feelings beyond the orthodoxies of language’.72 By contrast, Lye’s films evidence a direct connection with a world larger than that encompassed by the visual phenomena of animation. For Desmond O’Rawe, the advertising text that is a frequent feature of the films is evidence of Lye’s coherent artistic vision: […] Lye avoids giving any sense that the captions were a post-​production afterthought. Stencilled letters, silhou­ ettes, numbers, words, and symbols flow into the filmic and assemble themselves into legibility in a manner con­ sistent with the overall visual and rhythmical shape, and soundscape, of each film.73

It is also an opportunity for Lye to ask the audience how they cre­ ate meaning. At the start of the film, the overlaid titles take familiar form:  the film’s producers, its title, the brand names of its technical processes (Dufaycolor and Visatone-​Marconi). However, after the main sequence’s display of non-​narrative colour, texture and moving shapes, the return of language is fragmented. Letters and words appear haltingly, supercede one another so that their cumulative meaning is only understood once the final word (‘post’) is onscreen: G /​P /​O /​ cheaper /​parcel /​post. This message is followed by a series of parcel weights and prices (e.g. ‘3 lbs. for 6d.’, ‘4 lbs. 7d.’ etc.) which criss-​cross the screen successively (Figure 1.4). The variation in their directions and speed of movement has a charming, humorous effect which light­ ens the potential discomfort of the sudden address to the audience as consumer. Lumpen, these baldly empirical weights and prices propose a different set of values to the fluid colours and shapes. Their criss-​ crossing movement evokes the omnipresence of publicity images in the modern world, which John Berger has suggested ‘are continuously passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus’.74 40

41

Len Lye: The Sensual World

Figure 1.4  Criss-​crossing weights and prices in A Colour Box.

Mapping modern Britain In an account of sound in GPO films, James G. Mansell has argued that members of the Unit used noise and rhythm in very different ways, as ‘part of a broader culture of aurality in early twentieth-​ century Britain in which representations of noise were, by necessity, interventions in politicised debates about industrial modernity’.75 Mansell highlights Cavalcanti’s work on the soundtrack of Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936) as presenting ‘noise as a creative force in modernity, a welcome side effect of industrial work which could be divorced from its original source in order to provide new material for the artist’.76 In this section, I  argue that Lye’s 1930s films similarly represent modern Britain as technologi­ cal, multi-​cultural and noisy, qualities which define an energetic and hopeful vision of the nation. In the previous section, I  have thought particularly about the place of sound in relation to the cin­ ematic image; it is also important to consider a structuring absence, that medium through which most audience members would have 41

42

Jazz as Visual Language

had their first experience of jazz, the BBC radio service. As E. Anna Claydon reminds us, ‘Britain was an aural media nation in the 1930s and 40s’ and ‘the sonic spaces of the radio mapped onto and into the daily lives of people and helped to contribute to the mid-​ century national identity’.77 In June 1933, Duke Ellington and his orchestra had electrified the British jazz world with a series of concert performances at theatrical venues around the country and a broadcast on the BBC National Programme. As Tim Wall has argued, this moment signaled an important shift in the way that jazz was understood in Britain and also in how the BBC programmed jazz content.78 Listener responses in the Radio Times to the 50-​minute studio broadcast by Ellington’s orchestra on 14 June 1933 demonstrate not just the range of responses available to ‘hot’ music but also the broad demographic of radio listeners. One listener, writing under the pseudonym ‘Rhythm Fan’, proclaimed the broadcast to be ‘the grandest three-​quarters of an hour I have ever listened to’ while another, H. F. Clarke, protested against ‘our good English air being polluted with such nonsense and tripe’.79 Just as Ellington’s visit led some to upbraid the shortcom­ ings of British musicians, so I claim that Lye’s immigrant perspec­ tive structured his films’ attitudes towards perceptions of national identity and cultural mixing.80 Andrew Higson has argued that the GPO documentaries con­ ceived of a ‘common public sphere’, an idea that depends upon the elision of labour, just as in the Shell advertisements: […] the interests of the capitalist class are transformed into the public interest. […] Similarly, the party political govern­ ment becomes subsumed into the idea of the benevolent state, above divisive politics (the GPO is simply a public institution). In the same movement, the documentary film addresses the spectator as a citizen of the nation, not as a subject of one or another antagonistic class, race or sex. The citizen is addressed as someone to whom this unitary reality 42

43

Len Lye: The Sensual World

is immediately explicable (a particular ideological position is rendered familiar, natural, common sense).81

Reconceiving the nation was a common preoccupation during the 1930s. As old certainties crumbled, writers like George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, H.  V. Morton and Mary Ellen Chase charted industrial and rural spaces, often looking to working-​class life as an authentic snapshot of what constituted modern Britain.82 As Juliet Gardiner has observed, social conditions were intimately linked to scientific devel­ opment:  ‘technological advances were charged with having thrown thousands out of work, and creating machines for military savagery’.83 Michael Chanan recollects that it was in the 1930s that behavioural psychologists became interested in the connection between back­ ground music and worker productivity, leading to the BBC’s after­ noon broadcasts of ‘Music While You Work’.84 Right-​wing thinkers employed micrographic metaphors, as when Charles Bond described the masses proliferating ‘like the parasitic cancer cells in the individ­ ual organism’.85 Scientific parlance was adopted by artists as well; in a 1917 lecture on Kandinsky, the British Dadaist Hugo Ball had referred to ‘the theory of electrons’.86 This confluence of art and science was by no means incongruous –​Patricia Fara reminds us that the history of microscopy is also the history of scientists interpreting images.87 In his pioneering Micrographia (1665), Robert Hooke had observed that microscopic images changed according to conditions of light but maintained that ‘a sincere Hand and a faithful Eye’ were the essential tools for one attempting to transcribe natural phenomena.88 The development of modernism, a new way of understanding imagination’s relation to reality, had been irrevocably influenced by science’s capacity to photograph the microscopic world. Theological orthodoxies were undermined by this previously invisible substrate at the level of micro-​organisms and then sub-​atomic particles. Surfaces were no longer fixed but were instead teeming, vibrating, ever shifting. This restless movement was captured in Lye’s direct 43

44

Jazz as Visual Language

films, whose liquid textures and plasmic vibrations evoked biologi­ cal processes (in this respect, Lye’s films complement Jean Painlevé‘s startling nature cinema). As Smythe explains, the quality of move­ ment in A Colour Box was dictated by Lye’s practice of working directly onto the 35mm film and along the film strip, rather than on a frame-​by-​frame basis (as had other avant-​garde animators). Instead of pursuing the smooth, graduated forms of movement that are typical of standard animation […], he laced his films with a deliberate shakiness and abruptness. By allowing for a certain level of calculated ‘imprecision’ in his work, he was able to experiment with new forms of consonance and dissonance between music and image that tighter methods of synchronisation and a more care­ fully controlled approach to the production of his film images would have precluded.89

This ‘calculated imprecision’ is perhaps the defining stylistic elem­ ent of Lye’s direct films. It is the painterly touch, the reminder of the human (singular) behind the potentially alienating abstract vis­ ual field. Visible brush marks propel the moment of creation into the text, making it insistently visible and seeming to compress the time elapsed between production and exhibition. For Lye, then, the ‘easy human reality’90 of jazz smooths the appeasement of man and machine. For a yet more explicit example of Lye’s conception of a multi-​ vocal Britain, we must turn to his later animation Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1938). A commission from the Travel and Industrial Development Association, brokered by Grierson, the film presented a version of ‘The Lambeth Walk’, a novelty song and dance craze made popular by Lupino Lane in the 1937 stage musical Me and My Gal. In an excellent account of the phenomenon, Allison Abra details its permeation throughout the strata of British society and the ways in which the Mecca dance hall company, who owned copyright on the dance, engineered publicity which spuriously 44

45

Len Lye: The Sensual World

constructed ‘The  Lambeth Walk’ as a folk tradition, mobilising notions of nationhood and democracy. Through song lyrics and thematic associations, the Mecca dances glorified the nation’s history and heritage, landscape and natural beauty, as well as reflecting a more inward turn towards ‘England’ rather than ‘Britain’, all idioms that previous work on national identity has identified as being prevalent in the inter-​war period.91

While the intentions of the song publishers may have been to ‘effec­ tively produce the nation for consumption by British ­dancers’,92 Abra notes that ‘it was in the physical performance of the Lambeth Walk that much of its meaning was created’.93 With this perfor­ mance came the possibility of resistance to Mecca’s dominant nar­ rative, and it is in this spirit that Swinging the Lambeth Walk ‘covers’ the song.94 After working together on numerous films, Ellitt and Lye had ended their professional partnership with N or NW?, and so Lye cast about for another sound editor.95 He found a sympathetic ally in Ernst Hermann Meyer, a musicologist and composer. Meyer’s ‘sudden politicisation’ and fierce opposition to Nazism had led him away from Romanticism and towards dissonance in his composi­ tion.96 In 1937, he produced the abstract soundtrack to Cavalcanti’s GPO film Roadways and spent time on a trawler researching North Sea (Harry Watt, GPO, 1938). Meyer’s modernist sensibility encour­ aged him to modify the techniques used by Ellitt. For Swinging the Lambeth Walk, Meyer cut up segments from commercially avail­ able cover versions of ‘The Lambeth Walk’ (Horrocks estimates that the soundtrack is made up of five different versions). This cut-​up maintains the rhythm of the melody, but moves between different orchestrations. Horrocks identifies two –​the Quintette du Hot Club de France featuring Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, and the Milt Herth Trio97 –​and describes the soundtrack as made up 45

46

Jazz as Visual Language

Figure 1.5  A thumbs-​up and cry of ‘Oi!’ in Swinging the Lambeth Walk.

of at least thirteen segments, accompanying ‘approximately 4800 hand-​painted and scratched frames’.98 Lye’s cheery film is topped and tailed by one of the hand-​gestures that was a feature of the dance, the up-​turned thumb, accompanied by a hearty cry of ‘Oi!’ (Figure  1.5). The repetition of this filmed image, framing the direct animation, offers a more direct connec­ tion to the real world than anything in A Colour Box. It condenses the dance, ‘in which partners circled the floor singing the Lambeth Walk song and strutting with the supposed cockney swagger’, slap­ ping their knees.99 This repetition of the thumbs-​up gesture acts as an overly determined statement of national identity, the cockney ‘Oi!’ leading into a melange of Lambeth Walks, from different nations. The French version, the American version, the British version; to hear these in a film made by a New Zealander in 1938 is to wonder at the dissemination of musical ideas afforded by recorded media. The insistent return to Milt Herth’s Hammond organ on Meyer’s cut-​ up soundtrack mimics the organ that many audiences would have 46

47

Len Lye: The Sensual World

associated with trips to the cinema and the music hall, a tradition of live performance within the space of mechanical reproduction.

The sensual world In an influential piece of film scholarship published in 1986, Tom Gunning terms early film a ‘cinema of attraction’. This was an exhib­ itionist cinema, sometimes showing its audiences exotic sights, but often depicting the most banal actions, where fascination lay in the ability to observe these scenes mechanically reproduced. Gunning argues that it is inappropriate to think about these films in nar­ rative terms, and instead that they rely on ‘direct stimulation’ for affect.100 These nascent films were usually shown as part of an unre­ lated sequence, either set amidst live performances in vaudevilles or music halls, or viewed in nickelodeons ‘in a variety format, trick films sandwiched in with farces, actualities, “illustrated songs”, and, quite frequently, cheap vaudeville acts’.101 Crucially, Gunning notes that it was often the medium itself which was attractive to audiences, from the earliest exhibitions of ‘the Cinématographe, the Biograph or the Vitascope’ to close-​ups that served no narrative purpose but rather presented enlargement as a wonder in itself.102 Evidently, Lye’s direct films make a similar appeal to the spec­ tacle of cinema as a technology and the wonder of the projected image. However, as I have argued, this spectacle is dependent on a social-​democratic ideology and an address to an attentive specta­ tor, alive to the particularities of the moment. For Lye and Ellitt, jazz was an especially useful genre of music to draw upon, not just for its liberatory rhythms, but because it was a site of racial and cultural dissonance. A Colour Box creates a cinematic space which posits hope in the idea of mixing, which values subjec­ tive experience and which finds the human in the machine. As I have shown, Swinging the Lambeth Walk, a later film made with Ernst Meyer, offers a more direct comment on the construction 47

48

Jazz as Visual Language

of nationhood. In considering these films, I have largely ignored the claims for spiritual enrichment made by Lye and his admirers. Rather, this chapter has offered a reading of Lye’s direct practice, and of A Colour Box in particular, within the context of the jazz culture of the 1930s. As I  have argued, the word ‘jazz’ provoked discourses around race, cultural value, technological affect and the relation of Britain to the rest of the world. These frameworks deepen our understanding of Lye’s films, beyond a sense of their place in his personal oeuvre. There remains important work to be done on their connections to the inter-​war British avant-​garde, and to larger popular film culture. Lye’s direct films remain powerful for their sensuous quali­ ties, an ability to reconcile the human body in abstract terms, as moving shapes and patterns, as colour in light. But this sensual world was not conceived in isolation and it is important for us to understand the films’ statement on the modern. To do so is to rec­ ognise not just the function of these films within the GPO Film Unit’s ideological project but also Lye’s involvement in a world of commerce. Mark Laver’s recent study of jazz and advertising provides a valuable incursion into this area, often elided in histo­ ries of the music.103 In recent years, the GPO films have provided a conceptual framework for the alternative band Public Service Broadcasting, while in 2015, the Govett-​Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand opened its centre dedicated to the artist with an exhibition entitled ‘Len Lye’s Jam Session’. During the writing of this chapter, Royal Mail released a set of first day covers celebrating the ‘Great British Film’. Along with a more general set focusing on six seminal feature films was a set of four stamps celebrating the GPO Film Unit, accompanied by text written by historian Scott Anthony. The GPO was represented by Night Mail, Love on the Wing (Norman McLaren, 1938), Spare Time (Humphrey Jennings, 1939) and –​of course –​A Colour Box. The choice of films is striking, especially in featuring two animations, 48

49

Len Lye: The Sensual World

usually seen as ancillary to the movement. McLaren’s film followed Lye in using ‘virtuoso hand-​drawn animation over complex col­ oured backgrounds shot with the aid of a multi-​plane camera to add an impression of depth’.104 Grierson’s conception of a socially responsible, paternalistic GPO Film Unit is replaced by one defined by colour, liberation, and emphasis on the postal service as commu­ nication system. The selection of Jennings’ Spare Time is also signifi­ cant here; an oddity amongst GPO films in that its depiction of the working-​class focused not on their need for elevation but instead on their leisure pursuits. The release of the stamps in May 2014 followed the disastrous selling of Royal Mail shares the previous year.105 Given this context, in which the Post Office was reposition­ ing itself as a private entity and relocating branches as franchises within newsagents and convenience stores, the mobilisation of nos­ talgia for an idealist 1930s GPO is telling. One is struck, though, on handling the stamp set, at the oddity of confining the motion of A Colour Box to one (silent) image. Similarly, the set’s handsome card-​backed display protects the stamps behind cellophane, memo­ rialising this unruly text. In the twenty-first century, the concerns of Lye’s audiences remain distressingly present, as immigration is demonised and civil rights are eroded. It is in the watching, not in the remembering, that A Colour Box can still speak to us.

49

50

51

2 Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

Jammin’ the Blues (Gjon Mili, Warner Bros., 1944)  has become the most celebrated of jazz films. Released by Warner’s as a ten-​ minute short, the film depicts a jam session made up of three songs (‘The Midnight Symphony’, ‘On The Sunny Side of the Street’, and ‘Jammin’ the Blues’) played by celebrated American musicians, most notably the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. It was not the first film to present jazz in this format. As well as showcase appearances in Hollywood feature films, famous jazz musicians had featured in numerous musical shorts, films which unfolded a basic narrative on which to hang a number of musical performances. Often unsophis­ ticated, these films nevertheless share formal similarities and the­ matic preoccupations with Jammin’ the Blues which coalesce around the question of the status of the black entertainer in American culture. Where Jammin’ the Blues largely differs from the cycle of musical shorts which preceded it is in its explicit engagement with a modernistic art discourse. As I shall argue, this positioning of jazz allows for a reflection on the film-​making process itself and the dis­ sonance generated by the separation of sound and image tracks. 51

52

Jazz as Visual Language

In this way, Mili performs in a mode of self-​reflexivity similar to Len Lye, in which the negotiation between craft and art is inter­ rogated; unlike Lye’s, however, Mili’s films evoke a particular sub-​ cultural world, that of the liminal space between swing and bebop in 1940s America. Jammin’ the Blues takes pains to emphasise the effort and achievement of players within this world and it is perhaps this organising assumption of skilled creative labour that has fixed the film in popular memory as the ‘first honest, serious attempt to capture jazz in the movies’.1 In this chapter, I  ask how ‘honesty’ and ‘seriousness’ are con­ structed as virtues. Despite the film opening with a voiceover which assures that the musicians are performing ‘ad lib’, they are, of course, actually miming to a prerecorded soundtrack. It is important that we understand the ways in which this film conformed to standard Hollywood practice (such as post-​synchronisation) so that we can be clear about the innovations of its sophisticated mise-​en-​scène. Other constructed elements speak to the socio-​political circum­ stances under which the film was created; famously, the white gui­ tarist Barney Kessel’s hands were stained with berry juice to falsify the impression that the band is all black, a concession to prevalent racism. Against this kind of compromise, we must set the film’s evi­ dent moral imperative: to position new movements in black music as central to American cultural life. The film’s credited director was Gjon Mili, an American-​Albanian photographer most famous for his striking LIFE magazine photo-​spreads of athletes, artists and dancers. As we shall see, Jammin’ the Blues’ political elements are best understood within wider discussions of Mili’s photographic practice, and the promotional work of the film’s technical director, Norman Granz. Mili’s visual aesthetic was informed by a developing iconography for jazz made permissible through the development of flash photography and high-​speed film. As mentioned in the section on The Sound of Jazz in the Introduction, this iconography privi­ leged nocturnal interior spaces where high-​key lighting picked out 52

53

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

the faces of musicians visualising the burden of creation and ciga­ rette smoke twisting into thought. As I suggested, these old myths have not dogged but defined jazz in the twentieth century. Alongside Jammin’ the Blues, I  will discuss two later Mili jazz films. Improvisation (1950), a filmed jam session depicting Charlie Parker amongst others, was never completed and exists only in fragments, finally pieced together for commercial release in 1996. Stompin’ for Mili (1954), a document of The Dave Brubeck Quartet, was thought lost for many years and has only recently re-​emerged online. All three films share a striking tension between expression­ istic visual flourishes and documentary footage of musicians. All three share the aim of showing musicians performing and interact­ ing. However, the mounting of the two later films was very differ­ ent from the Hollywood studio production of Jammin’ the Blues, by far the most accomplished and realised of the three films. Despite this, each film shares a common visual strategy, placing musicians within a blank and unadorned studio environment. In this way, Mili envelops the music in a space of abstraction but one quite different from Lye. If Lye pictured jazz as ongoing motion, Mili sees it rather in terms of flat space and blocks of light or shade. The sets within which jazz is placed in Mili’s films recall the sparse décor of mod­ ern theatre and dance. Like Lye, despite this abstraction, Mili’s films address jazz’s place in the contemporary social world. By affording us glimpses of musicians performing and interacting, Mili’s films undoubtedly serve a documentary purpose. However, in this chap­ ter, I wish to move away from the characterisation of his work as a ‘straightforward record’2 of the jazz jam session and focus instead on his films’ capacity to reflect and analyse. In a meditation on the moving image, Gilberto Perez describes the hallucinatory properties of projection: ‘The images on the screen carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost’.3 The ‘juncture of world and otherworldliness’ which 53

54

Jazz as Visual Language

Figure 2.1  Lester Young’s pork-​pie hat as abstract still-​life in Jammin’ the Blues.

Perez identifies as distinctive to the medium of film receives potent expression in Jammin’ the Blues.4 Mili’s film shows us how musicians looked in reality but also conjures a vision of how they possessed the national imagination. Jammin’ the Blues opens with a shot that elegantly establishes its tension between abstraction and documentary. To the languid sound of a piano trio beginning ‘The Midnight Symphony’, produc­ tion credits roll up the screen, behind which we see cigarette smoke rising next to two mysterious circles (Figure  2.1). As the credits disappear, an unseen male narrator provides a few sentences of commentary: This is a jam session. Quite often, these great artists gather and play, ad-​lib, hot music. It could be called a midnight symphony.

With these words spoken, the abstract circles are revealed to be the brim and crown of a pork-​pie hat as Lester Young tips his head back, 54

55

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

poised over the mouthpiece of his saxophone. As the voiceover ends, Young puts the instrument to his lips, the sax held at a distinc­ tive 45-​degree tilt, and blows. Snaky sinews of sound float forth as the camera slowly, gracefully tracks back. This first shot establishes a systematic process of revelation in Jammin’ the Blues in which shapes become material objects, a technique common to inventive noir photography (compare, for example, Harry J.  Wild’s opening shot in Farewell, My Lovely [Edward Dmytryk, RKO, 1944]). It has become a famous moment for Young enthusiasts, captur­ ing something biographically and musically true about that delicate man. But it is important to note the complex address of this opening shot, beginning as a deliberate and carefully lit still life composi­ tion that promises the onset of motion with the curling smoke of the cigarette. Arthur Knight characterises the moment as abstrac­ tion reconfigured into detailed representation, providing a useful starting point for the discussion of the film: the drastic movement between states and settings made fluid by the continuity of music.5 Jammin’ the Blues establishes its own distinctive continuity codes, very different from those of the Hollywood narrative film:  musi­ cians appear then disappear between shots, are framed together in tight close-​ups and then repositioned at opposite ends of the room. Even the studio itself –​a blank void with no props save for a few wooden chairs  –​is unpredictable, switching from inky blackness to luminous white between shots. These ruptures are established as possible by the mutability of the film’s first shot, so that they seem invigorating rather than confusing or inept. This visual experimentation is grounded by the opening voiceo­ ver. As Knight has argued, the narrator serves multiple functions, mediating (perhaps undermining) the subversive aspects of the film, but also articulating notions of artistry in language that avoids traditional compromises such as ‘folk artists’ or ‘Negro artists’.6 For Knight, the voiceover operates on a different plane to the interac­ tion of music and image in the opening shot. It is ‘the voice of God, 55

56

Jazz as Visual Language

the voice of white authority, preceding what the audience sees and hears’ so that the phrase ‘midnight symphony’ becomes problem­ atic; it ‘claims “hot music” as a “symphonic” artistic form, but it also admits a cliché –​“midnight” –​that is dense with both romantic and potentially racist significations’.7 However, while Knight addresses the authoritative aspects of the disembodied voice, characterising it as a newsreel/​documentary address, his account neglects the warmth and intimacy of the narration. A more pertinent comparison may be not to reportage but rather to the radio disc-​jockey, the welcome guest in the domestic space, broadcast on the medium through which most viewers would have first experienced jazz. As Tim Wall has argued, jazz had metaphorical significance on US radio of the 1920s and 1930s: ‘To a working class urban listenership, it stood for the modern excitement of slightly exotic entertainment, to the white and small black cultural uplift middle class it was a sign of cultural degradation, and to rural listeners it was part of the urban attempt to commercialise and undermine traditional values of authenticity’.8 I  am arguing, then, that Mili’s films mobilise associations created within other popular art forms (radio, dance, theatre) to explore the contribution of jazz to culture in the modern age.

Jazz finds Mili After training as an engineer in Bucharest, Gjon Mili emigrated to the US in 1923. His early experiments in photography investigated the potential of artificial light, and he published findings in vari­ ous professional journals.9 Like other modernists before him, Mili became fascinated by the concept of capturing motion and was irre­ sistibly drawn to musical subjects, as his account of a study of 1931 makes clear: My first experiment in recording a moving subject with aluminium-​foil photoflash lamps (newly arrived from Germany soon after their invention) was a picture of 56

57

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

Margaret Aue playing the cello. It was taken by firing a lamp during the movement of the shutter. I  found the image very compelling, but at the same time I kept wish­ ing it were sharper.10

Like Lye, Mili was interested in technology’s place in the creation of art. However, where Lye’s direct films were ontologically radical, Mili’s photography relied upon technology developed by others, often experimenting with it in controlled environments in order to generate unexpected results. Mili’s attempts to record moving sub­ jects in still images display a scientist’s interest in precision but an artist’s eye for visual representations of action occurring over time. While speaking at an MIT symposium, Mili met Professor Harold E. Edgerton, who was demonstrating a new electronic flash with the duration of 1/​100, 000 of a second. ‘For the first time,’ Mili recalled later, ‘I realised that time could truly be made to stand still, texture could be retained despite sudden, violent movement’.11 In 1937, Mili’s first use of this electronic flash was a study of model Betty Friedman leaping into the air, rendered with the clarity miss­ ing in the Margaret Aue portrait. For Mili, sharpness was ‘a prime requisite for photographic quality’.12 The emerging market for illus­ trated photo-​magazines prompted Mili to submit a series of test shots made with a battery of Edgerton’s electronic flashes to LIFE magazine, which secured him regular assignments. In 1938, Mili took out a lease on a New  York studio, fondly recalled by one of his students as ‘one of the unmarked shrines of twentieth-​century photography:  the former Chinese nightclub on the second floor of 6 East Twenty-​third Street’ with ‘no hint, at street level, of what lay above, just a bell marked MILI’.13 Mili brought ath­ letes and dancers to this vast dusty studio, asking them to reenact actions and gestures usually against a blank backdrop. By remov­ ing these subjects from their environments of playing fields and theatres, Mili abstracted their movement. The dimensions of the studio permitted considerable experimentation with lighting and, 57

58

Jazz as Visual Language

crucially, the ability of subjects to move unhindered. In his memoir Photographs and Recollections, Mili recalled: The floor, 55 feet square, allowed ample room for subjects in motion; a ceiling with an extended skylight, hanging 33 feet high, made possible the exceptionally high back­ grounds required for low camera placement, as well as acute back-​lighting. (These technical aspects became the mainstays of my style.)14

Mili’s retrospective volume compares two of his photographs of tennis players serving, Bobby Riggs (1938) and Don McNeill (1940). Placing the images on facing pages, Mili’s commentary offers the comparison as exemplary of ‘the difference between a descriptive and an expressive photograph’. In the image of McNeill, his upper body is strained, veins standing out on the arms and neck in sharp relief as the tennis ball flattens and blurs with impact. For Mili, the value of the electronic flash became tied to an analytical observation of movement and so the later photograph is unreservedly superior: ‘It is evident that Riggs went through the motions –​he posed –​but McNeill actually served’.15 This commitment to the verisimilitude of bodies in motion is an important feature of Mili’s jazz films. In 1939, Edgerton developed a new ‘flash unit that fired in rapid sequence’, permitting one image to capture numerous stages of motion, which Mili saw as offering ‘unlimited photographic possi­ bilities for dissecting movement’.16 The use of anatomical vocabulary is significant here; Mili sought to fillet the action of his subjects as surely as Renaissance artists painstakingly detailed the structure of muscle and ligament. Using Edgerton’s strobing flash, Mili created photo­ graphs that described iterations of movement in complex, stuttering images:  drummers Franziska Boas (1939) and Gene Krupa (1941); dancers Betty Bruce (1941), Martha Graham (1942) and Nora Kaye (1947); the juggler Stan Cavenaugh (1941); and more prosaic action 58

59

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

in Study of the movement of an artificial leg (1946), Nude descending staircase (1942) and Patricia McBride, arm movement (1962). All of these monochrome photographs place their lone subject against a flat backdrop of either black or white, anticipating Jammin’ the Blues. In 1943, Mili completed two of his most famous LIFE assign­ ments.17 The 23 August issue showcased Mili’s photographs of the jive-​dance craze The Lindy Hop set against his now familiar alter­ nately light and dark stage flats. The high-​speed images were so suc­ cessful that the editor chose one for the magazine cover –​‘a totally unexpected bonanza’ for Mili.18 The photo-​feature’s accompanying text (unaccredited but not written by Mili) explained the Lindy’s graduation from ‘the rhythmic, primitive folk dance’, through for­ malisation until it ‘attained respectability as a truly national dance’.19 While Mili’s photographs do not differentiate between the abilities of black dancers Willa Mae Ricker and Leon James and white danc­ ers Stanley Catron and Kaye Popp, the text overlays the images with a racial narrative of the dance’s movement from the uncontrolled gyrations practiced by the ‘lower strata of society’ until its adoption by mainstream society allows it to be recognised (along with tap) as ‘this country’s only native and original dance form’.20 This imposi­ tion of meaning is identified by Benjamin Cawthra as a common editorial strategy of LIFE magazine photo-​features: LIFE’s commitment to arranging and commenting upon groups of photographs created dominant narratives even when the photographs themselves might have suggested other interpretations. The magazine used language to con­ strain and delimit the interpretive possibilities inherent in its own photographic narratives.21

These possibilities for oppositional readings were highlighted in two letters published in the 13 September issue of LIFE. Thanks to Gjon Mili for his really grand photographs of the Lindy Hop. […] It’s worth fighting just to preserve 59

60

Jazz as Visual Language

such a silly, crazy, wonderful, out-​of-​this-​world dance originated by a silly, crazy, wonderful country!22 The cover of your Aug. 23 issue nauseated me. In these times of direst peril, must we be shown the latest adapta­ tion of the age-​old antics of the savage? There is no real music, no real art in the jazz-​daffy, jitterbuggy dance you have documented.23

LIFE’s 11 October issue saw Mili’s connection to jazz culture deepen. A photo-​feature entitled ‘Jam Session’ recorded a night of improvisation as leading jazz musicians performed for an apprecia­ tive audience at Mili’s cavernous New York studio. Partly organised by bandleader Eddie Condon, the musicians involved were of stellar quality including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, James P. Johnson, Mary Lou Williams and Cozy Cole. As well as being photographed, the session was distributed on V-​discs to those in the services over­ seas, positioning jazz as an expression of uniquely American patri­ otism and democracy. Mili’s photographs emphasised the sociable aspects of the music, giving equal weight to the performers and the conversations among onlookers around them. While ‘The Lindy Hop’ feature had created distinctions between black and white dancers (and kept them on separate pages), the ‘Jam Session’ photos show races interacting, as black musicians mingle with the audience of white professionals. One photograph identifies the editorial staff at Vogue, accompanied by ‘a model who kept changing her hat dur­ ing the jam session’.24 This mention of the model permits an associa­ tion with glamourous enthusiasm, similar to the description of the dancing ‘blonde girl’ in George Avakian’s liner notes for the 1956 Ellington at Newport concert.25 For Mili, the studio jam session provided an education in jazz. He later wrote: It was quite an initiation. I had often listened to blues and spirituals and found them very moving, but orchestrated 60

61

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

popular jazz had always scored low for me. This jam ses­ sion was a revelation, not for the music itself  –​which sounded more like an outburst than a performance –​but as a spectacle non pareil. It was a physical experience, compelling everyone’s participation.26

All-​night parties were not unusual in Mili’s studio, once referred to by Henri Cartier-​Bresson as ‘the Athens of New  York’ but it is important to remember that the jam session was a highly con­ structed event.27 Mili’s photographs of it are cluttered with detail, quite unlike the spare flat backdrops he used elsewhere. Tables are laden with bottles and glasses, cigarettes litter the floor, clusters of people break off into their own conversations. The accompany­ ing text described ‘an alert, fascinated, almost frenzied enjoyment’ provoked in the audience present, strongly suggesting that Mili’s photographs will evoke this feeling in the reader of the magazine.28 Seductive notions of informality structure the article’s text, eliding the ‘infinite preparation’ of optical and lighting elements that was fundamental to Mili’s technique.29 Again, this accompanying text is to some extent undermined by the evidence of the photographs themselves. In the image that opens the feature, shot from high above the studio, a woman in the audience looks up into the camera lens, acknowledging Mili’s over-​seeing eye. In a volume celebrating masters of jazz photography, Lee Tanner recalls the ‘profound effect’ the ‘Jam Session’ article had on him as a twelve-​year old. I had been listening to jazz on the radio since I was seven, and now I  could put faces to the sounds I  had learned to love. Here they were on the page, musicians captured while playing rather than stiffly posed for publicity shots. Mili’s photographs plunged me into a world where I could observe the artists at work. It gave me a sense of being present as the creative process unfolded. More exactly, the photographer made me the eye of the camera.30 61

62

Jazz as Visual Language

Like LIFE magazine’s accompanying text, Tanner notes the power­ ful sense of spontaneity which Mili’s images convey. Crucially, the photographs capture musicians ‘at work’ and it is the opportunity to appreciate that work which transports the viewer, making them ‘present’. Tanner’s observations tie into a strong vein in jazz portrai­ ture which determines musical value by reference to biographical detail, in which the mastery of minutiae promises greater agency and access to the music-​making process. The concept is forcefully articulated by Nat Hentoff when he writes, ‘music is made by men who are insistently visible, espe­ cially, as in jazz, when the players are their music’,31 and again in his account of Robert Herridge’s CBS-​TV The Sound of Jazz: ‘What made the jazz musicians extraordinary, when the camera put their features through its harsh examination, was how much it found there’.32 And yet, perhaps the most eloquent image in Mili’s ‘Jam Session’ feature is one that features no musicians at all. Framed iden­ tically to the overhead shot which had opened the article, this con­ cluding photograph looks down at the debris of the evening. Two pianos sit silently, chairs stand in disarray and the scene is deserted save for a black cat curled on the floor, looking up at the camera. The image caption reads: ‘The next morning. Gjon Mili’s studio was littered with cigaret [sic.] stubs, broken glasses, spilled liquor. Many jazz musicians eat scrambled eggs & benzedrine for breakfast.’33 Disregarding the sensational narrative overlaid by LIFE magazine, Mili’s photograph conveys a poignancy which can be traced in his later films: an emptiness created when music ends, infused with the memory of exuberance.

Mapping the imagination In an account of the phenomenon of the jam session, Bruce Lippincott describes a typical progression and its intended effects: 62

63

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

At best, the piano intro sets the mood for the ensu­ ing piece, perhaps as community song piano players or church organists do when they play the last phrase of the song, leading to its beginning ensemble. The jazz intro is not sacred as far as its relation to the coming piece is concerned. Sometimes it should be played according to the record, but usually it is only to establish tempo and tonality.34

The enigmatic, semi-​abstract shot of Lester Young which opens Jammin’ the Blues serves a similar purpose, establishing formal and stylistic manoeuvres. However, the narrator’s voiceover adds com­ mentary to the musical performances while long takes set an ini­ tially languid pace, which will change as the film continues. I have suggested at the start of this chapter that the placement of Young at the extreme left of frame allows Mili to posit a space of creativ­ ity and imagination, moving the consideration of music beyond the insistently visible musicians and instruments (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2  Young within a space of imagination in Jammin’ the Blues. 63

64

Jazz as Visual Language

The jam session is an archetype through which popular audi­ ences have understood the jazz experience. As Peter Townsend notes, the jam ‘has been idealised as a vernacular academy of musi­ cianship, dramatised as an arena for trials of strength, politicised as a model of collective endeavour’, standing ‘between individual and group, competition and co-​operation, formality and informal­ ity, commercialism and autonomy, order and freedom’.35 The evolu­ tion of bebop subculture, meanwhile, has been described by Dick Hebdige as a deliberate attempt ‘to restrict white identification by producing a jazz which was difficult to listen to and even more dif­ ficult to imitate’.36 Similarly, Eric Lott has suggested that At its hippest (and meanest), such a common language became a closed hermeneutic that had the undeniable effect of alienating the riff-​raff and expressing a felt isola­ tion, all the while affirming a collective purpose –​even at the expense of other musicians.37

While fictional accounts of jazz-​making have tended to depict the jam ‘as ordeal, or as showdown, or as trauma’,38 Jammin’ the Blues minimises the competitive and alienating aspects of jam session cul­ ture.39 But this is not to say that it neglects, or suppresses, the tensions identified by Townsend. Rather, the space of the jam session is used in the film to dramatise the complexities of a music in the process of change, at the moment at which it became ‘marginalised from the mainstream of popular music’.40 Knight identifies Young, Sid Catlett (drums) and Jo Jones (drums) as members of the ensemble who ‘self-​consciously bridged the gap between swing and bebop’,41 which is to say that they embodied not only jazz’s recent past as a big-​ band dance music but also that they were instrumental in its future as a small-​group art music. At the cusp of this shift, Jammin’ the Blues incorporates many of the more commercial aspects of swing music: jazz as accompaniment for dancing couples; jazz as medium for reinterpreting popular Tin Pan Alley standards and for musical 64

65

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

showmanship. It blends these with associations forming around the new bebop:  chiaroscuro lighting evoking an abstracted world of night; flamboyant costuming that flaunted wartime restrictions; jazz as a music for listening rather than dancing. As I have said, the film’s first song ‘The Midnight Symphony’ shows the musicians lost in their own worlds: in the second shot of the film, the camera is placed behind Young’s left shoulder so that we observe the bassist Red Callender, eyes fixed on the floor. Mili cuts to Callender’s hands moving on the bass and then back to a tight close-​up of Young’s ‘lidded, moonlike face’.42 The camera pans right and tilts down, tenderly tracing the pin-​stripe suit, the button­ hole, finishing up at his fingers on the saxophone keys. A lit cigarette is perched insouciantly in one hand. This downward camera move­ ment makes an expressive connection between Young’s sartorial ele­ gance and the poise of his musical phrasing. Rather abruptly, Mili then cuts back to Young’s face. It is a curious repetition, giving the effect of time folding back upon itself. This time the camera tracks right but stays level, coming to rest on the spiral of Young’s cigarette smoke. The image of the smoke dissolves to a shot that depicts all five musicians playing on ‘The Midnight Symphony’. The first five shots of the film establish strategies of repetition, mirroring, acceleration and entropy that will recur throughout Jammin’ the Blues. Lester Young’s head tilting up from beneath his hat (shot 1) is mirrored by the camera tilting down to the bell of his saxophone (shot 4); the blank space of the opening still life, ani­ mated by a wispy column of cigarette smoke (shot 1), is answered by a moving camera which returns to the imagery of smoke moments later (shot 5); a track backwards to map the space of the studio (shot 1) is followed by shots that foreground introspection (shot 2), technique (shot 3) and reversion (shots 4 and 5). As James Tobias has argued, the film ‘does not, in fact, attempt to present a jam s­ ession as if it were a live session’ but rather constructs ‘a complex temporal

65

66

Jazz as Visual Language

diagram’.43 Within this virtual world, Mili explores the meanings (both sensual and social) that cluster around jazz culture. Knight posits that ‘the film’s main organising principle is addition, expressed both aurally and visually’.44 With each song, the line-​up increases (from quintet to sextet to septet) and the tempo quickens; accordingly, visual composition becomes increasingly crowded and ‘the film adds a new photographic effect with each song’.45 Knight links the film’s escalation with ‘an evolving relationship between its performers and its camera’, in which the introspective groupings eventually flatten out into a more front-​facing arrangement, culmi­ nating in the film’s final shot of Jo Jones smiling directly into cam­ era.46 Knight suggests that, from the second song (‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’) onwards, the film begins to chart additional space, expanding the hermetic world of the film. Throughout, Mili creates a fragmented visual continuity, playing with scale and dis­ tance so that the studio setting becomes an ‘impossible’ space. An example of these impossible spatial relations is provided by the dissolve (shot 5) that leads into a shot of the quintet which con­ tradicts the earlier framing of Young in isolation, surrounded by empty space. While a dissolve often represents an elision in classi­ cal Hollywood grammar, here the progression of the music enforces a temporal coherence contradicted by the sudden appearance of other musicians. A similar trick is played in the twelfth shot of the film, in which musicians previously seen disappear (but remain on the soundtrack), so that the image emphasises the exchange between Harry Edison’s trumpet and Young’s saxophone. For this moment, the camera is positioned where the evidence of previous shots has shown us that the piano stands. This playful unsettling of mise-​en-​scène preserves the integrity of the recorded song, under­ mining any illusion of liveness by presenting musicians as avatars or spectres existing in ‘phantasmic space’.47 As noted earlier, Jammin’ the Blues was one of many jazz musical shorts, or ‘soundies’, made in America, films which typically featured 66

67

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

a couple of songs hung on a flimsy narrative. Starring big names such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, these musi­ cal shorts placed discourses of artistry and fame within the context of the social and economic privations of black Americans. Jazz was often positioned as a dream space within which one might escape the drudge of life through fantasies of success and accomplishment. In films like Rhapsody in Black and Blue (Aubrey Scoto, Paramount, 1932) and Boogie-​Woogie Dream (Hans Burger, Official Films, 1944), jazz accomplishment is contained within these dream sequences. The intellectual work of making music is not generally treated and Jammin’ the Blues was explicitly conceived as a riposte to the conventional jazz soundie by its technical director Norman Granz, a young film editor who was beginning to make a name for himself as a music promoter. It is not quite accurate, however, to see Jammin’ the Blues as a rup­ ture from the soundies that preceded it. Rather, it placed emphasis on a particular conception of the black musician as artist, a represen­ tation already explored in two earlier films starring Ellington, Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy, RKO, 1929) and Symphony in Black (Fred Waller, Paramount, 1935). In Black and Tan, expressionistic lighting and point-​of-​view shots construct Ellington as ‘elegant but thought­ ful’ in line with the persona developed by his manager Irving Mills.48 Symphony in Black provides an even more explicit engagement with modernist visual techniques, in which, as in Jammin’ the Blues, black creative labour is ‘dignified and mythified’ by the decision not to have any spoken dialogue in the film.49 Conceived as a riposte to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Symphony in Black describes itself as ‘A Rhapsody of Negro Life’, depicting Ellington’s accomplishment as composer and bandleader as inextricably tied to the black working-​class (a series of vignettes show hard manual work, infidelity, piety and nights out in Harlem). As we shall see, the use of dance sequences (showcas­ ing the talents of Bessie Dudley and ‘Snake Hips’ Tucker), song (Billie Holiday) and striking editing effects in Symphony in Black antici­ pate prominent elements in Jammin’ the Blues. These Ellington films 67

68

Jazz as Visual Language

elevate black artistic achievement but share an interest in the dream space, a trope common to other jazz musical shorts. As I  argued, Jammin’ the Blues also uses this trope and so can be seen as part of the soundie cycle rather than the clean break imagined by Granz. What is exceptional to Jammin’ the Blues is the rigour of its abstraction and the extent to which it discards the narrative container. Jazz, a site of nego­ tiation for American cultural value, is out of the bottle in this film.

Dances, glances and the extra-​musical Coming out of the bottle forces engagement with the outside world. In this section, I wish to address the film’s progression towards social interaction and the circumstances which allowed its creation. Unlike most soundies, Jammin’ the Blues is not designed to popularise a song or to promote an existing jazz unit. It is important then to note how its constitution mirrors aspects of Granz’s work as a promoter. On 2 July 1944, Granz had organised a groundbreaking concert of jazz musicians at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Cherry-​ picking players from the most popular big bands and placing them in unfamiliar line-​ups, Granz challenged perceptions of popular music by booking a hall usually reserved for classical performance. In doing so, he placed the ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ (shortened on posters to JATP) concert within a tradition of jazz events which were structured so as to convey a historical narrative, of which they are the culmination, as in Paul Whiteman’s 1924 Aeolian Hall concert and Benny Goodman’s at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Similarly, Granz was concerned with the cultural elevation of jazz: A good concert is better for music making than a nightclub full of patrons more interested in drinking than listening. A good acoustically alive theatre or hall is the best place to hear jazz. A dark, smoky cellar may look romantic in the small hours, but late night sessions produce more bad music than people are capable of realising at the time.50 68

69

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

Granz’s concerts foregrounded social consciousness. The first JATP concert was organised as a fundraiser in support of Hispanic defend­ ants in the racially-​sensitive Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. As Granz’s biographer Tad Hershorn observes, the first JATP concert’s racially and ethnically mixed audience ‘were a different clientele than the hall had ever assembled’.51 In attendance at this concert was Mili who, on the strength of his LIFE photographs, had been invited to Hollywood by Warner Bros. to direct a test film. After the concert, Mili approached Granz and together they developed a treatment that would incorporate musicians from the Count Basie Orchestra, then playing in Los Angeles (Young, Edison and Jones), as well as Catlett, Callender, Kessel, Marlowe Morris (piano), Illinois Jacquet (tenor saxophone) and John Simmons (bass). Against Granz’s objections, and probably influenced by Mili’s LIFE photographs, Warner Bros. insisted upon a singer and some dancing –​Marie Bryant performed both roles, joined in a Lindy hop by Archie Savage. The four-​day shoot was tense and fractious, with Granz leading the musicians on strike when he discovered that the studio was paying them less than the dancers. As his career as an impresario and record pro­ ducer grew during the 1940s, Granz would develop a reputation as a defender of musicians’ rights and outspoken enemy of segregation. Mili and Granz’s expertise was supported by an experienced film crew. Hershorn notes that, since Mili was not unionised, he ‘per­ formed more as a photographer than as a director’, and that while Granz ‘contracted the musicians, singers, and dancers’, he was only credited as technical director rather than producer.52 The film’s cin­ ematographer was Robert Burks, who had trained as a special effects technician, and it was edited by Everett Dodd, a veteran of the busi­ ness since 1929. Burks would go on to shoot twelve feature films for Alfred Hitchcock, one of which (The Wrong Man, Warner Bros., 1956) featured numerous jazz sequences. There can be little doubt that Mili, unused to a film studio, would have relied h ­ eavily upon the support of his crew. While Granz acted as a liaison between 69

70

Jazz as Visual Language

the studio and the musicians, the film’s actual producer Gordon Hollingshead made a significant contribution as well. The head of short films at Warners, Hollingshead convinced studio boss Jack Warner that the project was worthwhile, overseeing (and over-​ ruling) Granz to ensure variety and commercial appeal. Recalling Hollingshead’s input in 1980, Granz was still protesting that he ‘never wanted’ those elements in the film and ‘was even then a pur­ ist’.53 But Hollingshead was an experienced film professional, in the business since 1916, and had been an assistant director on Warner Bros. hits such as The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933) and Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933). We may be grateful to Hollingshead for his intervention. Marie Bryant’s song sequence and her jive dance with Archie Savage are highlights of the second and third sequences of the film, and inher­ ent to its overall structural logic. During Edison’s trumpet solo in ‘The Midnight Symphony’, the camera tracks in quickly toward him, moving focus from the group back to the individual. However, unlike previous moments of introspection, this shot depicts social interaction happening around the soloist, introducing the notion of extra-​musical engagement. As Edison plays, Marie Bryant enters from left of frame, striding purposefully through the circle of musi­ cians, waving at the smiling Catlett as she goes. The moment creates a new plane of action, bisecting the circular space formed by the musicians. Bryant does not contribute musically to ‘The Midnight Symphony’ but her casual entrance reminds us of a world outside of this studio and a life beyond jazz, creating anticipation for the next song. As ‘The Midnight Symphony’ ends, the film cuts to a side-​on medium shot of pianist Marlowe Morris playing a lead-​in to the next tune ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’, his hands reflected in the shiny fallboard. This abrupt segue between songs denies any intermission  –​time is compressed and the music seems continu­ ous, in escalation. The ongoing musical imperative jars with the 70

71

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

easy, non-​musical entrance of Bryant, establishing a tension between ‘performing’ and ‘being’. Where, previously, blank space had been used to suggest a musi­ cian’s interiority, ‘On The Sunny Side of the Street’ begins with a shot of Morris’ head and shoulders reflected in the piano lid. The piano lid, when not propped up, protects the hammers and strings within; when raised, it acts as a reflecting surface for sound waves. This eloquent image doubles Morris, mirroring back a spectral solo. The shot creates a triple pun: a visual reflection of Morris on a sur­ face designed for reflecting sound, acting as a reflection upon the relationship between music and visuals. The rest of the film will con­ tinue to create these ‘ghost’ reflections of the musicians, sometimes on set (as here), sometimes through post-​production effects. As the shot continues, the camera moves up across the piano lid, leaving Morris to find a reflection of Bryant, distorted and perpen­ dicular to our understanding of the vertical axis (Figure 2.3).54 This image of Bryant shimmers, rippling like water. The texture of the image marks out a difference between Bryant and the instrumentalists. At

Figure 2.3  The reflection of Marie Bryant in Jammin’ the Blues. 71

72

Jazz as Visual Language

the most basic level, this is a difference of gender; jazz in the 1940s was an overwhelmingly male pursuit and female performers were, with a few exceptions, singers. The dappled reflection could be seen to associate femininity with the nymph, a divine spirit of nature given to song. On a formal level, the sideways image denotes a shift in the character of the music: from jam session to interpretation of a stand­ ard. ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ has a breezy, optimistic lyric but Knight interprets its presence in the film as a narrative of racial ‘crossing’, a bold reading inverting Hollywood convention in that the white Kessel ‘passes’ for black, a structuring absence signified by the empty chair seen in some shots.55 Knight’s argument depends upon a knowledgeable audience, ‘able to read the code’,56 for whom the film creates a meta-​argument about jazz as ‘a social-​cultural, visual and aural representation, and the contradictions of the United States as a “community” in the mid-​1940s’.57 If we leave aside this idealised audience, extra-​textually aware of Kessel’s ‘veiled inclusion’, we can confidently assert that, for any audience, Jammin’ the Blues visualises the interiority of improvi­ sation through an experimental mise-​en-​scène. The film’s abstract depiction of the culturally current phenomenon of the jam ses­ sion captured jazz at a crossroads, between the popularity of swing and the obscurity of bebop. Indeed, the film uses emerging bebop iconography to further its project of picturing jazz musi­ cians as ‘great artists’. Initially the musicians as depicted seem to be avatars of their music, though this subtly changes as their rela­ tionship to each other and to the camera becomes more sociable. It may be that the innovation of Jammin’ the Blues has been over­ stated; certainly, it builds upon the ‘soundie’ convention of situat­ ing jazz within a dream space –​but perhaps its greatest interest is as a nexus of conflicting ambitions for jazz, balancing the perso­ nae of its various musicians, the photographic aesthetic of Gjon Mili, the ‘purism’ of Norman Granz and the commercial demands of Warner Bros. 72

73

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

The second and third songs of the film (‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ and ‘Jammin’ the Blues’) move away from introver­ sion, retreating from bebop iconography toward a more extro­ verted swing. The dissolve from Bryant’s reflection on the piano lid at the beginning of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ marks the film’s shift into a different register, one in which jazz improvi­ sation becomes subject to the interpretation of a Tin Pan Alley standard, where musicians become accompanists and where the introversion of artistic creation is balanced by the extroversion of exuberant dance. The dissolve leads into a close-​up of Bryant against a dazzling white background. While Bryant does not look into the camera, her delivery assumes a mode of communication that transcends the circle of musicians. ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ builds upon the film’s presentation of group achieve­ ment by offering moments of interaction and appreciation. We see Bryant making eye contact with Red Callender as she sings; a cutaway to Young, his saxophone resting on his knees, lighting another cigarette as he coolly surveys her performance; Bryant, seated and swaying her head in rhythm, as Young rejoins the group (Figure  2.4). These moments of mutual enjoyment enrich the music, but they also guide our reaction to it. The appearance of musicians playing in ‘The Midnight Symphony’ corresponds with what David Ake has called ‘perform­ ing deep jazz’, in which physical demeanour communicates ‘a sense of artistic and personal depth (profundity, sensitivity, seriousness)’.58 With this work done, the second and third song sequences of the film move emphasis onto internal relationships between the ensem­ ble and their external relationship to the studio space. In the third song ‘Jammin’ the Blues’, this is articulated through dance, and specifically the Lindy hop. Granz’s objections to the presence of dance in the film seem yet more wrong-​headed when one considers the integral role dance played in the development of jazz. Indeed, both Sid Catlett and Jo Jones were accomplished tap dancers while 73

74

Jazz as Visual Language

Figure 2.4  Bryant watches Young in Jammin’ the Blues.

Lester Young once expressed a wish that ‘jazz were played more for dancing’.59 Towards the end of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ the sextet is joined by two other players: the saxophonist Illinois Jacquet (wearing a flatter pork-​pie hat than Young) and the drummer Jo Jones. As the next song (‘Jammin’ the Blues’) begins, Catlett relinquishes his seat at the drums in spectacular style, starting a paradiddle and then tossing his sticks into the air, which Jones adroitly catches, finishing the musi­ cal phrase. This extroverted visual display characterises the entire song, which is built around Bryant and Archie Savage’s acrobatic Lindy. The song closes on a shot of Jo Jones, smiling directly at the camera. Knight suggests that these final moments represent intellectual compromise: While the film initially challenges the viewer to under­ stand and make sense of the cultural forms it represents, 74

75

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

it ends by erasing the challenge, directly addressing the audience, and presenting images of the jitterbugging cou­ ple (which Sam Donahue named as one of Hollywood’s primary method of ‘covering up’ black bands) and the grinning black man.60

This final jam is more furious than the preceding two songs, evok­ ing a more standardised dance band. Bryant moves from singer to dancer, while Young’s status as lead saxophonist is superseded by the younger Jacquet. One striking shot establishes difference between the two saxophonists. While the film’s opening shot had framed empty studio space around Young as a metaphor for musical con­ ception, a similar view of Jacquet obliterates empty space by multi­ plying his image within the shot. This post-​production effect at first duplicates Jacquet, then duplicates again so that the shot is filled by an identical multiplication of four; the same effect is applied to Edison (Figure 2.5). This reproduction seems driven by the music’s relentless pace and defines space in a new way, not by adding or subtracting visual elements, elongating or compressing time, but rather by extending the improvisational moment to include post-​ production film printing processes. The duplication effect superficially resembles Mili’s stereoscopic photographs but is different in one crucial respect: while the pho­ tographs describe one movement in increments, the duplication shots in this third song reproduce movement in quantity. If we compare the duplications of Jacquet and Edison to Mili’s photo­ graphs of tennis players Riggs and McNeill, we see a similar desire to analyse and dissect movement. In the shots of Jacquet and Edison, movement becomes illustrative of the energy and impact of improvisational charisma. A similarly multiplied shot of Kessel has less impact, perhaps because the effect is used to obscure the guitarist’s race, not to articulate a relationship between musician, film and time.61 75

76

Jazz as Visual Language

Figure  2.5 A post-​production effect multiplies Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison in Jammin’ the Blues.

Editing jazz I conclude this chapter with a consideration of editing, that filmic element which sets Mili’s film-​making most distinctly apart from his photography. As I have shown in my textual analysis of Jammin’ the Blues, the film’s editing establishes a complex relationship with time. Filmic space and the physicality of musicians seem to con­ found the temporal unity of music elapsing. While Mili’s photo­ graphs attempted to dissect discrete movement through time, his films fragment action and aurality. In the most extreme instances, process shots multiply the same action within one frame. The conditions of time, place and immediacy are integral to Frederick Garber’s understanding of jazz, film and the auratic.62 Garber’s criticism of films like Young Man with a Horn and ‘Round 76

77

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

Midnight depends upon the conception that ‘jazz is an art of per­ formance and rock an art of recording’, and so that the notion of jazz film is inherently problematic.63 Mili’s jazz photography ana­ lysed gesture; his jazz films, however, foreground the constructed nature of their diegesis. In Jammin’ the Blues, the music and image tracks were recorded at different moments in which the documen­ tary observation of musicians performing is less a case of ‘this hap­ pened’ as ‘this happened again and again, over multiple takes, to playback’. These elements are present too in Mili and Granz’s 1950 film Improvisation, which was produced independently of a studio. Tad Hershorn records that the film had come about after two years of discussion.64 Once again, the film would feature a line-​up drawn from the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts:  Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich, Lester Young, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips, Bill Harris, Ella Fitzgerald and, most significantly, Charlie Parker in his second and final film appearance. While Young and Edison provided continuity with Jammin’ the Blues, made six years previously, the circumstances of filming were quite different. In 1987, Granz recalled that, ‘By that time, shorts were not really making it, so I could not have gone back to Warner Bros. and asked them to do another one.’65 Given the disagreements on set during Jammin’ the Blues, it is likely that such an advance, even if made, would not have been welcome. Instead, shooting took place in Mili’s New York studio, with a skeleton crew and only one camera. An inability to shoot from multiple angles on takes inevi­ tably slowed down the shooting process and provided minimal coverage. As Mili’s studio was not sound-​proofed, Granz was forced to repeat the compromise of Jammin’ the Blues  –​ pre-​recording the music and then attempting to synch footage of musicians per­ forming to playback. This proved especially difficult with Buddy Rich’s drumming and Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal and the film project 77

78

Jazz as Visual Language

was abandoned.66 After decades as a film considered lost, Jacques Muyal, in collaboration with Bill Kirchner and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, pieced together a version from original 35mm film elements held by Granz. The film was released as a DVD in 1996 and re-​released in 2007, in a two-​disc set that included silent, unused rushes and on-​set photographs taken by Mili’s assistant, Paul Nodler. In a filmed introduction to the DVD, Granz states that Imp­ rovisation was conceived as ‘a second Jammin’ the Blues’. Muyal’s reconstruction presents a sequence of five songs, beginning at a relaxed tempo and steadily building in energy. From its midpoint, Improvisation observes the structure of escalation noted by Knight regarding Jammin’ the Blues, where each consecutive song adds to its roster of musicians. In keeping with the JATP philosophy of eclecti­ cism, Improvisation juxtaposes musicians of different styles and eras, as in the song ‘Ballade’ which features Coleman Hawkins (46 years old) alongside Buddy Rich (33), Hank Jones (32), Charlie Parker (30) and Ray Brown (24). Improvisation discards the solemnity and con­ trolled environment of Jammin’ the Blues. From ‘Ballade’ onwards we see the musicians interacting in candid fashion. However, inevitably, given the audio playback and one camera set-​up, these observational moments are in themselves highly constructed. The opening shots of ‘Ballade’ offer a case in point. After Hank Jones’ introductory bars, Coleman Hawkins’ solo is pictured first in a tight close-​up, then in a mid-​shot in which Charlie Parker sits appreciatively observing. As stated above, this is a rare opportu­ nity to observe Parker on film and so perhaps it is hindsight which makes his reaction to Hawkins’ playing as fascinating as the music. Parker looks off screen-​right (as we will soon discover, in the direc­ tion of Buddy Rich), smiles and shakes his head, silently commu­ nicating his respect and affection for Hawkins (Figure 2.6). It is a precious moment of camaraderie, quite unlike anything in Jammin’ the Blues. Yet our inability to fully understand Parker’s reaction is 78

79

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

Figure 2.6  Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker in Improvisation.

inescapable, since we are not hearing what he heard but rather a ver­ sion of Hawkins’ solo recorded some time earlier, in a sound studio. The absurdity of this situation becomes apparent on viewing another take of Hawkins miming to the same playback, struggling to contain his mirth while Parker openly laughs. Parker is swiftly silenced by an off-​screen presence, to whom he responds sullenly.67 These two takes of Parker’s reaction to Hawkins playing his solo, so disparate in tone, reveal the design of these shots and forcefully demonstrate the temporal distance between sound and image tracks, the degree to which Mili’s films generate the ‘ad lib’ synthetically. The 2007 DVD re-​release of Improvisation offers viewers a ‘sec­ ond video angle track’ which constitutes an alternate cut of the film, using other viewpoints from the rushes. In conjunction with around 30 minutes of additional silent rushes and the extensive gallery of 79

80

Jazz as Visual Language

Nodler’s photographs of the shooting, the viewer is promised unparallelled access to the moment of musical creation. However, as I have argued, these digital affordances also forcefully problematise the coherence of the performative moment. Muyal’s reconstruction of Improvisation memorialises the production process of this ‘lost’ film, retaining elements which Mili would inevitably have excised in editing such as the musicians being counted in and clapper-​boards being struck. In his liner notes, Muyal explains that ‘without know­ ing what Mili had in mind, we decided to show what existed with­ out elaborating on what we had, to keep the document pure’. The reconstruction project followed the imperative ‘to show the play­ ers as much as possible’.68 Nevertheless, expressive editing effects are in evidence, an example being the dissolves which link shots as Hawkins solos at the beginning of ‘Ballade’. However, the sophisticated lighting and post-​production effects so prominent in Jammin’ the Blues are not part of Improvisation. The lighting throughout is predominantly flat and naturalistic, with some moments shrouded in low light, and the set an entirely comprehensible space. Certain shots self-​consciously evoke Mili’s earlier film (especially a cutaway to Lester Young’s hat resting at his tapping foot), but in doing so, exaggerate the six years that separate the two films. Jammin’ the Blues was a wartime film, a statement of artistry in a segregated nation. What remains of Improvisation can­ not lay claim to equivalent achievement or coherence. A close-​up of Charlie Parker laughing delightedly at a Buddy Rich solo sums up the pleasures and the frustrations of the film. There is huge affective power in the documentary recording of Parker observing another musician, but the beauty of the moment is sundered by a curious tripartite temporality: Rich recording a solo in a sound studio, Rich performing to audio playback in Mili’s photographic studio and filmed with the one camera available, Parker laughing at something at some other point in time and filmed by the same camera. 80

81

Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost

The infelicities of miming to audio playback are more elegantly managed in a later film of The Dave Brubeck Quartet entitled Stompin’ for Mili (1955), which Mili shot with his assistant Aram Avakian. Aram’s brother, the record producer George Avakian, was preparing to record the album Brubeck Time (1955, Columbia CL 622) and persuaded a reluctant Mili to film three songs. As the album liner notes make clear, there was some tension between Mili and the band, due to his unguarded doubts over their ability. Unsurprisingly, the narrative comprising the liner notes is resolved with Mili being won over by the Quartet’s prowess and one of the album’s tracks is entitled ‘Stompin’ for Mili’, linking music and film. Stylishly shot in monochrome, the film combines elements of both Jammin’ the Blues and Improvisation, using chiaroscuro lighting but also maintain­ ing a realist spatial integrity. Expressionistic flourishes are achieved in camera rather than in post-​production. A  clever lighting effect reflects Brubeck’s hands on the keyboard onto the surface of his spectacles in extreme close-​up. A number of shots concentrate on the shadows thrown by Joe Dodge’s arms when drumming. Hand-​ held sequences invigorate the studio space, adding a nervy imme­ diacy that acts in visual counterpoint to the fluid melodies. Musicians’ bodies, their relation to one another and to their instru­ ments structure Mili’s films, more so than the relationship between image and song. While Improvisation and Stompin’ for Mili have great charms, they do not match the coherent achievement of Jammin’ the Blues. Indeed, certain elements of the later films suggest that Mili’s style was hardening into ‘cool’. It is Jammin’ the Blues which has con­ tributed most to the way we ‘see’ jazz of the 1940s. Its influence is there in Herman Leonard’s 1948 still life photograph Lester Young’s Pork Pie Hat. It is there also in the lush opening credits of Mo’ Better Blues (Spike Lee, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1990), a sequence that carefully observes the film’s star Denzel Washington, his dress, gesture and trumpet in an abstract setting. And it is there in our imag­ ination of Lester Young, floating at the margins, shrouded in smoke. 81

82

83

3 Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

For the British jazz fan, Jazz 625 is hugely important as a record of the 1960s scene, when American stars mingled with homegrown talent. For the scholar of television, Jazz 625 also holds significance, as one of the programmes scheduled for the first week of broadcast on the BBC’s second channel in 1964. In this chapter, I describe the two-​year BBC2 series run not just as a record of musicians perform­ ing but also as an articulation of renewed cultural commitment from Britain’s major public service broadcaster. Today, the programme’s legacy is that of a repository of clip-​worthy moments useful to the documentarist. Questions of institutional and social context are largely lost when moments from Jazz 625 are disinterred. The sub­ sequent fragmentation of the series into clips, and the resultant con­ fusion over the circumstances of original production, has resulted in it seeming distant and elusive, particularly marked in re-​edited repeats on digital arts channel BBC Four.1 As Tim Wall and Paul Long have argued in their analysis of 2005 BBC Four heritage series Jazz Britannia, archive footage can be ‘decontextualised from its original setting’ and this is a strategy commonly employed in the 83

84

Jazz as Visual Language

re-​use of Jazz 625.2 My work here is an attempt to bring the original series more clearly into focus, and so to clarify the ways in which the subsequent deployment of Jazz 625 as archive television frequently ignores ‘the original representational function of the images and the music’.3 In doing so, I hope to provide the fullest analysis of what I take to be a major moment not just in the history of jazz in Britain but also in the history of BBC music television. Quite apart from the music it showcased, Jazz 625 was an emi­ nently stylish show, with a sophisticated address that won over both jazz fans and the general public. Its spare, modernist visuals were emblematic of a reinvigorated, progressive BBC and the very title of the programme drew attention to the most recent advances in television technology, the high-​definition 625-​line UHF image which distinguished BBC2 and which many viewers could not receive on their 405-​line VHF television sets. Besides the incur­ sion of jazz into the domestic space, Jazz 625 also presented the music in a variety of environments, both in controlled studio settings and Outside Broadcasts (OB) from locations like The Marquee Club in Soho. As I shall argue, a strong connection with technological progress is one of the ways in which the programme characterises jazz as an exclusive preserve, and through which it associates the music with modernism. The programme’s prominent stylistic panache demands an analysis of television aesthetics, an account which understands Jazz 625 as a broadcast event in which the technical possibilities of television are integral to the genera­ tion of musical meaning. To illustrate this stylistic sophistication, it is sufficient here to offer two swift examples. Firstly, as Hazel Collie and Mary Irwin have shown, music television consumption is a complex process in which the appearance of presenters and onscreen audiences play a crucial part in the appeal to the viewer.4 Certainly, this was the case for Jazz 625, which benefited from two erudite and experienced hosts:  first Steve Race (Figure  3.1), then Humphrey  Lyttelton (Figure  3.2). Always dressed in suits, 84

85

Figure 3.1  Steve Race, the first presenter of Jazz 625.

Figure 3.2  Humphrey Lyttelton, the second presenter of Jazz 625.

86

Jazz as Visual Language

these men spoke authoritatively but casually to camera, interact­ ing with musicians but mediating them for the domestic audience. Similarly, cutaways to audiences in the recording studio or in the nightclub not only prompted response to the music but depicted a mixed age/​gender/​race audience for jazz that challenged sub-​ cultural stereotypes. Secondly, in addition to these mediating elements, Jazz 625 represents an ambitious response to the chal­ lenges of recording and broadcasting a live musical event. In the discussion below, I will suggest that the varied locations in which the programme was filmed reject a homogenous style, responding expressively to the music played, and, to use Nicholas Gebhardt’s suggestive phrase, that ‘the camera actively conspires’ with the musicians featured.5 Methodologically, then, my move from the discussion of film to television is not an attempt to flatten out the differences between those media but rather to highlight their dis­ tinct qualities, taking up the challenge set by Michele Hilmes, to ‘take the specific historical evolution of television into account, along with a nuanced understanding of […] conditions of produc­ tion and reception’.6 As Long and Wall have observed, television is often perceived as having a ‘bad influence’ on representations of music, neglecting the sophisticated relationship between the two forms that creates music television.7 My reading of Jazz 625 is founded on an assumption that the musical meaning and affect contained within these programmes is as much a result of the crew behind the camera as the musicians in front of it. This chapter is an account of that collective labour and its accomplishment.

Before Jazz 625 It is important to begin by challenging a well-​rehearsed narra­ tive of the BBC’s overwhelming hostility to jazz. In his seminal history of British jazz, Jim Godbolt suggests that the Director-​ General John Reith dictated that ‘real jazz had little or no place, 86

87

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

not even on the Regional Programme, the “light” alternative, and certainly not on Sundays until the [1939–​1945] war’.8 However, as Tim Wall has demonstrated, jazz made up a large part of the BBC’s radio output from 1923 onwards.9 Similarly, Paddy Scannell has contended that the BBC’s role as cultural tastemaker ensured that radio broadcasts implanted jazz in the musical consciousness of the nation.10 These revisionist interventions highlight the danger of interpreting an institution through the stated aversions of one man, however influential.11 Indeed, by playing up a narrative of institutional conservatism, the variety and experimentation of the BBC’s output may be suppressed. Stephen Bourne reminds us that black performers were present on screens from the first BBC tel­ evision broadcasts in 1936, that black musicians frequently con­ tributed to entertainment programmes and that the first dedicated jazz television presentation came in 1946 with Jazz Is Where You Find It, which featured Jamaican-​born bassist Coleridge Goode.12 Writing in 1958 (seven years before he would present Jazz 625), trumpeter and bandleader Humphrey Lyttelton noted the limita­ tions of live broadcasting for jazz programming: The film camera, operating freely in its own time, can cap­ ture the off-​parade moments which are essential to good reporting. In front of the live TV camera, the participants are on their best behaviour. They know they are ‘on the air’ and they react accordingly. Some become temporar­ ily inhibited, others try too hard to do what is expected of them.13

Lyttelton’s position is refreshing in its acknowledgement of televis­ ual creativity, but it reinforces a prevalent assumption that record­ ing compromised spontaneity and authenticity. If Lyttelton’s ideal free-​roaming and invisible camera is perhaps a little far-​fetched, his observations very usefully frame the ‘constructed’ nature of televi­ sion as a virtue. John Wyver has noted the place of music in early 87

88

Jazz as Visual Language

arts television, quoting a Daily Telegraph review of the BBC’s early experimental broadcasts of ballet choreography in the early 1930s which praised the ability to ‘crowd such complex movement on to the narrow screen, capable of showing only two or three figures simultaneously… [so that] parts of the ballet actually came to life, and gave a foretaste of the full enjoyment that will come with high definition television’.14 As Gebhardt observes, the restrictions of the television screen and the processes of editing and image composi­ tion permit programme-​makers to place a viewer within a band’s performance and to focus that viewer on the unfolding drama of the music.15 Production files held at the BBC Written Archive attest to the fact that issues of composition, framing and visual texture were paramount in the minds of the producers of early jazz television. In Jazz Is Where You Find It, musicians would be pictured in vignettes around card tables or hanging up their coats.16 The later Jazz Session (1954) deliber­ ately included studio technicians within shot, depicted listening to the music.17 Evidently, both programmes owed a debt to Jammin’ the Blues in their portrayal of a studio jam session –​Jazz Is Where You Find It would begin each episode with a voiceover by continuity announcer McDonald Hobley, describing the milieu of the jazz musician, while Jazz Session featured dancers as well as musicians. Notably, Jazz 625 would forego these flourishes in favour of a sustained focus on musicians. These early jazz programmes featured musicians resident in Britain such as Goode, Kenny Baker and Dill Jones. International stars were banned from appearing due to the protectionist policy of the British Musicians’ Union (MU). Between 1935 and 1954, the MU had imposed a ban (upheld by the Ministry of Trade) prevent­ ing American musicians from playing in Britain, ‘the single most effective anti-​American music move in the inter-​war years’,18 lead­ ing in at least one case to prosecution.19 In 1954, the MU ‘agreed, after lengthy discussions, on a reciprocal deal with the American Federation of Musicians’20 but it is clear from production files held 88

89

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

by the BBC that, ten years later in 1964, placation of the MU was still a significant consideration.21 As Simon Frith notes, the ban had been instituted to prevent ‘aliens’ from taking up lucrative radio work.22 The extension of this restriction to television resulted in a feeling of predictability in early jazz television. The same perform­ ers, those on good terms with television producers and who might be relied on to be punctual and efficient during recording, cropped up again and again. In America, more dynamic jazz television was being produced. On NBC, The Nat King Cole Show (1956–​1957) used quirky in-​ camera effects when presenting Jazz at the Philharmonic musi­ cians.23 On CBS, Robert Herridge’s The Sound of Jazz (1957) had brought new rigour and discipline to televised jazz: The programme took a strikingly different form, with dif­ ferent generations of jazz musicians playing together in a large television studio space in which the cameras fol­ lowed the presenter and wove between the players. […] It was shot using what were then high-​definition cam­ eras reproducing the shallow depth of field and key-​lit imagery that had become established in jazz photography and setting up a narrative diegesis which explored the role of blues across the history of jazz in a similar vein to how the 1924 Aeolian Hall and 1944 Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts had presented the history of jazz on the concert stage.24

In the next decade, two US shows established a template which Jazz  625 would broadly follow. Both Jazz Casual (KQED, 1961–​ 1968, presented by Ralph J.  Gleason), broadcast on the National Education Television public service network, and the nationally syndicated Jazz Scene USA (Meadowlane, 1962, presented by Oscar Brown Jr. and produced by Steve Allen) dedicated entire episodes to current bands, allowing them to present their repertoire. Rather than constructing ensembles in the manner of Mili or Herridge 89

90

Jazz as Visual Language

(anthologies or summaries of the jazz), these programmes reported on the contemporary jazz scene, including segments in which the presenter interviewed the bandleader. In both series, the presenter served an important mediating function, demonstrating his exper­ tise through informed conversation.25 The early 1960s was a period of immense change at the BBC. The appointment of Hugh Greene as Director-​General ushered in a new spirit of experimentation and a relaxation of the kind of broad­ cast material permissible, ‘an invigorated and far more entertaining schedule’.26 As Asa Briggs observes, the satirical That Was The Week That Was (BBC, 1962–​1963, hereafter TW3), emblematic of the early Greene years, featured music as an ‘integral element’.27 Its opening song, with topical lyrics sung each week by Millicent Martin to Ron Grainer’s theme, was distinctly jazz-​inflected, and we may see Jazz 625 as part of a trend of specialisation that saw jazz in British culture becoming associated with specific locations (as in Soho clubland) and with a particular intellectual sensibility, e.g. satire as a signi­ fier of modernity. In 1962, the Pilkington Report –​a government committee of inquiry into television and radio –​recommended the institution of a second BBC channel. Plans to create a dedicated jazz programme soon followed, one that would reflect BBC2’s remit of cultural elevation. The question of who would be responsible for producing such a show was the subject of some controversy.28 Many in the BBC assumed that the programme would be the preserve of Documentary and Music Programmes, despite (or perhaps due to the failures of) Jazz Is Where You Find It and Jazz Session having been produced by Light Entertainment. On 11 November 1963 Cecil Denton, a documentary produc­ tion assistant, wrote a two-​page memo to Huw Wheldon, the Head of Documentary and Music Programmes, preceding it with the following note: Sound radio has demonstrated that there is a considerable potential audience for critical and intelligent treatment 90

91

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

of jazz subjects, and the opening of BBC2 could give us the opportunity to develop this existing interest further. Television in this country has tended to present limited and critically undemanding jazz material as a sort of vis­ ual joke box complete with funny hats and girls super­ imposed on trumpets. Both the subject and its audience deserve to be treated with more respect, and the following notes suggest ways in which this might be done.29

Denton’s proposal is admirably ambitious and anticipates many of the eventual innovations of Jazz 625. Stating that the music’s ‘com­ plexity and diversity tend to handicap any critical treatment suitable for a visual as distinct from a wholly aural medium’, Denton recom­ mends basing each episode on ‘an individual musician or group’.30 In terms of format, this suggests to Denton ‘a studio-​presented series utilising stills, film, and commercial recordings linked with live crit­ ical comment and assessment’, to be presented by a knowledgeable jazz commentator. With attention to the inherent differences between music and television as media, Denton observes: There seems no reason why the visuals employed in this kind of format need follow the sound faithfully. Television and film have for years used wholly unrelated sound to elicit a particular mood or response to a set of pictures: it might be exciting to try to do the same thing in reverse. We could use visuals to give point and comment to our sound, instead of vice versa, and the variety of these visu­ als –​studio shapes, film, stills, lighting –​is limitless. This might go a little way to upset the opinion that music on television is without point.31

With some prescience, Denton addresses the issue of how televi­ sion can add value to music through its own formal qualities. In fact, his suggestion is far more radical than anything attempted in Jazz 625, suggesting as it does a reversal of traditional assumptions 91

92

Jazz as Visual Language

regarding an image-​sound hierarchy. Something of the sort would later be attempted by The Old Grey Whistle Test (BBC, 1971–​1988). Denton also urges that greater effort be made to employ American performers: One of the stock reasons against using Americans has always been the supposed objections from the Musician’s Union, but these can and have been overcome by vari­ ous people who are prepared to try hard enough (among them Granada T. V.). Every year a number of American groups tour this country very successfully, and every year we resolutely ignore their presence. Why?32

Denton argues that programming could be synchronised with the appearance of stars like Stan Getz at Ronnie Scott’s club, bringing these musicians into the studio, or even making Outside Broadcasts from nightclubs. Denton ends his proposal with the request that he be given the chance to develop these ideas further. Wheldon for­ warded the memo to Music’s Executive Producer Humphrey Burton, who informed Denton that the matter was out of his hands since the planned jazz programme had been assigned to Light Entertainment. We may gauge reaction to this decision from a memo sent to Burton by John Bassett, a production assistant working on TW3 who was, like Denton, interested in being involved in the BBC’s plans for jazz. Bassett predicted that Light Entertainment would simply rep­ licate the ‘utterly tedious’ radio programme Jazz Club, presented by Steve Race, for screen, predicting that the programme would be full of ‘those same adenoidal, defensive, enthusiasts, talking tediously about the Mound City Blue Blowers and all’.33 His memo betrays an implicit snobbery within some areas of the BBC, accusing Light Entertainment of not caring about jazz and suggesting that BBC1 would be a better home for a jazz programme. A two-​line response to Denton and Bassett’s proposals written by Tom Sloan, Head of Light Entertainment Group, effectively shut down all debate. Writing to 92

93

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

Burton, with Denton and Bassett copied in, Sloan thanked them for their ideas and added, ‘Plans for this project are only beginning to get under-​way here but I hope that you will find that all the points raised by Messrs. Bassett and Denton will be covered.’34 The sub-​text was emphatic: this was now Light Entertainment’s show.

Jazz on BBC2 Bassett’s charge of apathy within Light Entertainment could not have been more misguided. In the build-​up to the BBC2 launch, the television service had been reorganised into new and smaller departments to handle the influx of new recruits.35 Ultimately, Jazz 625 was the invention and responsibility of one of BBC2’s new producers, Terry Henebery, who had come to the station from BBC Radio.36 Born in 1932, Henebery was considerably younger than eminent British jazz tastemakers like Steve Race (who also wrote for Jazz Journal), Rex Harris and Charles Fox. Henebery had produced Jazz Club for four-​and-​a-​half years on the Light Programme, with Race as presenter.37 However, Henebery would not, as predicted, be content to merely replicate the success of his radio programme. In a four-​page document dated 17 January 1964, Henebery sug­ gests various ways in which a jazz television programme might be approached, insisting that the calibre of musicians selected should match that of Duke Ellington and the Modern Jazz Quartet, whom Henebery planned to feature within the first six programmes.38 Henebery lists ‘name’ British bands that he would be happy to secure  –​Johnny Dankworth, Humphrey Lyttelton, Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Ross –​as well as musicians residing in Europe  –​Stephane Grappelli, Arni Domnerus, Bud Powell and Hans Koller. Noting the work of Bill Le Sage and Johnny Scott, Henebery categorises them as ‘more esoteric offerings but, nevertheless, we should not overlook their value in the overall jazz scene’.39 With regard to the onscreen presenter, Henebery indicates 93

94

Jazz as Visual Language

a strong preference for Steve Race, citing his recent tenure as pre­ senter of the Light Programme’s The Jazz Scene.40 Possible titles sug­ gested for the new show are The Jazzmakers, Jazz ‘64, Just Jazz or Jazz Tonight.41 Just three months before the launch of BBC2, the programme was still being conceived of as entirely OB, filmed at either the Mayfair or Mermaid theatres. However, the restrictions imposed by these venues preoccupied Henebery, who observed: The conventional theatre type of staging is, of course, going to limit our camera coverage to a rather frontal approach and I feel that really good lighting is essential to this programme both in helping to create the desired atmosphere and in diverting attention from the limita­ tions imposed, by making the shots look really striking and interesting.42

The straight-​on staging imposed by a proscenium somewhat threat­ ened Henebery’s intention that ‘each programme should have an identity of its own’ and complicated the imperative to record ‘first-​ class sound balance’.43 Plans to record a block of initial programmes at the Mayfair Theatre reached quite an advanced stage, with Chief of BBC2 Programmes Michael Peacock having made the initial negotiations and set and sound designers making site visits to assess the feasibility of the space. Indeed, at one point, the series’ work­ ing title was Jazz at the Mayfair, though this was discarded when it was pointed out that this would preclude OB from jazz festivals.44 After all of the promising groundwork, a scouting expedition in February by Henebery and Robin Scott of OB convinced them that the Mayfair would prove too visually limiting.45 The Mayfair Theatre is quite unsuitable as a permanent venue for these programmes because it forces on us the use of static cameras. It has neither the advantages of an alter­ native to a studio nor those of a real jazz club situation. It is a bad compromise between both. Furthermore, the 94

95

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

L. C. C. [London County Council] restrictions in terms of staging, editing, use of design materials and so on, and the enormous complications of an overnight rig and an over­ night de-​rig under weekend pay conditions would take an appreciable slice out of the already comparatively small programme budget.46

Robin Scott concluded that ‘the prospect of doing a series at the Mayfair is a dispiriting one’.47 And so the deal with the Mayfair was hurriedly reneged upon. As an alternative, Scott nominated The Marquee Club, which had recently moved to new premises at 90 Wardour Street in Soho. Noting the extendable stage, Scott judged it a venue that ‘lends itself to the sort of mobile coverage which jazz demands, combined with the right sort of atmosphere’.48 Evoking a milieu through camera movement was paramount, with Henebery predicting that ‘jam ses­ sions will provide us with some very exciting pictures and a most stimulating atmosphere’.49 In the event, the move away from a title that invoked live performance was significant. Episodes of Jazz 625 would be filmed at the Marquee but also in the more controlled environments of Television Centre and the Television Theatre at Shepherd’s Bush. These spaces provided visual variety but also imposed distinct relationships between performers and their audi­ ences. The name Jazz 625 encompassed these very different jazz spaces, clustering them around the mediating technology of the 625-​line broadcast frequency. With the technical advantages of the 625-​line system came asso­ ciations of advancement and exclusivity. The second channel was initially only available to London and the South-​East, leading to public concerns about over-​specialism and a restricted address. In the Radio Times for the first week of BBC2, Kenneth Adam (BBC Director of Television) spoke to these anxieties over the new chan­ nel. Adam reassured readers that BBC2 was ‘not seeking, in unholy partnership with BBC1, to seduce viewers away from ITV’, was not 95

96

Jazz as Visual Language

attempting to ‘undermine or in any way diminish the importance of BBC1’, was ‘not intended as a menace to BBC Radio’ and, perhaps most importantly, was ‘not staffed by an élite’.50 Despite the impor­ tance of reassuring continuity, Adam is careful to point out that, due to the new programme-​makers, ‘some specialisation will emerge, naturally and properly, but not by age or class’, and that this will challenge the viewer, ‘because we think he is ready for the exercise’.51 In the BBC Handbook for 1964, Adam was more specific about the novelty of the new system and the demands this placed on content: Having reached the UHF 625-​line screen, it must be with something that looks, taking not only a week as a whole, but any one evening, new, and lively, and different, some­ thing which will have an appeal for large groups of view­ ers, and for smaller groups as well, and something which takes off from the point of technical sophistication and programme maturity already reached by BBC1. This is the professional problem.52

The ‘problem’ posed by Adam is one addressed by Jazz 625, a pro­ gramme both specialised and aimed at the general public, which built upon existing TV tropes but developed novel ways of seeing music through the expressive use of mobile camera technology. It is not surprising that the first episode of the series was prominently positioned on the second night of BBC2’s launch week, at 9.40pm on Tuesday 21 April 1964. This first programme, ‘Jazz 625 presenting Ellington in Concert part  1’, was the first of two recordings of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, filmed during a two-​week tour of England in February 1964.53 The booking had been set up by director Yvonne Littlewood who established an important contact with the powerful Harold Davison talent agency. Inspired by her attendance at an Errol Garner concert in November 1963, Littlewood wrote to the head of Light Entertainment, Tom Sloan, to propose a series of half-​hour 96

97

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

programmes of ‘top visiting jazzmen’.54 Sloan recommended the idea to Michael Peacock, noting that it would be perfect ‘in the jazz spot in your [BBC2] opening week as a curtain raiser to the jazz series’. He closed by noting that ‘Ellington is undoubtedly the mas­ ter of jazz composition and it is inconceivable to me that we should lose an opportunity of putting him on BBC Television in this way’.55 After Davison secured permission for filming from the Musicians’ Union and the Ministry of Labour, recording took place on 21 and 25 February 1964, with part 1 shot at the TC4 studio in Television Centre and part 2 at Television Theatre, Shepherd’s Bush. As promotional literature noted, this was the first time that Ellington’s orchestra had been showcased on BBC-​TV, and this historical significance was reflected in the elaborate set design and extended 55 minute runtime for both episodes.56 Symbolically, too, the choice of Ellington to open Jazz 625 was telling, recalling the landmark BBC radio broadcast made by his orchestra on their first visit to England in 1933.57 In preparation for this new audiovisual recording, Littlewood compiled detailed shooting scripts, which tracked camera movements to each bar played by the orchestra. The complex challenge facing Littlewood of deploying cameras in con­ cert with a 15-​piece orchestra is indicated by the first day’s call sheet, which programmed in seven hours of camera rehearsal before film­ ing commenced at 8.30pm.58 Despite this meticulous planning, the broadcast did not go according to plan. In the Radio Times for the BBC2 launch week, programmes on mathematics, finance, engineering and politics were scheduled around Jazz 625, evidence of the way in which jazz was considered part of the high-​minded ambition of the new chan­ nel. However, on the night, disaster struck. When the BBC launched its television service in 1936, the occasion went off without a hitch. Similarly, the reopen­ ing of the service in 1946 had been flawless, as had the 97

98

Jazz as Visual Language

launch of commercial television in 1955. This time, how­ ever, a fire at Battersea Power Station deprived most of west London of electricity. Crucially, this included BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. […] By the time the fire was extinguished a couple of hours later, the deci­ sion had been taken by BBC2 controller Michael Peacock to delay the launch, including the fireworks display from Southend-​on-​Sea, until the following day, ditching the scheduled educational programmes. […] The only survi­ vor from the original second night schedule was a concert by Duke Ellington’s orchestra, forming the first edition of one of BBC2’s best-​remembered early programmes, Jazz 625.59

It is notable that, amidst this confusion, the Ellington broadcast was retained from the original schedule. Stylistically, Littlewood’s direction of ‘Ellington in Concert part 1’ would act as a template for subsequent episodes of Jazz 625. Fluid camera movements attended to the contribution of individual soloists, their relation to Ellington as bandleader and the orchestra as a whole. Dramatic compositions made the most of the TC4 studio, with cameras placed low to capture the modernist set design and lighting responding to the mood of each piece played (Figure  3.3). Interviewed in The Stage and Television Today, Littlewood observed, ‘I’m terri­ bly concerned that the sound should be exactly right for someone who may be known to audiences in this country only from his records’.60 Her decision to present Ellington ‘in the simplest, most gimmick-​free way’ was noted in Melody Maker which praised her ‘tasteful direction’.61 In this first episode, the music selection concentrates on Ellington’s current repertoire, reinforcing the association of jazz with modernity (the second Ellington episode, filmed at TV Theatre, would showcase his back catalogue). Steve Race breathlessly intro­ duces the programme from within the audience, proclaiming ‘a 98

99

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

Figure 3.3  Duke Ellington (left) and Cootie Williams (right) in Jazz 625.

red-​letter day in the jazz calendar’ and describing Ellington as ‘the master, the man without whom jazz couldn’t even think of existing’. Race swiftly hands over to Ellington, who assumes the role of com­ père, announcing each number, identifying soloists and addressing the camera and studio audience directly.62 By doubling up compères, the curious double address of the programme is acknowledged, both live and recorded, for the studio audience and the audience watching at home. Ellington’s suave links to camera reassure the tel­ evision viewers of their inclusion in the event, as when he notes that usually the orchestra would give concert audiences three guesses as to the title of ‘Perdido’ but that, in this case, ‘you’re so hip, we just don’t dare’. Another way in which ‘Ellington in Concert’ established a work­ ing model for Jazz 625 was in the decision to film two episodes. As Littlewood explained in a press release, ‘The decision to record a 99

100

Jazz as Visual Language

second programme was made at only a few days’ notice. […] We realised that it was impossible in one show to do justice to a man who has written more than 2000 compositions. The orchestra had a spare day in their tour following the first recording and so we pinched it’.63 This practice of snatching opportunities on tour dates would con­ tinue throughout the series, with Henebery working closely with the Harold Davison Agency to maximise filming potential. In the case of a Thelonious Monk booking, for example, the Davison Agency approached the BBC on 15 October 1964 detailing an intended tour, with two programmes recorded back-​to-​back at the Marquee Club on 14 March 1965 (between Monk’s appearances at London’s Royal Festival Hall and Birmingham Town Hall) and then broadcast on 21 April 1965 and 5 January 1966.64 The relationship between the Jazz 625 production team, the Harold Davison Agency and the Musicians’ Union would be crucial in the booking of international acts for the programme.

Jazz as television In total, including Littlewood’s first Ellington recording, 83 episodes of Jazz 625 were recorded between 1964 and 1966 (see ‘Film and television programmes cited’ for a complete listing). Initially, epi­ sodes went out in the 9.40pm slot on Tuesdays. With the success of the programme on BBC2, repeats began to appear on BBC1 (thus broadcast to the whole country) from 9 November 1964 onwards, with a special Boxing Day compilation to close the year. In this way, the tension between these broadcasts as ‘new’ and ‘archival’ was established in the first year of broadcast and, as we shall see, con­ tinues to define their status in BBC history. Undoubtedly, the visual dynamism afforded by multiple shooting locations and state-​of-​the-​ art camera equipment, complemented by a minimalist aesthetic, would have been a major reason for the decision to repeat these programmes. Like the US Jazz Casual, Jazz 625 favoured spare sets 100

101

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

which did not distract from the musicians featured and so created a milieu not tied to one contemporary moment. Graphics design for the opening and closing titles used crisp clean typography and early episodes began with a sequence of still photographs of musicians accompanied by a bebop theme written by Steve Race. It is important, I think, to establish a degree of accomplishment in Jazz 625 that is not simply the result of novelty. In a famous cri­ tique of television’s representation of music, Simon Frith describes an uneasy relationship between the two forms. Frith argues that the ‘television audience is rarely conceived as a music audience’65 and that ‘the visuals that television could most usefully bring to music were not about reading music but displaying it’.66 In this concep­ tion, music television is posited as inherently unreflective, ‘not sound-​centred but picture-​driven, organised around an aesthetic of ­immediacy’.67 Rather contentiously, Frith makes the historical claim that ‘the visual conventions of rock performance were shaped by tel­ evision’ but that this was not the case for ‘musical genres which pre-​ dated television –​classical music, opera, jazz, folk’.68 Frith permits no sense of the evolution of visual conventions in these allegedly elderly genres and implies formal qualities unsuitable for televi­ sion:  music programmes, he claims, ‘were more about bringing stage acts into the living room than about changing their perform­ ing conventions’.69 Frith’s thesis might be supported with reference to Briggs’ institutional history of the BBC, which does not mention Jazz 625, and which states that BBC2 offered few ‘new opportunities for music, except for opera and ballet’.70 Frith’s discussion of Jazz 625 is relegated to a footnote regarding television’s rare attempts to create programming for specialist music markets: What is striking about such programmes […] is their uneasy relationship with the relevant fans. In the very pro­ cess of bringing a musical world to a television audience, such specialist programmes seem to render the music itself 101

102

Jazz as Visual Language

faintly (or, in the case of Hee-​Haw, not so faintly) ridicu­ lous, a point brilliantly made by The Fast Show parody of TV jazz. When I’ve asked genre fans for TV memories they do not usually cite specialist shows but music heard in non-​ music programmes –​baroque music on the soundtrack of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, jazz on Peter Gunn.71

Two assumptions are made by Frith about television as a medium. First, that ‘the visuals that television could most usefully bring to music were not about reading music but displaying it’; and second, that ‘television is not primarily a sound medium’.72 I address the first of these suppositions at length in the following discussion, but the second is more readily dealt with. The limited screen size and poor quality speakers of domestic television sets are noted by Frith as restrictions to the viewer’s experience of music, while editing’s construction of televisual space is given to show an incompatibility with liveness, a problematic notion given television’s long history of live broadcasts. Using frameworks more appropriate to the study of film, Frith does not address the differences between editing and vision mixing (the switching between camera positions in the con­ trol booth at the moment of television recording). Similarly, Frith seems unaware of debates in television studies which have more closely considered the specificities of broadcast media. As John Ellis has argued, sound is crucial in television, drawing viewer attention back to the set, and ‘tends to anchor meaning on TV’.73 The image does not break up the continuity of sound –​rather, sound ensures continuity across the fragmentation of successive images. Indeed, television studies has tended to describe the medium as sound-​led; hence, Hilmes has demonstrated that television’s production con­ ventions were dictated more by radio than by film.74 Many enter­ prising ‘genre fans’ of Jazz 625 wired their set to their hi-​fi speakers to better enjoy the programme’s excellent sound balance; I  have spoken to some, others wrote into the BBC.75 While Frith usefully frames his discussion within contexts of industry and consumption, 102

103

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

ultimately his argument is marred by its preoccupation with a com­ mon fallacy of music television scholarship, identified by Gebhardt as the question of what television ‘does as a medium to music’.76 As Gebhardt makes clear, this approach sees television as interposing itself between music and its audience. A more nuanced approach is suggested by Collie and Irwin, who acknowledge ‘the varied and complex reasons that an audience might have for engaging with music programming besides the music itself ’.77 In his analysis of the broadcast of a 1964 Miles Davis Quintet performance in Milan, Gebhardt has explored the ways in which television ‘contributes to, and intensifies our experience of, […] the quintet’s attempts to discover […] the material basis and limits of their art’.78 Drawing upon Stanley Cavell’s account of television as ‘monitoring’, Gebhardt describes the way camera movement and composition place the viewer within the space of the musicians’ performance and so contribute to televisual meaning. Unlike Frith, Gebhardt provides a systematic demon­ stration of visual elements acting to ‘read’ the meaning of music, and of music creation. By emphasising the ways in which viewing television is utterly unlike the experience of going to a concert, Gebhardt suggests that the television event ‘loses its power to overwhelm us, to impose its meaning on us, to reclaim the band’s performance for the classic jazz narratives of unmediated self-​ expression’.79 This is a particularly modernist conception of jazz television, in which the broadcast medium allows the music to question and renew itself, and one which is useful in determining Jazz 625’s aesthetic strategies.

Jazz 625: non-​representational signs and visual dissonance For a new programme under scrutiny from the Musicians’ Union, the line-​up for 1964’s opening season of Jazz 625 was impressive 103

104

Jazz as Visual Language

indeed. Following the inaugural Ellington concert, an all-​star jam session on 28 April featured British musicians Kenny Baker, George Chisholm, Tony Coe, Roy Willox, Laurie Holloway, Jack Fallon and Lennie Hastings. In May, the show presented The Tubby Hayes Quintet, Chris Barber’s Jazzband, The Modern Jazz Quartet, and The Johnny Dankworth Orchestra. In June, this mix of US and UK stars continued with The Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley Sextet, Alex Welsh and his Band, Bill Le Sage’s New Directions in Jazz Unit, and Marian McPartland. July saw appearances from The Humphrey Lyttelton Fifteen, The Art Farmer Quartet, Henry ‘Red’ Allen, and a second appearance from the MJQ. What is striking in these first four months is the variety not just of performer but of style and intent. Raucous jams sat side-​by-​side with, for example, the cool sobriety of the MJQ sessions. New Orleans and Chicago’s influence were represented (Henry ‘Red’ Allen) just as the orchestral future of jazz was explored (Bill Le Sage). Big American stars (Ellington, MJQ, Adderley) were presented alongside British leaders (Hayes, Dankworth, Lyttelton) without apology or qualification. The remainder of 1964’s output represented a period of consoli­ dation and growing confidence, exemplified by the decision not to broadcast Yvonne Littlewood’s second Ellington episode under the Jazz 625 mantle. Now fully established, with regular coverage in the Radio Times, we may see this decision as evidence of BBC2’s faith in the format and its certainty that the programme no longer needed the push that an Ellington would provide. August’s line-​up would present another ‘Cannonball’ Adderley show, Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, Mark Murphy and Tubby Hayes, and The Dave Brubeck Quartet. September kicked off with another jam session (this time Lennie Felix, Freddie Randall, Bruce Turner, Jimmy Skidmore, John Picard, Spike Heatley and Derek Hogg), followed by The Woody Herman Orchestra, Henry ‘Red’ Allen, Jimmy Witherspoon, Sandy Brown’s Band and The Art Farmer Quintet. In October, programmes featured Mel Torme, The Oscar Peterson Trio, 104

105

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

Benny Golson, Annie Ross and Errol Garner; in November, a musi­ cal tribute to Charlie Parker by musicians who had played with him (J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Walter Bishop, Tommy Potter and Kenny Clarke), The Woody Herman Orchestra again, Derek Smith and Eddie Thompson, Coleman Hawkins, and a sec­ ond Brubeck Quartet session; in December, another British jam ses­ sion (Keith Christie, Eddie Blair, Ronnie Scott, Art Ellefson, Colin Purbrook, Dave Green and Jackie Dougan), The Newport All Stars and The Johnny Scott Quintet. Of the British players, certain names recur over the two year run of Jazz 625 (e.g. Ronnie Scott, Lennie Hastings, Ronnie Ross, Allan Ganley) and, while the programme did not encourage distinctions between native talent and Americans on tour, it is notable that the listings in the Radio Times frequently did. The special 1964 Boxing Day compilation was described as ‘a special edition featuring some of the many American stars’, failing to note the presence of Scott, Hastings, Brian Brocklehurst and Alex Welsh in these clips. By listing every programme for 1964, we immediately see the variety and volume of jazz on BBC2 over nine months and the enterprise and ambition of the Jazz 625 team. Some programmes presented live touring units intact, others generated new combi­ nations of musicians especially for that programme’s recording. American musicians mixed freely with Europeans. Guest vocalists appeared  –​some established (Betty Bennett on the Tubby Hayes Quintet recording; Bobby Breen with the Dankworth Orchestra), some provocative (Champion Jack Dupree with Chris Barber). The appearance of TW3 singer Millicent Martin on the Johnny Scott episode reminds us of the sophisticated address of these shows, to an audience assumed to be discerning and worldly-​wise. Even in the episodes that featured aged stars such as Henry ‘Red’ Allen or Dupree, Jazz 625’s visual style was defined by its thrilling moder­ nity. Its modish opening titles typically led into a to-​camera intro­ duction from presenter Steve Race, often surrounded by young and 105

106

Jazz as Visual Language

fashionable members of the audience but always authoritatively detached from them. As Collie and Irwin’s audience research has shown, television audiences can identify strongly with presenters, often seeing reflections of themselves in details of dress or gesture.80 Race was an amiable presence, older than many of the musicians fea­ tured, soberly dressed but casual and dryly deprecating in his com­ ments. He was also popular with jazz aficionados, praised in Jazz Journal for his ‘unassuming dignity and sense of proportion’, thus providing Jazz 625 with a connection to established fan networks.81 A great degree of experimentation was seen in this first year. As well as programmes recorded at TV Centre, TV Theatre and the Marquee Club, outside broadcasts were made from the Richmond Jazz Festival (Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen) and Wembley Town Hall (Coleman Hawkins). These were not always deemed successful by senior management, as with the Richmond broadcast which was criticised by Michael Peacock for technical inadequacy in com­ parison to studio recordings.82 After the 11 August 1964 Richmond broadcast, there would be no more ‘exterior’ shoots, with the rest of the series rarely going further than the Marquee Club in Soho (more ambitious OB work in student unions would be seen in Henebery’s next series, Jazz Goes to College [1966–​1967]). By increasingly repre­ senting jazz in interior spaces, the series presented jazz sub-​culture in controlled environments unlike that of the famous Newport Festival film Jazz on A Summer’s Day (Bert Stern, New Yorker Films, 1960), internalising jazz within recognisably BBC spaces, or OB locations that could accommodate a particular visual style (hence the move from the Mayfair Theatre to the Marquee Club). With this in mind, it is instructive to make a comparison to Mili’s Jammin’ the Blues. As I have argued in the previous chapter, the her­ metic world of Mili’s film permits a focus on gesture and movement as modernist expression, in which reflection of the social and politi­ cal world of America in 1944 is allegorical and symbolic. The cru­ cial difference between Mili’s film and any episode of Jazz 625 is the 106

107

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

presence (and visibility) of the live audience. As a presenter, Race is commonly seated within the audience, heightening the sense of shared participation. Cutaways during and after musical perfor­ mances foster the sense that the meaning created by musicians is negotiated by the reception and appreciation of the audience, a pos­ sibility absent from Jammin’ the Blues. In studio settings, these audi­ ences are often reserved but on other occasions, such as episodes featuring Henry ‘Red’ Allen and Alex Welsh or Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer, they are demonstrative, engaging in call-​and-​response or laughing at witticisms. In Marquee Club episodes, audience mem­ bers appear yet more relaxed, with shots depicting some smoking and drinking. Audience shots contribute to the documentary effect of the programme, especially when we catch those present stealing a glance into the camera (see Figure 3.1). The presentation of jazz to the British public is a major structural component of Jazz 625, giv­ ing television viewers the opportunity to observe others consuming and carefully appreciating music. Moments like these offer perhaps the greatest temptation to view episodes of Jazz 625 merely as the filming of live performance, which would ignore that the ever-​present cameras and sound equip­ ment for the purposes of recording were integral to the event. For the audience watching at home, the textured high-​quality 35mm film image, transmitted via the 625-​line UHF frequency, would have been of significantly higher definition than previous program­ ming and would have indicated the seriousness and prestige with which the BBC was treating jazz. Jazz Journal praised this aspect of the series, noting ‘the fine camera shots’ and that the ‘[sound] bal­ ance was better than one has come to expect from the television stu­ dios’.83 Given Frith’s focus on the image as problematic mediator, it is interesting that the debate over Jazz 625 between ‘relevant fans’ in specialist magazines emphasised televisuality.84 Most strikingly, Jazz Journal’s October 1964 issue devoted six pages to a Jazz 625 photo-​ spread, the first page of which framed an image of Ellington within a 107

108

Jazz as Visual Language

television screen, textured to simulate the new 625-​line system and so perfectly depicting the mediation of music by the broadcast tech­ nology.85 It is important therefore, to remind ourselves that episodes of Jazz 625 were not simply recorded musical events that transmit­ ted live experience, but rather that they were television events, in which the format and filming defined the musicality. If criticisms of Jazz 625 were made by enthusiasts, they were not directly about the content or style of programmes but rather the limited reach of BBC2, initially only available from the Crystal Palace transmitter.86 Regular Jazz Journal columnist Steve Voce dryly observed that ‘up here in the uncivilised wastes, we can’t get it on our clockwork television sets’, while Brian Priestley in Jazz Monthly complained that the programme was unavailable to him as a ‘mere Northerner’.87 Priestley’s testy comment comes in a valuable account of the 13 August 1964 rehearsal and filming of Benny Golson and a specially selected 25-​piece orchestra of soloists and session men: […] the main work of the afternoon is done by the sound engineers, and especially the cameramen and Terry Henebery in his capacity as director, who have to translate the entire shooting-​script into practical. Each number is played complete only once during the after­ noon and the musicians have several official or unofficial breaks but, by the time of the final run-​through (com­ plete with announcements and interview) at 7.45pm, the band has a really firm grasp of the form of each number […]. The audience is let in for the recording of the definitive programme at 9 o’clock, plus two retakes, caused by lapses on the visual side […]. Thus ends a 12-​ hour day for some notable British musicians, to whom this has been not only a vindication of their ability but a very enjoyable experience.88

In a famous discussion of musical sequences in Hollywood films, Richard Dyer describes how our emotional response to song sequences 108

109

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

can be dictated by ‘non-​ representational signs  –​colour, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork’, and suggests that this emo­ tional coding is the product of ‘culturally and historically determined sensibilities’.89 In attempting to theorise the effect of Jazz 625’s musi­ cal sequences, and the contribution of direction, camerawork, sound recording and editing, Dyer’s notion of non-​representational signs is a useful touchstone. Often, camera movements or zooms seem to be doing that which Frith claimed was beyond television: reading the music. The stylistic qualities of 625-​line televisuality become expres­ sive elements in the realisation of the screened jazz event. These non-​representational signs –​which give the programme texture, rhythm, mood and movement  –​cannot be schematised or homogenised. Unlike the work of Lye or Mili, we cannot assign credit to a single author (though, as I  have argued, to do so even in these cases is misguided). The circulation of directors, crew and musicians means that each episode of Jazz 625 has its own charac­ ter, complicating Frith’s intuition of specialist music programmes’ creation of a (singular) ‘musical world’. Rather, each programme establishes its own visual strategies dictated by environment, set design, crew, musicians and audience. Jazz 625 offers a multiplicity of musical worlds within episodes, particular to discrete songs. We might point to the use of spotlight and crane shot during a Henry ‘Red’ Allen Jazz 625 performance as an instance of the programme using high-​key lighting similar to CBS’ The Sound of Jazz. This dra­ matic interaction of singer, lighting and camera movement lends the musical moment a sense of timelessness, where Allen’s brief visual separation from the rest of the band reminds the viewer of his emblematic relation to the history of American jazz. Shot com­ position is often used so that spatial relationships suggest musical connection, as in the careful two-​shots that link, for instance, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond. Transitions between shots are often held in an extended cross-​fade, so that exchanges between instru­ mentalists are visualised (Figure 3.4).90 109

110

Jazz as Visual Language

Figure 3.4  A slow dissolve between Christopher Wesley White (bass) and Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) in Jazz 625.

One memorable effect of Jazz 625’s black-​and-​white photogra­ phy is the distortion caused by reflection on the polished surfaces of brass instruments.91 For a jazz programme, this by-​product of studio lighting was a constant hazard, disrupting the space around the instrument with a pulsing aura (Figure  3.5). However, these feedback effects would contribute to the modernist look of Jazz 625, with the visual distortion seeming to respond expressively to the playing of trombones, saxophones and trumpets. It would be mis­ leading to suggest that BBC technicians desired this distortion but, looking back at these episodes, the effect stands out as an unfortu­ nate byproduct put to ingenious, expressive use. It is worth recall­ ing the imperative to experiment with televisual opportunities in 1964 with the introduction of the 625-​line image and that this was an era of innovation; a year earlier, for BBC1, Bernard Lodge had 110

111

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

Figure 3.5  A halo around Bob Brookmeyer’s trombone in Jazz 625.

used the distinctive ‘howl-​around’ feedback effect to create Doctor Who’s abstract opening titles, accompanied by Delia Derbyshire’s electronic interpretation of the Ron Grainer theme, while the exter­ mination effect created for the Daleks similarly took advantage of visual dissonance. Before the station turn-​on, Kenneth Adam expressed his wish that BBC2 look ‘new, and lively, and different’.92 Jazz 625 was the perfect vehicle for this ambition, presenting sophis­ ticated modernism in both its music and its visual presentation.

After Jazz 625 The success of Jazz 625 led Terry Henebery to be sought out for other jazz projects. During the two year run, he oversaw Commonwealth Jazz Club (1965), an international co-​production,  and after Jazz 625 went on to produce other jazz programming for the BBC, 111

112

Jazz as Visual Language

including:  Jazz Goes to College (1966–​1967), OB  recordings from student unions around the country; a two-​part British Jazz at the Philharmonic show (1967); Jazz at the Maltings (1968–​1969), OB  from the Aldeburgh Festival Concert Hall; Jazz Scene at the Ronnie Scott Club (1969–​1970); and Oscar Peterson In Concert (1974). Ronnie Scott recalled a hectic schedule during the filming of Jazz Scene: Terry Henebery, the producer of the programmes, asked me to act as compère for the series and this meant that on the final Sunday of the two-​week schedule, I had to do about forty-​five separate links to introduce all the differ­ ent segments of the sixteen-​week series, and I had to do it as though the whole thing was live. I  remember that just before the cameras started rolling, Terry Henebery said, ‘We’d better arrange a few changes of costume for you Ronnie as this is going to be spread over three or four months.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a suit for every day of the week. And this is it.’93

As the 1970s progressed, jazz took up less space in the BBC sched­ ule but the effect of Jazz 625 was felt in other ways. Specialist music programming placed increasing emphasis on the ability of visuals to interpret music, as in the experimental sequences of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Similarly, the trend for Quantel effects on shows like Top of the Pops during the late 1970s generated similar visual orna­ mentation to the distortion created in Jazz 625 by light falling on brass instruments. During the mid-​1980s, eight episodes of Jazz 625 were broadcast as repeats. The Radio Times listings gave death dates for musicians featured, a reminder of the time elapsed since the pro­ grammes’ recordings and a signal of their consequent repositioning as archive television. In 1989, the 25th anniversary of BBC2’s inception prompted a celebratory clipshow of Jazz 625, presented by young British saxo­ phonist Andy Sheppard. Beginning with newsreel footage that set 112

113

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

the programme in historical context, Sheppard’s links were recorded on sets that foregrounded the historicity of Jazz 625 (a recreation of a 1960s living room, complete with child actor in period cos­ tume) or imitated the retro visual style of 1980s jazz albums.94 The programme closed with Sheppard performing an unaccompanied solo and (rather confusingly) a clip from a 1970s BBC recording of Sonny Rollins. The recontextualisation of Jazz 625 continued with a sequence of nine repeats in 1990, each re-​edited and given new introductions by Neneh Cherry, Mick Hucknall, Courtney Pine, Ruby Turner, Slim Gaillard, Flora Purim and Sheppard. These introductory segments placed the presenters within fussy jazz club sets that contradicted the visual style of the episodes themselves and were evidently recorded quickly with autocued scripts. One sus­ pects that when Frith writes (in 2002) of the faint ridiculousness of the musical world created by Jazz 625, that he is thinking of these 1990s repeats. The excision of Race and Lyttelton from the repackaged repeats is but one disjunction created in the 1990s broadcasts of Jazz 625. With no original linking narration, song sequences from different episodes were amalgamated. The delicate balance between camera strategy and the sequenced live performance was therefore com­ promised. The finely judged creation of tone and sequence was discarded as Jazz 625 was reduced to a collection of clips, strip­ ping the series of its claim to modernity and making it seem ‘old-​ fashioned’. Certainly, these repeats of Jazz 625 gave the series a new audience and venerated the recordings as important moments in BBC2’s self-​told history. However, in jettisoning the framing elements of the programme’s format (Race/​Lyttelton, the stylish opening graphics), the repeats misrepresented and suppressed the programme’s modernist project. As archive television, Jazz 625 became paradoxically dehistoricised: a notable example being the 2009 documentary which uses a 1964 clip of Dave Brubeck’s quar­ tet to illustrate his career status in 1959.95 113

114

Jazz as Visual Language

For a 1990s audience, the most culturally prominent television depiction of jazz would undoubtedly have been The Fast Show’s Louis Balfour (played by John Thompson), a send-​up of hushed muso reverence whose convoluted to-​camera links were punctuated by the glib judgements, ‘Nice!’ and ‘Grrreat!’ As we have seen, it is to The Fast Show that Frith turns when characterising the ridicu­ lousness of specialist music programmes. The Fast Show is a cultural reference also cited by The Independent’s jazz reviewer Phil Johnson when lambasting BBC2’s six-​part Jazz 606 (1998). Shot within the 606 Club in Chelsea, performance footage was interspersed by readings by poet Lemn Sissay, which Johnson compared to The Fast Show’s ‘self-​regarding, in-​for-​a-​dig asides to-​camera’ while at the same time deploring the absence of Jazz 625’s ‘clear, unfussy vis­ ual style’.96 However, as John Thompson himself acknowledged, the Balfour skit was based not on Steve Race or Humphrey Lyttelton but rather a cross between The Old Grey Whistle Test’s Whispering Bob Harris and suave Bond actor Roger Moore.97 Thus, the presenter presence which The Fast Show parodied was actually typical of later developments in music television and is more representative of the presenters of the 1980s and 1990s repeats of Jazz 625 than of Race and Lyttelton themselves. More recently, Jazz 625 has been broadcast in re-​edited for­ mats by the specialist digital arts channel BBC Four. As Wall and Long have argued, built into the project of this new channel was an attempt to ‘rearticulate public service values within an expanding range of digital outlets’.98 Central to this ambition was the exploitation of the BBC archive, and a sequence of documen­ taries which mapped British music history onto British social history. The flagship three-​part Jazz Britannia (2005) ‘focuses on the mid-​1960s, a time constructed as the point at which jazz becomes imbued with distinctly British characteristics’.99 However, as Wall and Long note, this attempt to create a totalis­ ing narrative of national identity and works of genius mask ‘the 114

115

Jazz 625: Inform–​Educate–​Entertain

economic structures and professional processes through which these texts came into existence’.100 When watching Jazz 625 and writing this chapter, it has been my ambition to attend to these structures and processes. In thinking through these factors, I have remained mindful of the aborted listings for BBC2’s first night on air, and of the programmes abandoned while Jazz 625 was rescheduled. As I  have suggested above, the educational nature of BBC2’s Tuesday night program­ ming should remind us of the ways in which Jazz 625 enacted cer­ tain desirable public service ideals at a time of upheaval and change. Providing access to a music already specialised and historicised, Jazz 625 presented its music as culturally elevating, packaged in a sophisticated format that reflected the aims of the new BBC2 chan­ nel. I have argued that an understanding of televisual style is crucial to appreciating fully the programme’s modernist format. Through dynamic camerawork, creative editing, stylish design, informed commentary, audience presence and musical excellence, Jazz 625 developed expressive visual frameworks in dialogue with musical creation. Most interestingly, these strategies communicated not just a feeling for jazz but also an idea of what new broadcast technolo­ gies could achieve. It is striking that jazz has remained central to the BBC’s ongoing process of redefinition, present with the institution of BBC Four but also acting as a stimulus for research and develop­ ment in the digital age.101

115

116

117

Conclusion

At the beginning of this book, I asked a series of questions repro­ duced here: Where is the ‘jazz’ in ‘jazz film’ or ‘jazz television’? Is it the music that we hear? Is it our sight of musicians playing? Is it associated with certain kinds of lighting, shades of colour, camera movement, or even a particular behind-​the-​camera sensibility? As the previous chapters have shown, individual cases approach the challenge of screening jazz in ways which differ greatly in both technique and intent. A well-​meant but wildly inaccurate statement like Whitney Balliett’s appreciation of Jammin’ the Blues (‘the first honest, serious attempt to capture jazz in the movies’)1 comes from a mistake of emphasis: a desire to praise the music and a failure to consider the cinematic apparatus which mediates that music. In doing so, the collaborative and constructed nature of film and television as media is elided and reduced to a mere conduit through which jazz is delivered, at best unharmed. As I have argued, the assumption that screen media are transparent and reducible to a set of ideological oppositions is a naivety common to jazz writing, which commonly

117

118

Jazz as Visual Language

dodges searching ontological questions such as ‘what is film?’, ‘what is television?’ and, to invert Nicholas Gebhardt’s formulation, ‘what does jazz do to them?’2 The study of jazz and the media inevitably confronts jazz’s unwa­ vering belief in its own exceptionalism. The understanding that jazz stands apart from (and above) popular culture is one of its defining myths, shared by musicians, critics and the public. If my case studies have challenged this presumption, then they have served their pur­ pose. As we have seen, to depict jazz onscreen is to enter into a com­ plex negotiation between music and the materiality of its medium (film or television). Each of my case studies shares a preoccupation with its own form. Lye’s films disrupted the relationship of celluloid to the projector, using this ontological subversion as a metaphor for jazz, the music of cultural and racial mixing; Mili’s approached social commentary in a more opaque manner, with the manipulation of diegetic space and post-​production editing techniques visualising the artistry of jazz; and in its title, the BBC series Jazz 625 foregrounded the very lines that constituted the broadcast image, aligning its public service intent with the changing status of jazz in British culture. Like jazz, these examples look inwards and outwards  –​to the complex processes of their own creation and to the larger socio-​cultural and institutional processes which frame them. I do not claim my case studies to be exceptional in this respect. They are but three examples of a process I take to be common to every appearance of jazz on film or television:  the transformative encounter between music and media which reframes (and so rede­ fines) cultural understandings of the term ‘jazz’, where the nature of the transformative process is largely dictated by the economic, sociological and technological landscape pertaining to the histori­ cal moment of creation and consumption. In a discussion of BBC radio, Tim Wall makes a similar claim, drawing on Foucault’s sense of a discursive field:

118

119

Conclusion

In the account I present, jazz is an idea which different social agents –​including the BBC hierarchy, programme makers, jazz fans, musicians, and journalists  –​strug­ gle to define distinctively in a way which allows them to position themselves meaningfully in British society. Such definitions draw on repertoires of further ideas –​ including entertainment, excitement, relaxation, cul­ ture, genius, hierarchies of value, uplift, ethnicity and race, nationhood and modernism  –​to make jazz a meaningful concept, and a set of important economic and cultural institutions –​including live venues, record companies, radio corporations, dance bands, profes­ sional musicians, and the domestic home  –​in which these ideas play out.3

With this attention to wider concerns, Wall uses archival research to challenge existing historical narratives regarding the place and meaning of jazz within the BBC and British cultural life. Important to Wall’s account, and to my own case studies here, is the sense of ‘struggle’, as individuals and groups present competing definitions of what jazz is to the society that creates and consumes it. These definitions are not always welcome. Musicians, critics and fans are invested in preserving myths just as surely as mass cul­ ture generates mythic content; indeed, the anxieties exposed by the presentation of jazz on film and television may explain the discom­ fort that many feel as they watch. No-​one working in jazz today is likely to relish the unsettling world of Whiplash, or to enjoy the way it unpicks nagging concerns regarding race, masculinity and the music’s ongoing relevance. Yet Whiplash, and films like it, do not exist to provide comfort to the musician. My intention here is not to be combative but rather to remind jazz scholars and jazz prac­ titioners that film and television can be discursive media, echoing Tony Whyton’s call for greater interaction between cultural criti­ cism and music practice.4

119

120

Jazz as Visual Language

As disciplines that seek to understand the production, reception and meaning of collaborative art, the cognate fields of film, televi­ sion and media studies have developed methodologies which have much to offer the study of jazz. As a medium often glossed over as transparent and ‘in the moment’, television exhibits a particularly interesting formal relationship to improvisation, discussed in the preceding chapter. Given this, it is surprising that the scholarship on jazz and television is so scant, although there are signs that this is changing:  it is encouraging that the forthcoming edited collec­ tion Watching Jazz contains a number of focused case studies (e.g. Kristin McGee on US variety TV, Jenny Doctor on jazz and the BBC, Gebhardt on a televised Italian Miles Davis concert).5 Work of this kind performs a basic yet crucial function in jazz studies –​remind­ ing readers of medium specificity, distinct production practices and materiality. This has also been a concern of the present work and, indeed, by looking at my three focused case studies, we begin to see how broad terms such as ‘jazz film’ and ‘jazz television’ may be problematic. Classifications of this kind tend to suggest a parity of intent and effect, encouraging generalisation. I have argued in the Introduction that, if we turn away from criticising its conception of jazz, Whiplash may productively be read as a horror film. Similarly, I would propose that we need more scholarship of jazz on screen that carefully considers the place of extra-​musical elements, espe­ cially in relation to film or television aesthetics. One recent example is Martha Shearer’s study of New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, US, 1977) and cultural geography, which pro­ vides a sophisticated account of ‘the ways in which “jazz musicals” and their soundtracks were implicated in urban history in terms of production (shooting in studios or on location) and representation (the relationship between cities and their cinematic musical accom­ paniment)’.6 Shearer provides an exemplary interdisciplinary model, combining archival research and film theory with a finely-​tuned historical reading of New York’s post-​war development and decline. 120

121

Conclusion

Scholarship of this kind advances the project of the New Jazz Studies through its cross-​disciplinary nature but is also attuned to the dis­ tinct collaborative production procedures of film-​, television-​and jazz-​making. Most importantly, writers like Shearer approach jazz as a cultural construct, aggregating meaning which in turn enriches the music. In this book, my aim has been to establish differing degrees of empirical foundation (biography, production information, his­ torical context) that underpin and locate my cultural readings and interpretations of the mediating process of film and television on jazz. In doing so, I  emphasised the collaborative and contextual forces which shaped the production and reception of these works. In Chapter One, I have expanded prevalent understandings of Len Lye’s direct film-​making that position him as exceptional or aber­ rant so that the institutional role of the GPO is clearer. By focusing on the way that recorded jazz interacts with Lye’s unusual artistic practice, I locate the films in relation to contemporary theories of mass culture and the nation state. My textual analysis of A Colour Box addresses its use of advertising technique (an aspect of the film often suppressed or belittled), in an attempt to liberate Lye from the restrictive high art discourse which now surrounds his films. Chapter Two takes a film beloved in jazz circles, Jammin’ the Blues, and interrogates the reasons for its undoubted success and value. By contrasting Gjon Mili’s photographic work with the creation of a studio film, the construction of iconography is revealed. Drawing upon modern dance crazes, developments in photographic tech­ nology and the historical project of the JATP concerts, Jammin’ the Blues is shown to reflect upon the currency of jazz in wartime America. I argued that the film’s distinctive visual style and the cir­ cumstances of Hollywood production make it impossible for us to see the film as merely a document of jazz heroes. A similar inter­ est in expressive visual style is evident in Chapter Three’s account of Jazz 625 but here the archival nature of my research permits 121

122

Jazz as Visual Language

an enquiry into the place of the programme within a changing BBC. With reference to camera scripts and studio diagrams, the negotiations between musicians and production crew are better understood, leading to insights into the televisual aesthetic of Jazz 625. The analysis of documents held at the BBC Written Archive and magazines that publicised or discussed the programme (Radio Times, Melody Maker, specialist periodicals such as Jazz Journal) contributes to a richer conception of the meaning of jazz to the new BBC2 channel. Most importantly, I have demonstrated how the programme’s modernity, and its conception of jazz, have been subtly altered to suit changing priorities in the BBC’s development and institutional history. The methodologies employed in this book constitute an attempt to push beyond the largely theoretical New Jazz Studies, which confidently asserted that varied disciplines of the academic humanities could enrich our understanding of jazz’s contribu­ tion to culture. Twenty years later, Krin Gabbard’s Jammin’ at the Margins remains the definitive film studies text on jazz, unique for its theoretical insight, its long form and its wide-​ranging scope (from The Jazz Singer [1927] to Short Cuts (Robert Altman, Spelling Pictures International,  1993]). Evidently my work here has been indebted to New Jazz Studies writers like Gabbard, Arthur Knight and David Ake, while my focus on pre-​production and aesthet­ ics shares elements with the approach in David Butler’s Jazz Noir.7 However, just as influential has been the work of Richard Dyer (film studies), John Ellis (television studies), Tim Wall (radio and popular music studies) and Michele Hilmes (media and cultural studies). As Whyton has observed, a problem facing the study of jazz has been the division between theory and practice, where performance-​based pedagogy maintains distance from the modes of dialogical enquiry common to the humanities.8 As practice-​ based research becomes increasingly sophisticated in the fields

122

123

Conclusion

of media and cultural studies, it seems imperative that jazz open itself up to these worlds of possibility.

Dissonance and coherence In describing the possibility of a ‘dissonant image’ in my Introduction, I  made reference to Ajay Heble’s description of jazz dissonance, which I repeat in the following. […] landing on the wrong note […] can be a politically and culturally salient act for oppressed groups seeking alternative models of knowledge production and iden­ tity formation […] improvisation teaches us by exam­ ple that identity is a dialogic construction (rather than something deep within us), that the self is always a subject-​in-​process.9

I have argued that jazz’s relationship to its framing media is simi­ larly a process of dialogic construction, so that meaning and tone are constantly changing in the moment of reception. Thus, one can­ not describe a common form that ‘the dissonant image’ takes. One cannot provide a neo-​formalist account of such a moment, since it is inherently interpretative. ‘The dissonant image’ is best seen as a provocation, a formulation that allows us to examine moments of jazz in film and television from the perspective not just of musician but also of production crew and audience. It is the framed image, the visual composition which, in itself, effects a transformation of what ‘jazz’ means by imagining a diegetic world for it. In Western popular culture, jazz is often a mystery. Films, televi­ sion programmes and novels have codified the music as sensuous and profound, its pursuit leading to exaltation or despair. Others have presented the music as obscure, raucous or debased. As Ingrid Monson notes, it is these imposed associations which often provoke

123

124

Jazz as Visual Language

resentment, ‘the voyeuristic quality of the outside gaze that empha­ sises the social transgressions of musicians (especially sexual and drug-​related ones) at the expense of their broader and frequently more mundane humanity’.10 In Bart Spicer’s jazz detective novel Blues for the Prince (1950), the hard-​boiled narrator Carney Wilde, a white American male, observes, Bop can be fun, I’m told. It’s an adventure in dissonance that seems meaningless to me. And I feel a lot better when I see that old Satchmo agrees with me. Bop is a limited language, with practically no vocabulary. It does nicely as long as you are satisfied with the major generalities. As long as you are convinced hunger has no subdivisions, bop has its meaning. Deeper, you need jazz.11

In Spicer’s book, alongside the murder which Wilde attempts to solve sits the mystery of jazz. As a music critic, Carney Wilde gets no fur­ ther than a Joe Blow opinion but his metaphor of language is useful in highlighting the way that prose attempts to capture what Joachim E. Berendt has termed the music’s ‘expressive and eruptive’ qualities.12 For Wilde, it is ‘vocabulary’ that permits social commentary but the detective, locked into a comforting nostalgia for the music of his youth, never quite understands how the new music (bop) might be forming a new language of its own, from which he is excluded. Similarly, in 1956, André Hodeir lamented the poverty of jazz’s harmonic language, arguing that it ‘seems largely borrowed, both directly, from popular American music, and indirectly, from the influence of European art on this music.’13 Blinkered by his Euro-​ centric thesis, Hodeir judged that ‘jazz musicians have no spe­ cial reason for taking pride in an harmonic language that, besides being easily acquired, does not really belong to them but rather to a “light harmony” that North America borrowed from decadent Debussyism.’14 Yet Monson’s interviews with jazz musicians have demonstrated, beyond questions of musicology, a rich and complex engagement with language in jazz practice. Monson codifies these 124

125

Conclusion

interactions in three categories: ‘jazz as a musical language, improv­ isation as musical conversation, and good improvisation as talking or “saying something.”’15 Monson’s interview subjects construct the jazz ensemble as ‘a musical framework for participation’ and (recall­ ing Heble) improvisation as ‘a fundamentally social, conversational and dialogic way to organise musical performance’.16 Crucially, Monson sees what Hodeir did not: that musical repetition and quo­ tation manifest a process of signifying, ironically reconstituting the tropes of the past, a relational and discursive mode that Monson terms ‘intermusicality’.17 Similar structures of reference have been used to describe inter­ textuality in film. One example of this strategy is provided by V. F. Perkins: Without a body of conventions, developed and learned as a shared system, the film-​maker could not exploit the flexibility of film to achieve freedom of manoeuvre in time and space. If he did so, we would be unable to reas­ semble the fragmented images and make them cohere as a portrait of the world.18

Perkins’ interest in patterns of imagery and mise-​en-​scène have been hugely influential to the analysis of film style. His approach looks for coherence in film narrative, where the job of the director is ‘to organise the world to the point where it becomes most meaning­ ful but to resist ordering it out of all resemblance to the real world which it attempts to evoke’.19 With some adjustment, and allowance for a collaborative rather than director-​based model, it will be seen immediately that there are advantages to such an approach (attend­ ing to balance and construction) in the study of jazz and the media. A totalising approach to an ever-​changing set of meanings attached to the term ‘jazz’ and its visualisation may be impossible and unde­ sirable; this is why the term ‘dissonant image’ aims to identify the process rather than its effects. The effects of visual dissonance must 125

126

Jazz as Visual Language

be unpicked with the tools of textual analysis and contextualised with archival and historical research. There is, of course, a seeming contradiction between the visual and thematic coherence which Perkins desires and the often messy and unruly images of jazz in film and television. The deliberate compositions that Perkins analyses in the films of Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger cannot be compared to television footage recorded ‘live’ as musicians played, not least because these images may be put together in very different ways (respectively, by an editor and a vision mixer). However, it would be wrong to accuse the disso­ nant moments identified in previous chapters of being incoherent. Rather, to borrow from Robin Wood, ‘the fragmentation –​the con­ sciously motivated incoherence –​becomes a structuring principle, resulting in works that reveal themselves as perfectly coherent once one has mastered their rules’.20 The necessity of ‘mastering the rules’ might be said to be the structuring precept of this book, of learning to open ourselves to the ways that a film or television episode pre­ sents itself to us. Fundamental to the effect of Len Lye’s direct films was his mas­ tery of advertising technique. To keep an audience alert and recep­ tive, Lye used popular current music and played with words and numbers to create arresting spectacle. However, as I  have argued, the formal qualities of A Colour Box resist reductive categorisation as either a piece of advertising or a piece of art. The film is both of these things but materially, it is also a piece of film, reproduced; Lye’s practice of marking and painting directly onto celluloid explic­ itly acknowledging the films’ place within the culture industry. As a subject-​in-​process, aging with each projection, A Colour Box relies upon its visual dissonance to offset the coherent temporality pro­ vided by the use of ‘La Belle Creole’ on the soundtrack. The ‘wrong notes’ that A Colour Box strikes, through the combination of sound and image tracks, move the film through a sequence of modes of address:  to the audience as film viewer, as sensual participant, as 126

127

Conclusion

reader and as consumer. The experience of movement through these modes is, for an audience, an opportunity to ‘master the rules’, rules which this three-​minute film keeps changing. As I  have shown, while his films did not superficially resemble other GPO output, Lye’s work was founded on an institutionally shared sense of social responsibility. In keeping with Heble’s definition of dissonance in jazz, the dissonant images of A Colour Box serve an ideological pur­ pose. They are an immigrant’s vision of an unsettled Britain, rest­ lessly vibrating, in which jazz articulates the bright colours of new cultural influence. While Lye was an avowed jazz fan, Gjon Mili was not. However, his training as an observer of American life and leisure led him to jazz as a subject equivalent to sport and dance. Mili’s photographs and films position the performing jazz musician as spectacle, whose movement, through artful lighting and editing, can be analysed and dissected. The documentary elements of Jammin’ the Blues, however, are complicated by the temporal distance between music and image. Mili does not mask this artifice, structuring his film around spa­ tial dissonance manifested through a constantly changing abstract visual field and post-​production effects. While Mili’s photographic practice is usually characterised as closed off from the world, I have argued that Jammin’ the Blues exists in a continuum with other Hollywood jazz shorts, films which mobilised ideas of black artistry, economic deprivation and fantasies of popular success. A common trope of the soundie was the retreat into a dream space which never­ theless provided commentary upon the role of jazz musicians in the wider society, and I have suggested that Jammin’ the Blues provides an elliptical version of this trope. The musicians begin as spectral figures but the musical progress, from slow blues to fast jive, accom­ panies a dramatisation of increased interaction and sociability, and of a black culture newly visible in a changing America. I have tried to show that the actuality of Jazz 625, rather than its memory, provides a convincing rejoinder to Simon Frith’s claim 127

128

Jazz as Visual Language

that ‘the visuals that television could most usefully bring to music were not about reading music but displaying it’.21 Archival research is useful up to a point in demonstrating to us the interpretive intent of the programme makers and the larger public service framing of jazz. It also tells us that, long before filming, Henebery and his direc­ tors were ‘reading’ jazz through their selection and sequencing of musicians and their construction of camera scripts. In studio and on location, crisp high-​definition images were achieved with mobile cameras using 35mm film, broadcast on the new 625-​line frequency. Even in outside broadcasts from locations such as The Marquee Club, the available range of focal depth and image scale permit­ ted an expressive visual field, sometimes bordering on the abstract. These dissonant images associated the music with other modernist art forms seen on BBC2 (e.g. Theatre 625 and Cinema 625) but also offered textures appropriate to particular bands, soloists and songs. It is only with the reformatting of Jazz 625 as archive television that it is reduced to the ‘display’ described by Frith. Of course, the story of jazz in film and television does not end in the 1960s; indeed, there is currently a real resurgence of inter­ est in jazz on the screen. In 2013, the BBC broadcast Stephen Poliakoff ’s six-​part prestige drama Dancing on the Edge, a story of ‘homegrown black jazz musicians’ that drew upon the biographies of Duke Ellington and Leslie Thompson.22 In 2014, a documen­ tary charting the last years of Clark Terry’s life, Keep On Keepin’ On (Alan Hicks, Absolute Clay Productions), was released to wide­ spread critical acclaim. The year 2015 saw two Hollywood films that prominently featured jazz drumming, Whiplash and Birdman (Alejandro Iñárritu, Fox Searchlight, 2014), win trophies at the Academy Awards –​and 2016 will bring the release of new biopics of Miles Davis and Chet Baker, as well as a televisual adaptation of the Broadway hit Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill on HBO, filmed before a live audience in New Orleans.23 In February 2016, the Montreux Jazz Digital Project began online streaming the fruits 128

129

Conclusion

of a six-​year preservation project which had digitised 5000 hours of video recorded over decades at the festival.24 In New York, mean­ while, the jazz club Smalls stepped up its web streaming service and ‘announced a new initiative to monetise its video and audio archives, creating an online subscription service database with a revenue-​sharing apparatus for musicians’.25 I  began this book by stating that jazz was never just a music but rather that it was also a way of seeing the world. However, as the world changes, so too does the wider cultural meaning of this music. Evidently jazz remains a vital metaphor for artistic creation and one to which film and tel­ evision repeatedly return. Why that continues to happen, and how, is a question for future scholarship.

129

130

131

Notes Introduction 1 Wollen, Peter, Raiding the Icebox:  Reflections on Twentieth-​Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 109–​119. 2 Appel Jr., Alfred, Jazz Modernism: from Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 70. 3 Pells, Richard, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalisation of American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 138. 4 Townsend, Peter, Jazz in American Culture (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 166. 5 Mawer, Deborah, French Music and Jazz in Conversation:  from Debussy to Brubeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 2. 6 Townsend, Jazz in American Culture, p. 182. 7 Dyer, Richard, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 6. 8 Gebhardt, Nicholas, ‘On jazz, memory and history: a response to Alyn Shipton’, Jazz Research Journal 4:1 (2010), p.12. 9 Solis, Gabriel, Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 54. 10 Solis, Monk’s Music, p. 53. 11 Pillai, Nicolas, ‘Filming Improvisation: jazz criticism’s neglect of film style’, The Soundtrack 6: 1&2 (2014), p. 11. 12 Here I am alluding to the fictional jazz TV presenter Louis Balfour (played by John Thomson), whose painfully hip introductions to musical acts were part of the BBC sketch comedy The Fast Show (US title: Brilliant), tx. 24 September 1994–​29 December 1997. 13 Gabbard, Krin, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 1. 14 Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins, p. 6. 15 Gray, Herman S., Cultural Moves:  African Americans and the Politics of Rep­ resentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 187. 16 See Williams, Richard, ‘The trouble with Whiplash’, The Blue Moment, 19 January 2015. Available at http://​thebluemoment.com/​2015/​01/​19/​the-​trouble-​ with-​whiplash/​ (accessed 10 March 2015); O’Connell, Sean J., ‘Drummer Peter

131

132

Notes to pages 6–16 Erskine on jazz Flick Whiplash’, KCET.org, 24 February 2015. Available at http://​ www.kcet.org/​arts/​artbound/​counties/​los-​angeles/​drummer-​peter-​erskine-​on-​ whiplash-​film.html (accessed 10 March 2015); Brody, Richard, ‘Getting jazz right in the movies’, The New Yorker, 13 October 2014. Available at http://​www. newyorker.com/​culture/​richard-​brody/​whiplash-​getting-​jazz-​right-​movies (accessed 10 March 2015); Iverson, Ethan, ‘The Drum Thing’, Do The Math, 24 February 2015. Available at http://​dothemath.typepad.com/​dtm/​the-​drum-​ thing.html (accessed 10 March 2015). 17 Macdonald, Kevin, Emeric Pressburger:  The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 296–​297. 18 Pillai, ‘Filming improvisation’, pp. 8–​14. 19 Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16: 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–​18. 20 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 6. 21 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 7. 22 Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins, p. 83. 23 Heble, Ajay, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, dissonance and critical practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 20. 24 Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note, p. 95. 25 Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘More Thoughts on Structure’ in Leyda, Jay (ed.), Film Essays and a Lecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 93. 26 Garber, Frederick, ‘Fabulating Jazz’, in Gabbard, Krin (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 79. 27 Garber, ‘Fabulating Jazz’, pp. 100–​101. 28 See Pillai, ‘Filming improvisation’, pp. 14–​18 for a challenge to the production myths regarding ’Round Midnight. 29 Garber, ‘Fabulating Jazz’, pp. 78–​79, 84–​94. 30 Dinerstein, Joel, Swinging the Machine:  Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), p. 4. 31 Bindas, Kenneth J., Swing, That Modern Sound (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 32–​33. 32 Pells, Modernist America, p. x. 33 Perkins, V. F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 175. 34 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 66. 35 Nowell-​Smith, Geoffrey, ‘How films mean, or from aesthetics to semiotics and half-​way back again’, in Gledhill, Christine and Williams, Linda (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 16. 36 Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note, p. 25. See also Heble, Ajay, ‘The poetics of jazz: from symbolic to semiotic’, Textual Practice 2: 1 (1988), pp. 51–​68.

132

133

Notes to pages 18–24 37 Wall, Tim and Long, Paul, ‘Sight and Sound in Concert? The Interrelationship between Music and Television,’ in Bennett, Andy and Waksman, Steve (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (Los Angeles: SAGE Reference, 2015), p. 465. 38 Herridge, Robert quoted in Anon., ‘Jazz Featured Tomorrow in “Lively Arts” TV Series’, The Oxnard Press-​Courier (7 December 1957), p. 3. 39 Ibid. 40 Balliett, Whitney, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954–​2000 (London: Granta, 2001), pp. 638–​639; Hentoff, Nat, The Jazz Life (London: Panther, 1964), pp. 149–​150. 41 Balliett, Collected Works, p. 638. 42 Hentoff, Nat, ‘Huckleberry Dracula, Jazz, and Public TV’, The Village Voice (31 July 1978), p. 30. 43 Balliett, Collected Works, p. 638; Hentoff, ‘Huckleberry Dracula’, p. 30. 44 Balliett, Collected Works, p. 639. 45 Townsend, Jazz in American Culture, p. 165. 46 Hentoff, The Jazz Life, p. 149. 47 Larrabee, Eric quoted in Hentoff, The Jazz Life, p. 150. 48 Ibid. 49 Lyttelton, Humphrey, It Just Occurred to Me… (London: Robson Books, 2006), p. 147. 50 Hilton, Milt, Berger, David G., and Maxson, Holly, Over Time:  The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton (Maldon: Pomegranate Art Books, 1991), p. 10. 51 Balázs, Béla, ‘The Face of Man’ in Mast, Gerald and Cohen, Marshall (eds), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 292. 52 Balázs: ‘The Face of Man’, p. 292. 53 Tromans, Steve, ‘Myth, Progress, and Motion in Jazz Practice with the Standard Repertoire’, Epistrophy 1 (2015). Available at http://​www.epistrophy. fr/​myth-​progress-​and-​motion-​in-​jazz.html?lang=fr (accessed 27 October 2015). 54 Townsend, Jazz in American Culture, p. 167.

1  Len Lye: The Sensual World 1 Patchett, Stan, ‘Handpainted Swing’, Rhythm (February 1939), p. 67. 2 Parsonage, Catherine, ‘Fascination and Fear: Responses to Early Jazz in Britain’ in Wynn, Neil A. (ed.), Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 96–​97. 3 The potential absurdity of Latin rhythms invigorating drab British lives is nicely parodied at the beginning of the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949), as residents of Miramount Place listen to a radio broadcast of ‘Les Norman and his Bethnal Green Bambinos’.

133

134

Notes to pages 24–30 4 Vergo, Peter, ‘Music and abstract painting: Kandinsky, Goethe and Schoenberg’ in Compton, Michael (ed.) Towards a New Art:  essays on the background to abstract art 1910–​20 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1980), p. 42. 5 Higson, Andrew, ‘“Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to the Film”: The docu­ mentary realist tradition’ in Barr, Charles (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1986), pp. 78–​79. 6 Moore, Hilary, Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 11. 7 Overy, Richard, The Morbid Age:  Britain Between the Wars (London:  Allen Lane, 2009), p. 47. 8 Witkin, Robert W., ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz?’, Sociological Theory 18:  1 (2000), p. 153. 9 Riding, Laura, Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films (Bristol:  The Seizin Press, 1938), p. 26. 10 Riding, Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films, p. 31. 11 Aitken, Ian, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’ in Winston, Brian (ed.), The Documentary Film Book (London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 129. 12 Aitken, Ian, Film & Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 106–110. 13 Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 84. 14 Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary, pp. 54, 82. 15 Jackson, Kevin, Humphrey Jennings (London: Pan Macmillan, 2004), p. 153. 16 Horrocks, Roger, Len Lye: A Biography (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), p. 47. 17 Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 53. 18 Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 69. 19 Kanty Cooper journal, 12 January 1927 quoted in Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 82. 20 Sexton, James, ‘Tusalava (1929)’, BFI Screenonline. Available at http://​www. screenonline.org.uk/​film/​id/​442453/​ (accessed 18 February 2015). 21 Robinson, Camille, Light and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Jack Ellitt (Unpublished thesis, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, 2010), pp. 10–​11. 22 Robinson, Light and Rhythm, p. 21. 23 Margaret Thompson 1988, quoted in Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 70. 24 Lye, Len, Letter to John Grierson (25 July 1935), Govett-​Brewster Len Lye Collection. There is some ambiguity over the exact circumstances of commis­ sion. A text introduction to a National Film and Television Archive VHS release of A Colour Box suggests that an original version of the film was modified at

134

135

Notes to pages 30–34 Grierson’s behest in order to advertise the postal service. An interview with Basil Wright in the 1970s offers a similar chronology (see Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary, p. 51). However, the letter quoted seems to contra­ dict, or at least complicate, that version of events. 25 Leslie, Esther, Hollywood Flatlands:  Animation, critical theory and the avant-​ garde (London: Verso, 2002), p. 47. 26 Lye, Len, Letter to John Grierson (25 July 1935), Govett-​Brewster Len Lye Collection. 27 Robinson, Light and Rhythm, p. 33. 28 Claydon, E. Anna, ‘National Identity, the GPO Film Unit and their Music’ in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 179–​187. 29 Grierson, John, ‘The GPO Gets Sound’, Cinema Quarterly 2 (1934), quoted in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 117. 30 Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 137. 31 The song was one B-​side of twelve Barreto records released in 1934. A: Serenata Cubana (rumba) /​B: La Belle Creole (biguine), Decca F.3454. Listed in Anon., Decca Brunswick and Decca Polydor Records Complete Catalogue Up To and Including March 1934 (London: The Decca Record Company, 1934), p. 7. 32 Rico, Don, ‘The Latin Trend in Popular Music’, Rhythm (December 1934), p. 66. 33 Castro, Fernando, ‘The Progress of Cuban Music’, Rhythm (March 1934), p. 41. 34 Jackson, Edgar, ‘Dance and Popular Rhythmic’, The Gramophone 12: 137 (October 1934), p. 189. 35 Patchett, ‘Handpainted Swing’, p. 70. 36 Anon., ‘Hot Rhythm Records’, Melody Maker (1 April 1933), p. 246; Hammond, John, ‘More Places with Spike’, Melody Maker (1 April 1933), p. 271. 37 Meadows, T. S., ‘Definition Wanted’, Melody Maker (1 April 1933), p. 295. 38 Gabbard, Krin, Jammin’ at the Margins:  Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 8. 39 See Patchett, ‘Handpainted Swing’, pp.  66–​72 and Riding, Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films, pp. 25–​28. For a recent analysis of Lye’s visual exper­ imentation in relation to jazz, see Mollaghan, Aimee, The Visual Music Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 107–​111. 40 Witkin, ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz?’, pp. 145–​146. 41 Witkin, ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz?’, p. 165. 42 Smythe, Luke, ‘Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema’, October 144 (Spring 2013), p. 78. 43 Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 137. 44 Smythe, ‘Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema’, p. 77. 45 Smythe, “Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema’, p. 74.

135

136

Notes to pages 34–40 46 Morphy, Howard, ‘Moving the body painting into the art gallery  –​knowing about and appreciating works of Aboriginal art’, Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 2011), p. 9. 47 Cann, Tyler, ‘Surreal Sight Seer? Len Lye –​Mind, Self and Time’ in Cann, Tyler and Curnow, Wystan (eds), Len Lye (New Plymouth:  Govett-​Brewster Art Gallery/​Len Lye Foundation, 2009), p. 77. 48 Parsonage, Catherine, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–​1935 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 40. 49 Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–​1935, p. 40. 50 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 37 51 Watney, Simon, The Art of Duncan Grant (London:  John Murray, 1999), pp. 39, 41. 52 Krauss, Rosalind E., The Originality of the Avant-​Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 158, 168. 53 Wollen, Peter, ‘An Alphabet of Cinema’, New Left Review 12 (November–​ December 2001), p. 131. 54 Smythe, Luke, ‘Image and Music in the Direct Films of Len Lye’, The Journal of New Zealand Art History 26 (2006), pp. 4–​5. 55 Smythe, ‘Image and Music in the Direct Films of Len Lye’, p.  8. Emphasis in original. 56 Aitken, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’, p. 129. 57 Witkin, ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz?”, p. 151. 58 Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 154. 59 Smythe, ‘Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema’, p. 82. 60 Smythe, ‘Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema’, p. 81. 61 Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 55. 62 Ibid. 63 Wilkinson, Helen, ‘“The New Heraldry”:  Stock Photography, Visual Literacy, and Advertising in 1930s Britain’, Journal of Design History 10:  1 (1997), pp. 23–​38. 64 Wilkinson, ‘The New Heraldry’, p. 27. 65 Aitken, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’, p. 133. 66 Horrocks, Roger, Len Lye Rhythms DVD booklet (Paris: Re:voir Video Editions, 2009), p. 20. 67 Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 114. 68 Armstrong, Tim, ‘Len Lye and Laura Riding in the 1930s: The Impossibility of Film and Literature’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37: 2 (2001), p. 183. 69 Hewitt, John, ‘The “Nature” and “Art” of Shell Advertising in the Early 1930s’, Journal of Design History 5: 2 (1992), p. 124. 70 Hewitt, ‘The “Nature” and “Art” of Shell Advertising in the Early 1930s’, p. 135. 71 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008), p. 129.

136

137

Notes to pages 40–45 72 Wells, Paul, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 45. 73 O’Rawe, Desmond, ‘(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29: 1 (2012), p. 70. 74 Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 124. 75 Mansell, James G., ‘Rhythm, Modernity and the Politics of Sound’ in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 167. 76 Mansell, ‘Rhythm, Modernity and the Politics of Sound’, p. 164. 77 Claydon, E.  Anna, ‘National Identity, the GPO Film Unit and their Music’, p. 183. 78 Wall, Tim, ‘Duke Ellington, the meaning of jazz and the BBC in the 1930s’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. 79 Anon., ‘What The Other Listener Thinks’, Radio Times (30 June 1933), p. 813. 80 Ricketts, C. L., ‘Reflections on the Duke’s Visit: Some of the Things We Should Have Learned’, Melody Maker (29 July 1933), p. 17. 81 Higson, ‘Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to the Film’, p.  77. Emphasis in original. 82 Gardiner, Juliet, The Thirties, An Intimate History (London: Harper Press, 2010), pp. 59–​61. 83 Gardiner, The Thirties, p. 191. 84 Chanan, Michael, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects On Music (New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 16–​17. 85 Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, p. 100. 86 Sheppard, Richard, Modernism–​Dada–​Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000) p. 127. 87 Fara, Patricia, ‘A microscopic reality tale’, Nature 459 (June 2009), pp. 642–​644. 88 Fara, ‘A microscopic reality tale’, p. 642. Emphasis in original. 89 Smythe, ‘Image and Music in the Direct Films of Len Lye’, p. 5. 90 Riding, Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films, p. 28. 91 Abra, Allison, ‘Doing The Lambeth Walk:  Novelty Dances and the British Nation’, Twentieth Century British History 20: 3 (2009), p. 349. 92 Abra, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, p. 349. 93 Abra, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, p. 356. 94 In 1942, Charles A.  Ridley of the Ministry of Information would similarly deploy ‘The Lambeth Walk’ to satirise the Nazis in the short film Schichlegruber Doing The Lambeth Walk, Assisted by the Gestapo Hep-​Cats (Movietone News). 95 Horrocks, Roger, ‘Jack Ellitt: the Early Years’, Cantrills Film Notes 93–​100 (1999–​ 2000), p. 25 96 Cross, Anthony, ‘The Music of Ernst Hermann Meyer’, The Musical Times 121: 1654 (December 1980), p. 779.

137

138

Notes to pages 46–57 97 Horrocks, Roger, ‘Swinging the Lambeth Walk: The Hands of the Filmmaker’ in Cann, Tyler and Curnow, Wystan (eds), Len Lye (New Plymouth: Govett-​ Brewster Art Gallery/​Len Lye Foundation, 2009), p. 25. 98 Horrocks, ‘Swinging the Lambeth Walk:  The Hands of the Filmmaker’, pp. 21, 25. 99 Abra, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, p. 347. 100 Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde’, Wide Angle 8: 3/​4 (1986), p. 66. 101 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction’, p. 68. 102 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction’, p. 66. 103 Laver, Mark, Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing and Meaning (Oxford: Routledge, 2015). 104 Brooke, Michael, ‘Love on the Wing (1938)’, BFI Screenonline. Available at http://​www.screenonline.org.uk/​film/​id/​528634/​ (accessed 2 March 2015). 105 Kollewe, Julia and Perraudin, Frances, ‘Royal Mail sell-​off undervalued firm by £180m, report finds’, The Guardian. Available at http://​www.theguardian. com/​business/​2014/​dec/​18/​royal-​mail-​sell-​off-​undervalued-​firm-​180-​million (accessed 2 March 2015).

2  Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost 1 Balliett, Whitney, Collected Works:  A  Journal of Jazz 1954–​2000 (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 590. 2 Balliett, Collected Works, p. 137. 3 Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 28. 4 Perez, The Material Ghost, p.28. 5 Knight, Arthur, ‘Jammin’ the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944’ in Gabbard, Krin (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 32. 6 Ibid. 7 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, pp. 30, 32. 8 Wall, Tim, ‘Duke Ellington, Radio Remotes, and the Mediation of Big City Nightlife, 1927 to 1933’, Jazz Perspectives 6: 1–​2, p. 211. 9 See Mili, Gjon, ‘Visibility of Signal Through Fog’, Journal of the Optical Society of America 25: 8 (1935), pp. 237–​240 and Mili, Gjon, ‘Light Control in Photography’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 30: 4 (1938), pp. 388–​399. 10 Mili, Gjon, Photographs and Recollections (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980), p. 18. 11 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 20. 12 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 18.

138

139

Notes to pages 57–64 13 Morris, John G., Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 19–​20. 14 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 22. 15 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 28. 16 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 24. My italics. 17 For an extended reading of Mili’s jazz photography, and an account of LIFE’s coverage of Jammin’ the Blues, see Cawthra, Benjamin, Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 15–​69. 18 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 56. 19 Mili, Gjon, ‘The Lindy Hop’ LIFE (23 August 1943), pp. 95–​103. 20 Ibid. 21 Cawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White, p. 19. 22 Robertson, Keith H., Letter to LIFE (13 September 1943), p. 4. 23 Corey, Orlin R., Letter to LIFE (13 September 1943), p. 4. 24 Mili, Gjon, ‘Jam Session’ LIFE (11 October 1943), p. 119. 25 See Williams, Katherine, ‘Duke Ellington’s Newport Up! Liveness, Artifacts, and the Seductive Menace of Jazz Revisited’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions:  History, Theory, Practice (New  York:  Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. 26 Mili, Photographs and Recollections, p. 168. 27 Morris, Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism, p. 21. 28 Mili, ‘Jam Session’, p. 117. 29 Graves, Ralph, ‘Foreword’ in LIFE: The Second Decade 1946–​1955 (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 1984), p. 9. 30 Tanner, Lee, The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz Photography (New York: Abrams, 2006), p. 8. 31 Hentoff, Nat, The Jazz Life (London: Panther, 1964), p. 6. 32 Hentoff, The Jazz Life, pp. 149–​150. 33 Mili, ‘Jam Session’, p. 119. 34 Lippincott, Bruce, ‘Aspects of the Jam Session’, in Gleason, Ralph J. (ed.), Jam Session (London: The Jazz Book Club/​Peter Davies, 1961), p. 170. 35 Townsend, Peter, Jazz in American Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2000), p. 46. 36 Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: the meaning of style (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 47. 37 Lott, Eric, ‘Double V, Double-​Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style’, in O’Meally, R. G. (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 460. 38 Townsend, Jazz in American Culture, p. 58. 39 For a classic account of the jam session as ‘apprenticeship’, see Ellison, Ralph, Shadow and Act (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), pp. 208–​209.

139

140

Notes to pages 64–79 40 Wall, Tim, Studying Popular Music Culture (London: Arnold, 2003), p. 34. 41 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 30. 42 Balliett, Collected Works, p. 137. 43 Tobias, James, Sync: Stylistics of Heiroglyphic Time (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), p. 24. 44 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 34. 45 Ibid. 46 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, pp. 34–​35. 47 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 34. 48 Gabbard, Krin, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 165. 49 Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins, p. 173. 50 Hershorn, Tad, Norman Granz: The Man who used Jazz for Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011), p. 55. 51 Hershorn, Norman Granz, pp. 61–​62. 52 Hershorn, Norman Granz, p. 66. 53 Norman Granz, interview by John McDonough 12 January 1980 quoted in Hershorn, Norman Granz, p. 67. 54 A production error in Arthur Knight’s chapter ‘The Sight of Jazz’ mistakenly rotates two images of Bryant’s reflection so that she is seen right way up. Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 44. 55 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, pp. 41–​42. 56 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 42. 57 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 47. 58 Ake, David, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 83. 59 Malone, Jacqui, ‘Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands’ in O’Meally, R. G. (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 281, 287. 60 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 39. 61 Knight, ‘The Sight of Jazz’, p. 42. 62 Garber, Frederick, ‘Fabulating Jazz’ in Gabbard, Krin (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 79. 63 Garber, ‘Fabulating Jazz’, p. 77. See Frith, Simon, ‘Look! Hear! The uneasy rela­ tionship of music and television’, Popular Music 21: 3 (October 2002), pp. 277–​ 290 for a similar argument made in relation to jazz, rock and the television image. 64 Hershorn, Norman Granz, p. 153. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 This alternate take was used in a documentary about Parker as emblematic of the strictures placed on him as an artist. The Charlie Parker Story, BBC Four tx. 20 January 2006.

140

141

Notes to pages 80–87 68 Muyal, Jacques, Norman Granz Presents Improvisation DVD booklet (Laser Swing Productions, 2007), p. 5.

3  Jazz 625: Inform–Educate–Entertain 1 For instance, it is difficult to determine just how many episodes escaped the notorious wiping of content from the BBC archives. Of 83 recorded, only seven are listed on the BFI database. It appears that the BBC may hold up to 58 episodes in their archive, but it is unclear if these are complete or fragments. 2 Wall, Tim and Long, Paul, ‘Jazz Britannia: mediating the story of British jazz on television’, Jazz Research Journal 3: 2 (2009), p. 155. 3 Wall and Long, ‘Jazz Britannia’, p. 155. 4 Collie, Hazel and Irwin, Mary, ‘The weekend starts here: young women, pop music television and identity’, Screen 54: 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 265–​266. 5 Gebhardt, Nicholas, ‘Screening the event:  watching Miles Davis’ My Funny Valentine’, p.  237 in Heile, Björn, Elsdon, Peter and Doctor, Jenny (eds), Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), forthcoming. 6 Hilmes, Michele, ‘Television Sound: Why the Silence?’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2: 2 (Autumn 2008), p. 155. 7 Long, Paul and Wall, Tim, ‘Sight and Sound In Concert? The Interrelationship Between Music and Television’, p. 472 in Bennett, Andy and Waksman, Steve (eds), The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (Los Angeles:  Sage Reference, 2015). 8 Godbolt, Jim, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–​50 (London: Quartet Books, 1984), p. 144. 9 Wall, Tim, ‘The line between jazz and not-​ jazz:  music broadcasting and the BBC 1923 to 1953’, Rhythm Changes Jazz Beyond Borders conference, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, 7 September 2014. 10 Scannell, Paddy, ‘Music for the multitude? The dilemmas of the BBC’s music policy, 1923–​1946’, Media, Culture and Society 3 (1981), p. 251. 11 Leishman, Marista, Reith of the BBC  –​My Father (Edinburgh:  Saint Andrew Press, 2008), p. 76. 12 Bourne, Stephen, Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 60–​63; Jazz Is Where You Find It, BBC TV tx. 2 December 1946, 6 January 1947, 22 January 1947, 29 April 1947, 12 June 1947, 25 July 1947. Rather fittingly, the final episode of Jazz 625 also featured Goode. 13 Lyttelton, Humphrey, Second Chorus (London:  MacGibbon & Kee/​The Jazz Book Club, 1959), p. 51.

141

142

Notes to pages 88–93 14 Quoted in Wyver, John, Vision On:  Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 15. 15 Gebhardt, ‘Screening the event’, pp. 233–​237. 16 ‘Jazz Is Where You Find It’ general file, BBC Written Archives T12/​178. 17 ‘Jazz Session’ general file, BBC Written Archives T12/​179/​1. 18 Frith, Simon, Music for Pleasure (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 52. 19 Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–​50, pp. 254–​265. 20 Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–​50, p. 270. 21 Bill Cotton Jr memo 11 August 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1. 22 Frith, Music for Pleasure, p. 52. 23 Wennekes, Emile, ‘The scattered dream of “same time, same station”: The Nat King Cole Show’, Jazz and Cinema conference, Cardiff University, 1 November 2013. 24 Long and Wall, ‘Sight and Sound In Concert?’, p. 465. 25 Pim Jacobs’ Dutch television series Dzjess Zien (1964–​1966) similarly drew upon the Jazz Casual format, and featured an even more prominent role for the pre­ senter. See Rusch, Loes, Our Subcultural Shit Music: Dutch jazz, representation, and cultural politics (PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2016), p. 37. 26 Wyver, Vision On, p. 27. 27 Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom V: Competition 1955–​1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 350. 28 Barfe, Louis, Turned Out Nice Again: The Story of British Light Entertainment (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), p. 186. 29 Denton, Cecil ‘Jazz on Ch 2’ memo to Huw Wheldon 11 November 1963, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1, p. 1. 30 Denton, ‘Jazz on Ch 2’, p.1. 31 Ibid. 32 Denton, ‘Jazz on Ch 2’, p. 2. 33 Bassett, John, ‘JAZZ, and all that’, undated memo to Humphrey Burton, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1. 34 Sloan, Tom, ‘Jazz on Channel 2’, memo to Humphrey Burton 12 December 1963, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1. 35 Adam, Kenneth, ‘A Stretch towards Happiness’, Radio Times (18–​24 April 1964), p. 4. 36 Barfe, Turned Out Nice Again, p. 184. 37 Barfe, Louis, ‘The Jazz 625 Story’, Transdiffusion.org. Available at http://​ www.transdiffusion.org/​tv/​behindthescreens/​jazz625 (accessed 2 February 2014). 38 Henebery, Terry, ‘BBC II Jazz Series’, memo to Tom Sloan 17 January 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1, p. 1.

142

143

Notes to pages 93–98 39 Henebery, ‘BBC II Jazz Series, p. 2. 40 Ibid. 41 Henebery, ‘BBC II Jazz Series, p. 3. 42 Henebery, ‘BBC II Jazz Series’, p. 1. 43 Ibid. 44 Henebery, Terry, ‘Jazz Series –​Terry Henebery’, note for file 14 February 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1, p. 1. 45 Scott would later act as Controller of Radio 1 and take over from David Attenborough as Controller of BBC2. Attenborough, David, Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (London: BBC Books, 2009), p. 233. 46 Scott, Robin ‘Jazz Series –​Channel 2’, memo to Michael Peacock 25 February 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1, p. 1. 47 Scott, ‘Jazz Series –​Channel 2’, p. 2. 48 Scott, ‘Jazz Series –​Channel 2’, p. 1. 49 Henebery, ‘BBC II Jazz Series’, p. 2. 50 Adam, Kenneth ‘A Stretch towards Happiness’, Radio Times (18–​24 April 1964), p. 4. Emphasis in original. 51 Adam, ‘A Stretch towards Happiness’, p. 4. 52 Adam, Kenneth, ‘Straight-​jackets are no longer being worn’, BBC Handbook 1964 (London: BBC, 1964), p. 12. 53 For warm reviews of this tour, see Cooke, Jack, ‘Duke Ellington in England’, Jazz Monthly 10: 2 (April 1964), pp. 4–​5 and Lambert, G. E., ‘Ellingtonia ‘64’, Jazz Journal 17: 4 (April 1964), pp. 2–​4. 54 Littlewood, Yvonne, ‘Erroll Garner’, memo to Tom Sloan 4 November 1963, BBC Written Archives T12/​1,366/​1. 55 Sloan, Tom, ‘Duke Ellington’, memo to Michael Peacock 17 December 1963, BBC Written Archives T12/​1,366/​1. 56 The press release does not mention a short segment of BBC arts magazine Monitor in which Ellington was interviewed by Humphrey Lyttelton and John Dankworth (tx. 12 October 1958). BBC Written Archives T12/​1366. 57 See Wall, Tim, ‘Duke Ellington, the meaning of jazz and the BBC in the 1930s’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. 58 Littlewood, Yvonne, ‘Ellington in Concert camera script’, BBC Written Archives T12/​1,366/​1, p. 1. 59 Barfe, Turned Out Nice Again, pp. 183–​184. 60 Bilbow, Marjorie, ‘A Woman’s Touch in Light Entertainment’, The Stage and Television Today (9 April 1964), p. 10. 61 Anon., ‘The Man for Jazz 625’, The Stage and Television Today (23 April 1964), p. 12; Anon., ‘Scintillating Duke’, Melody Maker (2 May 1964), p. 5.

143

144

Notes to pages 99–111 62 Ellington’s son Mercer observed pithily, ‘he was quick to realise the power and importance of television’. Ellington, Mercer with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 159. 63 BBC2 Press Information, ‘Justice for the Duke’ 1 August 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​1,366/​1. 64 Higgins, Jack L. to Terry Henebery, letters 15 October 1964 and 29 December 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​1,036/​1. 65 Frith, Simon, ‘Look! Hear! The uneasy relationship of music and television’, Popular Music 21: 3 (October 2002), p. 277 66 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, p. 287. 67 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, p. 280. 68 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, p. 283. 69 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, p. 283. 70 Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom V, p. 397. 71 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, p. 288. 72 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, pp. 287, 279. 73 Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: cinema, television, video (London: Routledge, 1982), pp. 128–​129. 74 Hilmes, ‘Television Sound’, p. 159. 75 See, for example, Henebery, Terry, letter to John H. King, 10 December 1965, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1. 76 Gebhardt, ‘Screening the event’, p. 232. 77 Collie and Irwin: ‘The weekend starts here’, p. 263. 78 Gebhardt, ‘Screening the event’, p. 237. 79 Ibid. 80 Collie and Irwin, ‘The weekend starts here’, p. 265. 81 Voce, Steve, ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’, Jazz Journal 17: 5 (May 1964), p. 8. 82 Gilbert, James, ‘Jazz Jamboree’, memo to Terry Henebery 19 August 1964, BBC Written Archives T12/​623/​1. 83 Traill, Sinclair, ‘Editorial’, Jazz Journal 17: 12 (December 1964), p. 7. 84 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!’, p. 288. 85 Anon., ‘Jazz 625’, Jazz Journal 17: 10 (October 1964), pp. 14–​19. 86 Anon., ‘Preparing for BBC-​2’, BBC Handbook 1964 (London:  BBC, 1964), p. 108. 87 Voce, ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’, p. 8; Priestley, Brian, ‘Benny Golson at the BBC’, Jazz Monthly (September 1964), 10: 17, p. 3. 88 Priestley: ‘Benny Golson at the BBC’, pp. 3–​4. 89 Dyer, Richard, Only Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 20–​21. 90 For a more sustained analysis of television style in relation to the Brubeck episodes, see Pillai, Nicolas, ‘Brubeck betwixt and between:  television, pop and the middlebrow’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New

144

145

Notes to pages 111–119

Jazz Conceptions:  History, Theory, Practice (New  York:  Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. 91 Gerald Millerson lists this effect amongst ‘spurious visual effects’: ‘HALOES (throw-​off). A black aureole surrounding an over-​bright high-​contrast area, and obliterating the nearby picture; around light sources (candle-​flames, table lamps) and reflections from shiny surfaces’. Millerson, Gerald, The Technique of Television Production (Norwich: Focal Press, 1968), p. 49. 92 Adam: ‘Straight-​jackets are no longer being worn’, p. 12. 93 Scott, Ronnie with Hennessey, Mike, Some of My Best Friends Are Blues (London: Northway, 2004), p. 106. 94 Sheppard’s 1988 album Introductions in the Dark pictured the saxophonist on the cover in an image that self-​consciously evoked smoky 1940s jazz photog­ raphy (Antilles, AN 8742). 95 BBC Four, 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz, tx. 11 April 2009. 96 Johnson, Phil, ‘This isn’t jazz. This is just terrible telly.’, The Independent (15 March 1998). Available at http://​www.independent.co.uk/​life-​style/​jazz-​this-​ isnt-​jazz-​this-​is-​just-​terrible-​telly-​1150377.html (accessed 31 March 2014). 97 BBC Comedy, ‘The Fast Show:  Louis Balfour’. Available at http://​www. bbc.co.uk/​comedy/​fastshow/​characters/​louis_​balfour.shtml (accessed 17 June 2015). 98 Wall and Long, ‘Jazz Britannia’, p. 162. 99 Wall and Long, ‘Jazz Britannia’, p. 147. 100 Wall and Long, ‘Jazz Britannia’, p. 161. 101 Miller, Ant, ‘Jazz Shorts  –​New technology in an HD music show’, BBC Research and Development blog. Available at http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​blogs/​ researchanddevelopment/​2009/​12/​jazz-​shorts-​new-​technology-​in.shtml (ac­ cessed 6 July 2015).

Conclusion 1 Balliett, Whitney, Collected Works:  A  Journal of Jazz 1954–​2000 (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 590. 2 Gebhardt, Nicholas, ‘Screening the event:  watching Miles Davis’ My Funny Valentine’, p.  232 in Heile, Björn, Elsdon, Peter and Doctor, Jenny (eds), Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), forthcoming. 3 Wall, Tim, ‘Duke Ellington, the meaning of jazz and the BBC in the 1930s’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. 4 Whyton, Tony, Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 174.

145

146

Notes to pages 120–128 5 Heile, Björn, Elsdon, Peter and Doctor, Jenny (eds), Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2016), forthcoming. See also the analysis of Roland Kirk’s ‘chair act’ in Wald, Gayle, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! And Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 116–​127 and my chapter ‘Brubeck betwixt and between: tel­ evision, pop and the middlebrow’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. 6 Shearer, Martha, ‘Sax and the city: New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977), urban decline and the jazz musical’, The Soundtrack 6: 1&2 (2014), p. 54. 7 Butler, David, Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction (Westport:  Praeger, 2002). However, see my critique of Butler’s methodology in Pillai, Nicolas, ‘Filming Improvisation:  jazz criticism’s neglect of film style’, The Soundtrack 6: 1&2 (2014), pp. 9–​11. 8 Whyton, Jazz Icons, pp. 172–​177. 9 Heble, Ajay, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, dissonance and critical practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 20, 95. 10 Monson, Ingrid, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 6. 11 Spicer, Bart, Blues for the Prince (Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1989), p. 82. 12 Berendt, Joachim E., The Jazz Book: from New Orleans to Jazz Rock and Beyond (London: Paladin, 1984), p. 143. 13 Hodeir, André, Jazz: its evolution & essence (New York: Grove Press/​London: The Jazz Book Club, 1956), pp. 140–​141. 14 Hodeir, Jazz: its evolution & essence, p. 143. 15 Monson, Saying Something, p. 73. 16 Monson, Saying Something, pp. 82, 89. 17 Monson, Saying Something, pp. 97–​106. 18 Perkins, V.F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 72. 19 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 70. 20 Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… And Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 41. 21 Frith, Simon, ‘Look! Hear! The uneasy relationship of music and television’, Popular Music 21: 3 (October 2002), p. 287. 22 Poliakoff, Stephen, ‘Interview with Stephen Poliakoff ’, BBC Media Centre. Available at http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​mediacentre/​mediapacks/​dancingontheedge/​ stephen-​poliakoff.html (accessed 6 March 2016). 23 Obenson, Tambay A., ‘Audra McDonald takes you behind the scenes of her role as Billie Holiday’, Blogs.indiewire.com (2 March 2016). Available at

146

147

Notes to pages 128–129 http:// ​ b logs.indiewire.com/ ​ s hadowandact/ ​ audra-​mcdonald-​takes-​you-​ behind-​the-​scenes-​of-​her-​role-​as-​billie-​holiday-​in-​lady-​day-​at-​emersons-​ bar-​grill-​20160302 (accessed 7 March 2016). 24 Anon., ‘Montreux Jazz Digital Project’, Montreuxjazz.com. Available at http://​ www.montreuxjazz.com/​montreux-​jazz-​digital-​project (accessed 6 March 2016). 25 Chinen, Nate, ‘Increasingly, a Jazz Stage is Digital’, The New York Times (12 July 2013). Available at http://​www.nytimes.com/​2013/​07/​13/​arts/​music/​smalls-​ and-​other-​clubs-​are-​webcasting-​concerts.html?_​r=0 (accessed 6 March 2016).

147

148

149

Bibliography Abra, Allison, ‘Doing The Lambeth Walk: Novelty Dances and the British Nation’, Twentieth Century British History 20: 3 (2009), pp. 346–​369. Adam, Kenneth, ‘A Stretch towards Happiness’, Radio Times (18 April–​24 April 1964), p. 4. ——— ‘Straight-​jackets are no longer being worn’, BBC Handbook 1964 (London: BBC, 1964), p. 12. Aitken, Ian, Film & Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London: Routledge, 1992). Aitken, Ian, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’ in Winston, Brian (ed.), The Documentary Film Book (London:  BFI/​ Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 129–​137. Ake, David, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Anon., ‘Hot Rhythm Records’, Melody Maker (1 April 1933), p. 246. ——— ‘What The Other Listener Thinks’, Radio Times (30 June 1933), p. 813. ——— Decca Brunswick and Decca Polydor Records Complete Catalogue Up To and Including March 1934 (London: The Decca Record Company, 1934). ——— ‘Jazz Featured Tomorrow in “Lively Arts” TV Series’, The Oxnard Press-​Courier (7 December 1957), p. 3. ——— ‘Preparing for BBC2’, BBC Handbook 1964 (London: BBC, 1964), p. 108. ——— ‘The Man for Jazz 625’, The Stage and Television Today (23 April 1964), p. 12. ——— ‘Scintillating Duke’, Melody Maker (2 May 1964), p. 5. ——— ‘Jazz 625’, Jazz Journal 17: 10 (October 1964), pp. 14–​19. Anthony, Scott and Mansell, James G. (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Appel Jr., Alfred, Jazz Modernism: from Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). Armstrong, Tim, ‘Len Lye and Laura Riding in the 1930s: The Impossibility of Film and Literature’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37: 2 (2001), pp. 176–​185. 149

150

Bibliography

Attenborough, David, Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (London: BBC Books, 2009). Balázs, Béla, ‘The Face of Man’ in Mast, Gerald and Cohen, Marshall (eds), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 290–​298. Balliett, Whitney, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954–​2000 (London: Granta Books, 2000). Barfe, Louis, Turned Out Nice Again: The Story of British Light Entertainment (London: Atlantic Books, 2009). ——— ‘The Jazz 625 Story’, Transdiffusion.org. Available at http://​www. transdiffusion.org/​tv/​behindthescreens/​jazz625 (accessed 2 February 2014). Barr, Charles (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1986). BBC Comedy, ‘The Fast Show: Louis Balfour’. Available at http://​www.bbc. co.uk/​comedy/​fastshow/​characters/​louis_​balfour.shtml (accessed 17 June 2015). Bennett, Andy and Waksman, Steve (eds), The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (Los Angeles: Sage Reference, 2015). Berendt, Joachim E., The Jazz Book:  from New Orleans to Jazz Rock and Beyond (London: Paladin, 1984). Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008). Bilbow, Marjorie, ‘A Woman’s Touch in Light Entertainment’, The Stage and Television Today (9 April 1964), p. 10. Bindas, Kenneth J., Swing, That Modern Sound (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). Bourne, Stephen, Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (London: Continuum, 2001). Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom V: Competition 1955–​1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Brody, Richard, ‘Getting jazz right in the movies’, The New  Yorker, 13 October 2014. Available at http://​www.newyorker.com/​culture/​richard-​ brody/​whiplash-​getting-​jazz-​right-​movies (accessed 10 March 2015) Brooke, Michael, ‘Love on the Wing (1938)’, BFI Screenonline. Available at http://​www.screenonline.org.uk/​film/​id/​528634/​ (accessed 2 March 2015). Butler, David, Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction (Westport: Praeger, 2002). 150

151

Bibliography

Cann, Tyler, ‘Surreal Sight Seer? Len Lye –​Mind, Self and Time’ in Cann, Tyler and Curnow, Wystan (eds), Len Lye (New Plymouth:  Govett-​ Brewster Art Gallery/​Len Lye Foundation, 2009), pp. 61–​84. Cann, Tyler and Curnow, Wystan (eds), Len Lye (New Plymouth: Govett-​ Brewster Art Gallery/​Len Lye Foundation, 2009). Castro, Fernando, ‘The Progress of Cuban Music’, Rhythm (March 1934), pp. 41–​42. Cawthra, Benjamin, Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). Chanan, Michael, Repeated Takes:  A  Short History of Recording and Its Effects On Music (New York: Verso, 1995). Claydon, E. Anna, ‘National Identity, the GPO Film Unit and their Music’ in Anthony, Scott and Mansell, James G. (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 179–​187. Collie, Hazel and Irwin, Mary, ‘The weekend starts here: young women, pop music television and identity’, Screen 54:  2 (Summer 2013), pp. 262–​269. Compton, Michael (ed.) Towards a New Art: essays on the background to abstract art 1910–​20 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1980). Cooke, Jack, ‘Duke Ellington in England’, Jazz Monthly 10: 2 (April 1964), pp. 4–​5. Cross, Anthony, ‘The Music of Ernst Hermann Meyer’, The Musical Times 121: 1654 (December 1980), pp. 777–​779. Dinerstein, Joel, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). Dyer, Richard, Only Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 2002). Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘More Thoughts on Structure’ in Leyda, Jay (ed.), Film Essays and a Lecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 92–​107. Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: cinema, television, video (London: Routledge, 1982). Ellison, Ralph, Shadow and Act (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967). Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions:  History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. Fara, Patricia, ‘A microscopic reality tale’, Nature 459 (June 2009), pp. 642–​644. 151

152

Bibliography

Frith, Simon, Music for Pleasure (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). ——— ‘Look! Hear! The uneasy relationship of music and television’, Popular Music 21: 3 (October 2002), pp. 277–​290 Gabbard, Krin (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1995). ——— Jammin’ at the Margins:  Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Garber, Frederick, ‘Fabulating Jazz’ in Gabbard, Krin (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 70–​103. Gardiner, Juliet, The Thirties, An Intimate History (London: Harper Press, 2010). Gebhardt, Nicholas, ‘On jazz, memory and history:  a response to Alyn Shipton’, Jazz Research Journal 4:1 (2010), pp. 7–​14. ——— ‘Screening the event: watching Miles Davis’ My Funny Valentine’, pp. 221–​ 238 in Heile, Björn, Elsdon, Peter and Doctor, Jenny (eds.), Watching Jazz:  Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), forthcoming. Gleason, Ralph J. (ed.), Jam Session (London:  The Jazz Book Club/​Peter Davies, 1961). Gledhill, Christine and Williams, Linda (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). Godbolt, Jim, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–​50 (London: Quartet Books, 1984). Graves, Ralph, LIFE:  The Second Decade 1946–​1955 (New  York:  Little, Brown & Co, 1984). Gray, Herman S., Cultural Moves:  African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde’, Wide Angle 8: 3/​4 (1986), pp. 63–​70. Hammond, John, ‘More Places with Spike’, Melody Maker (1 April 1933), p. 271. Hebdige, Dick, Subculture:  the meaning of style (London: Routledge, 1979). Heble, Ajay, ‘The poetics of jazz: from symbolic to semiotic’, Textual Practice 2: 1 (1988), pp. 51–​68. ——— Landing on the Wrong Note:  Jazz, dissonance and critical practice (New York: Routledge, 2000).

152

153

Bibliography

Heile, Björn, Elsdon, Peter and Doctor, Jenny (eds), Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (New  York: Oxford University Press, 2016), forthcoming. Hentoff, Nat, The Jazz Life (London: Panther, 1964). ——— ‘Huckleberry Dracula, Jazz, and Public TV’, The Village Voice (31 July 1978), p. 30. Hershorn, Tad, Norman Granz: The Man who used Jazz for Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011). Hewitt, John, ‘The “Nature” and “Art” of Shell Advertising in the Early 1930s’, Journal of Design History 5: 2 (1992), pp. 121–​139. Higson, Andrew, ‘“Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to the Film”: The doc­ umentary realist tradition’ in Barr, Charles (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1986), pp. 72–​97. Hilmes, Michele, ‘Television Sound: Why the Silence?’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2: 2 (Autumn 2008), pp. 153–​161. Hilton, Milt, Berger, David G., and Maxson, Holly, Over Time:  The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton (Maldon: Pomegranate Art Books, 1991). Hodeir, André, Jazz:  its evolution & essence (New  York:  Grove Press/​ London: The Jazz Book Club, 1956). Horrocks, Roger, ‘Jack Ellitt: the Early Years’, Cantrills Film Notes 93–​100 (1999–​2000), p. 25. ——— Len Lye: A Biography (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001). ——— Len Lye Rhythms DVD booklet (Paris:  Re:voir Video Editions, 2009). ——— ‘Swinging the Lambeth Walk: The Hands of the Filmmaker’ in Cann, Tyler and Curnow, Wystan (eds), Len Lye (New Plymouth:  Govett-​ Brewster Art Gallery/​Len Lye Foundation, 2009), pp. 17–​32. Iverson, Ethan, ‘The Drum Thing’, Do The Math, 24 February 2015. Available at http://​dothemath.typepad.com/​dtm/​the-​drum-​thing.html (accessed 10 March 2015). Jackson, Edgar, ‘Dance and Popular Rhythmic’, The Gramophone 12: 137 (October 1934), p. 189. Jackson, Kevin, Humphrey Jennings (London: Pan Macmillan, 2004). Johnson, Phil, ‘This isn’t jazz. This is just terrible telly.’, The Independent (15 March 1998). Available at http://​www.independent.co.uk/​life-​style/​ jazz-​this-​isnt-​jazz-​this-​is-​just-​terrible-​telly-​1150377.html (accessed 31 March 2014). 153

154

Bibliography

Knight, Arthur, ‘Jammin’ the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944’ in Gabbard, Krin (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 11–​53. Kollewe, Julia and Perraudin, Frances, ‘Royal Mail sell-​off undervalued firm by £180m, report finds’, The Guardian. Available at http://​www.the­ guardian.com/​business/​2014/​dec/​18/​royal-​mail-​sell-​off-​undervalued-​ firm-​180-​million (accessed 2 March 2015). Krauss, Rosalind E., The Originality of the Avant-​Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1985). Lambert, G. E., ‘Ellingtonia ‘64’, Jazz Journal 17: 4 (April 1964), pp. 2–​4. Laver, Mark, Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing and Meaning (Oxford: Routledge, 2015). Leishman, Marista, Reith of the BBC –​My Father (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2008). Leslie, Esther, Hollywood Flatlands:  Animation, critical theory and the avant-​garde (London: Verso, 2002). Leyda, Jay (ed.), Film Essays and a Lecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Lippincott, Bruce, ‘Aspects of the Jam Session’, in Gleason, Ralph J. (ed.), Jam  Session (London:  The Jazz Book Club/​Peter Davies, 1961), pp. 168–​174. Long, Paul and Wall, Tim, ‘Sight and Sound In Concert? The Inter­ relationship Between Music and Television’ in Bennett, Andy and Waksman, Steve (eds), The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (Los Angeles: Sage Reference, 2015), pp. 456–​477. Lott, Eric, ‘Double V, Double-​Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style’, in O’Meally, R. G. (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 457–​468. Lye, Len, Letter to John Grierson (25 July 1935), Govett-​Brewster Len Lye Collection. Lyttelton, Humphrey, Second Chorus (London:  MacGibbon & Kee/​The Jazz Book Club, 1959). ——— It Just Occurred to Me… (London: Robson Books, 2006). Macdonald, Kevin, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (London: Faber and Faber, 1994). Malone, Jacqui, ‘Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands’ in O’Meally, R. G. (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 278–​297. 154

155

Bibliography

Mansell, James G., ‘Rhythm, Modernity and the Politics of Sound’ in Anthony, Scott and Mansell, James G. (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 161–​167. Mast, Gerald and Cohen, Marshall (eds), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Mawer, Deborah, French Music and Jazz in Conversation: from Debussy to Brubeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Meadows, T. S., ‘Definition Wanted’, Melody Maker (1 April 1933), p. 295. Mili, Gjon, ‘Visibility of Signal Through Fog’, Journal of the Optical Society of America 25: 8 (1935), pp. 237–​240. ——— ‘Light Control in Photography’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 30: 4 (1938), pp. 388–​399. ——— ‘The Lindy Hop’, LIFE (23 August 1943), pp. 95–​103. ——— ‘Jam Session’, LIFE (11 October 1943), pp. 117–​124. ——— Photographs and Recollections (Boston:  New  York Graphic Society, 1980). Miller, Ant, ‘Jazz Shorts  –​New technology in an HD music show’, BBC Research and Development blog. Available at http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​ blogs/​researchanddevelopment/​2009/​12/​jazz-​shorts-​new-​technology-​ in.shtml (accessed 6 July 2015). Millerson, Gerald, The Technique of Television Production (Norwich: Focal Press, 1968). Mollaghan, Aimee, The Visual Music Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Monson, Ingrid, Saying Something:  Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Moore, Hilary, Inside British Jazz:  Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Morphy, Howard, ‘Moving the body painting into the art gallery –​know­ ing about and appreciating works of Aboriginal art’, Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 2011), pp. 1–​20. Morris, John G., Get the Picture:  A  Personal History of Photojournalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16:  3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–​18. Muyal, Jacques, Norman Granz Presents Improvisation DVD booklet (Laser Swing Productions, 2007). 155

156

Bibliography

Nowell-​Smith, Geoffrey, ‘How films mean, or from aesthetics to semi­ otics and half-​way back again’, in Gledhill, Christine and Williams, Linda (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London:  Bloomsbury, 2000), pp. 8–​17. O’Connell, Sean J., ‘Drummer Peter Erskine on jazz Flick Whiplash’, KCET. org, 24 February 2015. Available at http://​www.kcet.org/​arts/​artbound/​ counties/​los-​angeles/​drummer-​peter-​erskine-​on-​whiplash-​film.html (accessed 10 March 2015). O’Meally, R. G. (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New  York: Columbia University Press, 1998). O’Rawe, Desmond, ‘(Pro)Motion Pictures:  Len Lye in the Thirties’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29: 1 (2012), pp. 64–​75. Obenson, Tambay A., ‘Audra McDonald takes you behind the scenes of her role as Billie Holiday’, Blogs.indiewire.com (2 March 2016). Available at http://​blogs.indiewire.com/​shadowandact/​audra-​mcdonald-​takes-​ you-​behind-​the-​scenes-​of-​her-​role-​as-​billie-​holiday-​in-​lady-​day-​at-​ emersons-​bar-​grill-​20160302 (accessed 7 March 2016). Overy, Richard, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009). Parsonage, Catherine, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–​1935 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). ——— ‘Fascination and Fear: Responses to Early Jazz in Britain’ in Wynn, Neil A. (ed.), Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 89–​105. Patchett, Stan, ‘Handpainted Swing’, Rhythm (February 1939), pp. 66–​72. Pells, Richard, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalisation of American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Perkins, V.F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). Pillai, Nicolas, ‘Filming Improvisation: jazz criticism’s neglect of film style’, The Soundtrack 6: 1&2 (2014), pp. 5–​20. ——— ‘Brubeck betwixt and between: television, pop and the middlebrow’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming.

156

157

Bibliography

Poliakoff, Stephen, ‘Interview with Stephen Poliakoff ’, BBC Media Centre. Available at http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​mediacentre/ mediapacks/​ dancingontheedge/​stephen- poliakoff.html (accessed 6 March 2016). Priestley, Brian, ‘Benny Golson at the BBC’, Jazz Monthly (September 1964), 10: 17, pp. 3–​4. Ricketts, C. L., ‘Reflections on the Duke’s Visit:  Some of the Things We Should Have Learned’, Melody Maker (29 July 1933), p. 17. Rico, Don, ‘The Latin Trend in Popular Music’, Rhythm (December 1934), pp. 66–​67. Riding, Laura, Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films (Bristol: The Seizin Press, 1938). Robinson, Camille, Light and Rhythm:  The Life and Music of Jack Ellitt (Unpublished thesis, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, 2010). Rusch, Loes, Our Subcultural Shit Music: Dutch jazz, representation, and cultural politics (PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2016). Scannell, Paddy, ‘Music for the multitude? The dilemmas of the BBC’s music policy, 1923–​1946’, Media, Culture and Society 3 (1981), pp. 243–​260. Scott, Ronnie with Hennessey, Mike, Some of My Best Friends Are Blues (London: Northway, 2004). Sexton, James, ‘Tusalava (1929)’, BFI Screenonline. Available at http://​www. screenonline.org.uk/​film/​id/​442453/​ (accessed 18 February 2015). Shearer, Martha, ‘Sax and the city: New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977), urban decline and the jazz musical’, The Soundtrack 6: 1&2 (2014), pp. 53–​66. Sheppard, Richard, Modernism–​Dada–​Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000). Smythe, Luke, ‘Image and Music in the Direct Films of Len Lye’, The Journal of New Zealand Art History 26 (2006), pp. 1–​14. ——— ‘Len Lye:  The Vital Body of Cinema’, October 144 (Spring 2013), pp. 73–​91. Solis, Gabriel, Monk’s Music:  Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Spicer, Bart, Blues for the Prince (Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1989). Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Tanner, Lee, The Jazz Image:  Masters of Jazz Photography (New  York: Abrams, 2006).

157

158

Bibliography

Tobias, James, Sync: Stylistics of Heiroglyphic Time (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). Townsend, Peter, Jazz in American Culture (Jackson:  University of Mississippi, 2000). Traill, Sinclair, ‘Editorial’, Jazz Journal 17: 12 (December 1964), p. 7. Tromans, Steve, ‘Myth, Progress, and Motion in Jazz Practice with the Standard Repertoire’, Epistrophy 1 (2015). Available at http://​www.epis­ trophy.fr/​myth-​progress-​and-​motion-​in-​jazz.html?lang=fr (accessed 27 October 2015). Vergo, Peter, ‘Music and abstract painting: Kandinsky, Goethe and Schoenberg’ in Compton, Michael (ed.) Towards a New Art: essays on the background to abstract art 1910–​20 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1980), pp. 41–​63. Voce, Steve, ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’, Jazz Journal 17: 5 (May 1964), p. 8. Wald, Gayle, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! And Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Wall, Tim, Studying Popular Music Culture (London: Arnold, 2003). ——— ‘Duke Ellington, Radio Remotes, and the Mediation of Big City Nightlife, 1927 to 1933’, Jazz Perspectives 6: 1–​2 (2012), pp. 197–​222. ——— ‘The line between jazz and not-​jazz:  music broadcasting and the BBC 1923 to 1953’, Rhythm Changes Jazz Beyond Borders conference, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, 7 September 2014. ——— ‘Duke Ellington, the meaning of jazz and the BBC in the 1930s’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. Wall, Tim and Long, Paul, ‘Jazz Britannia: mediating the story of British jazz on television’, Jazz Research Journal 3: 2 (2009), pp. 145–​170. Watney, Simon, The Art of Duncan Grant (London: John Murray, 1999). Wells, Paul, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998). Wennekes, Emile, ‘The scattered dream of “same time, same station”: The Nat King Cole Show’, Jazz and Cinema conference, Cardiff University, 1 November 2013. Whyton, Tony, Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Wilkinson, Helen, ‘“The New Heraldry”:  Stock Photography, Visual Literacy, and Advertising in 1930s Britain’, Journal of Design History 10: 1 (1997), pp. 23–​38.

158

159

Bibliography

Williams, Katherine, ‘Duke Ellington’s Newport Up! Liveness, Artifacts, and the Seductive Menace of Jazz Revisited’ in Fagge, Roger and Pillai, Nicolas (eds), New Jazz Conceptions:  History, Theory, Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), forthcoming. Williams, Richard, ‘The trouble with Whiplash’, The Blue Moment, 19 January 2015. Available at http://​thebluemoment.com/​2015/​01/​19/​the-​ trouble-​with-​whiplash/​ (accessed 10 March 2015). Winston, Brian (ed.), The Documentary Film Book (London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Witkin, Robert W., ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz?’, Sociological Theory 18: 1 (2000), pp. 145–​170. Wollen, Peter, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-​Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993). ——— ‘An Alphabet of Cinema’, New Left Review 12 (November–​December 2001), pp. 115–​133. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… And Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Wynn, Neil A. (ed.), Cross the Water Blues:  African American Music in Europe (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2007). Wyver, John, Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

159

160

161

Film and Television Programmes Cited Case studies A Colour Box. Len Lye, GPO Film Unit, 1935. Music: Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra, ‘La Belle Creole’. Jammin’ the Blues. Gjon Mili, Warner Bros., 1944. Musicians featured: Lester Young, Harry Edison, Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Red Callender, Barney Kessel, Marlowe Morris, Illinois Jacquet, John Simmons, Marie Bryant. Jazz 625. BBC2, tx. 22 April 1964–​13 October 1966. Listings in the table below drawn from Radio Times. Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

22 April 1964 (scheduled 21 April 21.40)

Steve Race

An all star jam session (Kenny Baker, George Chisholm, Tony Coe, Roy Willox, Laurie Holloway, Jack Fallon, Lennie Hastings)

28 April 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Tubby Hayes Quintet and Betty Bennett

5 May 1964 21.40

Steve Race

Chris Barber’s Jazzband, Ottilie Patterson and Champion Jack Dupree

12 May 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Modern Jazz Quartet (John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Connie Kay) and Laurindo Almeida

19 May 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Johnny Dankworth Orchestra and Bobby Breen

26 May 1964 21.40

Steve Race

161

162

Film and Television Programmes Cited

The Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley Sextet and Nat Adderley

2 June 1964 21.40

Steve Race

Alex Welsh Band and Henry ‘Red’ Allen Jr

9 June 1964 21.40

Steve Race

Marian McPartland, Freddie Logan and Allan Ganley

30 June 1964 21.40

Steve Race

Bill Le Sage’s Directions in Jazz Unit (Ronnie Ross, Bob Burns, Johnny Scott and the Freddie Alexander Cello Ensemble)

16 June 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Humphrey Lytellton Fifteen

7 July 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Art Farmer Quartet

14 July 1964 21.40

Steve Race

Henry ‘Red’ Allen and Alex Welsh Band part 2

21 July 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Modern Jazz Quartet and Laurindo Almeida part 2

28 July 1964 21.40

Steve Race

The Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderly Sextet and Nat Adderley part 2

3 August 1964 22.05

Steve Race

Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band, Mose Allison (Richmond Jazz Festival)

11 August 1964 21.45

Steve Race

Mark Murphy and The Tubby Hayes Quintet

18 August 1964 21.45

Steve Race

The Dave Brubeck Quartet (Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright, Joe Morello)

25 August 1964 21.40

Steve Race

An all-​star jam session (Lennie Felix, Freddie Randall, Bruce Turner, Jimmy Skidmore, John Picard, Spike Heatley, Derek Hogg)

1 September 1964 21.25

Steve Race

The Woody Herman Orchestra

8 September 1964 21.25

Steve Race

162

163

Film and Television Programmes Cited

Jimmy Witherspoon and The Ronnie Scott Quartet

12 September 1964 22.35

Steve Race

Sandy Brown’s Band and Ernest Ranclin

19 September 1964 22.15

Steve Race

The Art Farmer Quintet and Jim Hall part 2

26 September 1964 23.05

Steve Race

Mel Torme and The Bill Le Sage Dektette

3 October 1964 22.25

Steve Race

The Oscar Peterson Trio (Peterson, Ray Brown, Ed Thigpen)

10 October 1964 23.00

Steve Race

Benny Golson directs an all-​star 25-​piece British orchestra playing his works

17 October 1964 22.50

Steve Race

Annie Ross and The Tony Kinsey Quintet

24 October 1964 22.15

Steve Race

Erroll Garner, Eddie Calhoun, Kelly Martin

31 October 1964 22.45

Steve Race

In Memoriam –​Charlie Parker (featuring J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Walter Bishop)

7 November 1964 22.05

Steve Race

Derek Smith, Geoff Clyne, Ronnie Stephenson; Eddie Thompson, Spike Heatley, Tony Carr

14 November 1964 22.10

Steve Race

The Hawk at the Town Hall (Coleman Hawkins, Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, Sir Charles Thompson, Jimmy Woode, Jo Jones)

21 November 1964 22.05

Steve Race

The Dave Brubeck Quartet part 2

28 November 1964 22.05

Steve Race

163

164

Film and Television Programmes Cited

An all star jam session (Keith Christie, Eddie Blair, Ronnie Scott, Art Ellefson, Colin Purbrook, Dave Green, Jackie Dougan)

5 December 1964 22.15

Steve Race

The Newport All Stars (featuring Ruby Braff, Peewee Russell, Bud Freeman, George Wein, Brian Brocklehurst, Lennie Hastings)

12 December 1964 22.45

Steve Race

The Johnny Scott Quintet and Millicent Martin

19 December 1964 22.45

Steve Race

The Woody Herman Orchestra part 2

2 January 1965 22.50

Steve Race

Buck Clayton and the Humphrey Lyttelton Band

9 January 1965 23.00

Steve Race

Ben Webster and The Ronnie Scott Quartet

16 January 1965 22.40

Steve Race

The Oscar Peterson Trio part 2

23 January 1965 22.50

Steve Race

In Memoriam –​Charlie Parker part 2 (J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Walter Bishop, Tommy Potter, Kenny Clarke)

6 February 1965 22.50

Steve Race

Cleo Laine and The Johnny Dankworth Quintet

13 February 1965 22.35

Steve Race

Erroll Garner part 2

20 February 1965 23.00

Steve Race

Benny Golson directs an all-​star 25-​piece British Orchestra part 2

27 February 1965 23.00

Steve Race

The Hawk at Town Hall part 2

6 March 1965 23.00

Steve Race

The Newport All Stars part 2

13 March 1965 22.50

Steve Race

Buck Clayton and the Humphrey Lyttelton Band part 2

24 March 1965 22.05

Steve Race

164

165

Film and Television Programmes Cited

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

31 March 1965 22.15

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Tubby Hayes Big Band

7 April 1965 22.30

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Wes Montgomery Quartet

14 April 1965 22.15

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Thelonious Monk Quartet (Monk, Charlie Rouse, Larry Gayles, Ben Riley)

21 April 1965 22.25

Humphrey Lyttelton

Dixieland Revisited (Ronnie Ross, Art Ellefson, Jimmy Deuchar, Keith Christie, Bill Le Sage, Spike Heatley, Allan Ganley)

5 May 1965 22.35

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Bill Evans Trio (Evans, Chuck Israel, Larry Bunker)

12 May 1965 22.30

Humphrey Lyttelton

George Lewis, Acker Bilk’s Paramount Jazz Band and Beryl Bryden

19 May 1965 22.00

Humphrey Lyttelton

Victor Feldman, Rick Laird, Ronnie Stephenson and Ronnie Scott

2 June 1965 22.05

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Zodiac Variations (The Johnny Dankworth Orchestra, Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer)

9 June 1965 22.15

Humphrey Lyttelton

Jazz from Kansas City (Joe Turner, Buck Clayton, Vic Dickenson, the Humphrey Lyttelton Band)

16 June 1965 22.05

Humphrey Lyttelton

Clark Terry, Bob Brookmeyer, Laurie Holloway, Rick Laird, Allan Ganley

13 October 1965 23.00

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Wes Montgomery Quartet part 2

27 October 1965 23.10

Humphrey Lyttelton

165

166

Film and Television Programmes Cited

Jazz from Kansas City part 2

3 November 1965 23.05

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Oscar Peterson Trio

10 November 1965 23.10

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Jimmy Smith Trio (Smith, Quentin Warren, Billy Hart)

17 November 1965 23.15

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Jimmy Guiffre Trio (Guiffre, Donald Friedman, Barre Phillips)

24 November 1965 23.10

Humphrey Lyttelton

Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Tracey, Rick Laird, Jackie Dougan

22 December 1965 23.05

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Bill Evans Trio part 2

29 December 1965 23.05

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Thelonious Monk Quartet part 2

5 January 1966 22.25

Humphrey Lyttelton

Maynard Ferguson and The Johnny Dankworth Orchestra

19 January 1966 22.10

Humphrey Lyttelton

Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith, Brian Brocklehurst, Lennie Hastings

26 January 1966 21.00

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Tony Coe Quintet and Dakota Staton

2 February 1966 22.30

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Jimmy Smith Trio part 2

9 February 1966 22.30

Humphrey Lyttelton

Jimmy Witherspoon and The Dick Morrissey Quartet

16 February 1966 22.00

Humphrey Lyttelton

Alex Welsh Band and Dickie Wells

23 February 1966 22.20

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Modern Jazz Quartet

2 March 1966 22.30

Humphrey Lyttelton

Don Byas and Bruce Turner’s Jump Band

9 March 1966 22.40

Humphrey Lyttelton

Bud Freeman and the Alex Welsh Band

6 July 1966 22.25

Humphrey Lyttelton

166

167

Film and Television Programmes Cited

Anita O’Day and the Peter King Quartet

13 July 1966

Humphrey Lyttelton

Yuseef Lateef and The Stan Tracey Trio

20 July 1966 22.00

Humphrey Lyttelton

Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Ron Mathewson, Lennie Hastings

27 July 1966 21.55

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Modern Jazz Quartet part 2

3 August 1966 22.20

Humphrey Lyttelton

Mark Murphy, The Stan Tracey Trio and Ronnie Scott

10 August 1966 22.40

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Dizzy Gillespie Quintet (Gillespie, James Moody, Kenny Barron, Christopher Wesley White, Rudy Collins)

17 August 1966 22.15

Humphrey Lyttelton

Henry ‘Red’ Allen and the Alex Welsh Band

24 August 1966 22.25

Humphrey Lyttelton

Lee Konitz and The Stan Tracey Trio

6 October 1966 22.20

Humphrey Lyttelton

The Joe Harriott-​John Mayer Double Quintet (Harriott, Mayer, Gordon Rose, Pat Smythe, Coleridge Goode, Allan Ganley, Diwan Motihar, Keshav Sathe, Surendra Kamath, Chris Taylor)

13 October 1966 22.20

Humphrey Lyttelton

Other film and television cited 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz. BBC Four tx. 11 April 2009. The Birth of the Robot. Len Lye, Shell-​Mex, 1936. Music: Holst, ‘The Planets’. Black and Tan. Dudley Murphy, RKO, 1929. Musicians featured:  Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra. Boogie-​Woogie Dream. Hans Burger, Official Films, 1944. Musicians fea­ tured: Lena Horne, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra. The Charlie Parker Story. BBC Four, tx. 20 January 2006. 167

168

Film and Television Programmes Cited

Colour Flight. Len Lye, Imperial Airways, 1938. Music: Red Nichols and his Five Pennies, ‘Honolulu Blues’. Drifters. John Grierson, EMB Film Unit, 1929. Silent. Ellington in Concert part 2. Yvonne Littlewood, BBC2, tx. 1 August 1964. Farewell, My Lovely. Edward Dmytryk, RKO, 1944. Music: Roy Webb. The Fast Show. BBC2, tx. 24 September 1994–​29 December 1997. Footlight Parade. Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros., 1933. Music: Harry Warren, Al Dubin, Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal. 42nd Street. Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros., 1933. Music: Harry Warren, Al Dubin. Free Radicals. Len Lye, 1958. Music: the Bagirmi tribe of Africa. Improvisation. Gjon Mili, 1950. Musicians featured:  Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich, Bill Harris, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, Flip Phillips, Lester Young. Jazz 606. BBC2, tx. 4 March 1998–​8 April 1998. Jazz 625 repeats. BBC2, tx. 23 March 1990–​20 August 1991 (see also The Late Show presents Jazz 625). Presented by Neneh Cherry, Mick Hucknall, Courtney Pine, Ruby Turner, Slim Gaillard, Flora Purim and Andy Sheppard. Jazz 625 at the BBC. BBC Four, tx. 29 May 2014. Jazz at the Maltings. BBC2, tx. 10 October 1968–​10 April 1969. Jazz Britannia. BBC Four, tx. 28 January 2005–​11 February 2005. Jazz Casual. KQED/​NET, tx. 17 January 1961–​21 August 1968. Jazz Goes to College. BBC2, tx. 27 October 1966–​26 September 1967. Jazz Is Where You Find It. BBC TV, tx. 2 December 1946–​25 July 1947. Jazz on A Summer’s Day. Bert Stern, New Yorker Films, 1960. Musicians featured: Jimmy Giuffre, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Armando Peraza, Eli’s Chosen Six, Mahalia Jackson. Jazz Scene at the Ronnie Scott Club. BBC2, tx. 30 September 1969–​10 September 1970. Jazz Scene USA. CBS, tx. 21 April 1962–​26 November 1962. Jazz Session. BBCTV, tx. 4 May 1954–​27 August 1960. The Jazz Singer. Alan Crosland, Warner Bros., 1927. Music: Louis Silvers. Kaleidoscope. Len Lye, GPO Film Unit, 1935. Music: Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra, ‘Beguine d’Amour’.

168

169

Film and Television Programmes Cited

The Late Show presents Jazz 625. BBC2, tx. 21 April 1989. Presented by Andy Sheppard. Love on the Wing. Norman McLaren, GPO Film Unit, 1938. Music: Jacques Ibert. Lust for Life. Vincente Minnelli, Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer, 1950. Music: Miklós Rósza. Mo’ Better Blues. Spike Lee, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1990. Music: Bill Lee. N or NW? Len Lye, GPO Film Unit, 1938. Music: Fats Waller, ‘I’m Going To Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’; Bob Howard, ‘Gimme a Break Baby’; Benny Goodman, ‘T’ain’t no Use’. The Nat King Cole Show. NBC, tx. 5 November 1956–​17 December 1957. Night Mail. Harry Watt and Basil Wright, GPO Film Unit, 1936. Music: Benjamin Britten. North Sea. Harry Watt, GPO Film Unit, 1938. Music:  Ernst Herrmann Meyer. Particles in Space. Len Lye, 1958. Music:  drums from Bahamas and Nigeria. Passport to Pimlico. Henry Cornelius, Ealing, 1949. Music: Georges Auric. Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1960. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Raging Bull. Martin Scorsese, United Artists, 1980. Music: various popular and classical. Rainbow Dance. Len Lye, GPO Film Unit, 1936. Music: Rico’s Creole Band, ‘Tony’s Wife’. The Red Shoes. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers, 1948. Music: Brian Easdale. Rhapsody in Black and Blue. Aubrey Scoto, Paramount, 1932. Musicians featured: Louis Armstrong. Rhythm. Len Lye, 1957. Music: drums of the Zeetzeektula and Zinkil tribes. Roadways. Alberto Cavalcanti, GPO Film Unit, 1937. Music:  Ernst Herrmann Meyer. ’Round Midnight. Bertrand Tavernier, Little Bear/​PECF, 1986. Musicians featured: Dexter Gordon, Lonette McKee, Herbie Hancock, Bobby  Hutcherson, Billy Higgins, Éric Le Lann, John McLaughlin, Pierre Michelot, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Palle Mikkelborg, Mads Vinding, Cheikh Fall, Michel Pérez, Tony Williams, Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton.

169

170

Film and Television Programmes Cited

The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme, Strong Heart/​ Demme Productions, 1991. Music: Howard Shore. The Sound of Jazz. Jack Smight, CBS, 1957. Musicians featured:  Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Count Basie, Jo Jones, Coleman Hawkins, Henry ‘Red’ Allen, Vic Dickenson, Pee Wee Russell, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Giuffre, Emmett Berry, Doc Cheatham, Roy Eldridge, Joe Newman, Rex Stewart, Joe Wilder, Bob Brookmeyer, Benny Morton, Dickie Wells, Earle Warren, Danny Barker, Freddie Green, Jim Hall, Nat Pierce, Mal Waldron, Jim Atlas, Milt Hinton, Eddie Jones, Ahmed Abdul-​Malik, Osie Johnson, Ryan Nelson, Jimmy Rushing. Spare Time. Humphrey Jennings, GPO Film Unit, 1939. Music: various popular. Stompin’ for Mili. Gjon Mili, 1954. Musicians featured: Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Bob Bates, Joe Dodge. Swinging the Lambeth Walk. Len Lye, GPO Film Unit, 1938. Music: Ernst Herrmann Meyer. Symphony in Black. Fred Waller, Paramount, 1935. Musicians featured: Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, Billie Holiday. That Was the Week That Was. BBC TV, tx. 24 November 1962–​28 December 1963. Trade Tattoo. Len Lye, GPO Film Unit, 1937. Music: The Lecuona Band. Tusalava. Len Lye, 1929. Silent. Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1958. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Whiplash. Damien Chazelle, Sony Pictures Classics, 2014. Music: Justin Hurwitz. The Wrong Man. Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1956. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Young Man with a Horn. Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros., 1950. Musicians featured: Hoagy Carmichael, Harry James.

170

171

Index Entries in italics refer to images Adam, Kenneth, 95–​96, 111 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 23, 26, 32, 36–​37, 39 advertising, 23, 28, 30, 37–​40, 48, 121, 126–​127 Allen, Henry ‘Red’, 104–​105, 107, 109 Armstrong, Louis, 31, 67, 124 audiences British responses to jazz, 24–​25, 31–​32, 34, 42, 48 film audiences, 7, 26–​28, 40, 47, 72 live audiences, 1, 18, 47, 68, 103 studio audiences, 86, 87, 95, 98–​99, 105–​107, 115 television viewers, 86, 96, 99, 101–​102, 103, 107 Avakian, Aram, 81 Avakian, George, 81 Baker, Chet, 128 Baker, Kenny, 88, 104 Balázs, Béla, 21–​22 Ball, Kenny, 93, 106 Balliett, Whitney, 18–​19, 117 Barber, Chris, 93, 104–​105 Barreto, Emilio ‘Don’, 24, 31–​33 Basie, Count, 18–​19, 69 Bassett, John, 92–​93 BBC2, 90–​91, 113, 115, 122 launch night, 83, 96–​98

limited reach of transmitters, 95, 100, 108 public concerns, 95–​96 BBC Four, 83, 114–​115 BBC Television Centre, 95, 97–​98, 106 BBC Television Theatre, 95, 97–​98, 106 bebop, 52, 64–​65, 72–​73, 124 Benjamin, Walter, 13–​14, 76–​77 Birdman, 128 Bresson, Henri-​Cartier, 61 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 12, 42–​43, 118–​120 myth of prejudice against jazz, 42, 86–​87 production of music television, 87–​89, 111–​115 snobbery towards Light Entertainment, 90–​93 Britten, Benjamin, 30–​31 Brookmeyer, Bob, 107 Brown, Ray, 77–​78 Brubeck, Dave, 53, 81, 104–​105, 109, 113 Bryant, Marie, 69–​73, 71, 74, 74–​75 Burks, Robert, 69 Burton, Humphrey, 92–​93 Callender, Red, 65, 69, 73 Calloway, Cab, 67 camera movement, 4, 117 in film, 6, 65–​66, 70, 81

171

172

Index in television, 19, 94–​95, 97, 103, 109, 115 Carter, Benny, 20 Catlett, Sid, 64, 69–​70, 73–​74 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 28, 41, 45 Clarke, Shirley, 12 close-​ups, 20–​22 in film, 11, 55, 65–​66, 73–​74 in television, 18, 62 colour, 4, 23, 36, 40, 48–​49, 117 expressionistic use, 6 sensual experience of, 33 Cole, Cozy, 60 Condon, Eddie, 60 costume coats, 88 dresses, 19 hats, 65, 80, 90–​91 suits, 65, 81, 84–​86, 112

Dodge, Joe, 81 Domnerus, Arni, 93

Dada, 33, 36 dance, 24, 34, 53, 56, 58, 65, 88 Granz’s objections to, 69–​70, 73–​74 The Lambeth Walk, 44–​47 The Lindy Hop, 59–​60, 74, 121 dance bands, 31, 64, 75 Dankworth, John, 93, 104–​105 Davis, Aaron, 1 Davis, Miles, 103, 120, 128 Davison, Harold, 96–​97, 100 Denton, Cecil, 90–​93 Derbyshire, Delia, 111 Dickenson, Vic, 20 digital broadcasting, 83–​84, 114–​115, 128–​129 dissonance / dissonant image, 4, 12–​13, 16, 75, 123–​129 social dissonance, 12–​13, 47, 123 Doctor Who, 110–​111 documentary, 3, 19, 28, 42, 53, 56 use of archive footage, 83–​84, 112–​114, 128 Dodd, Everett, 69

Farewell, My Lovely, 55 Fast Show, The, 4, 102, 114 Fischinger, Oskar, 33, 38 Fitzgerald, Ella, 77 Fox, Charles, 93

Edison, Harry, 66, 69–​70, 75, 76, 77 editing, 15 in film, 6, 8, 13, 25, 65–​67, 70, 76–​80, 118 in television, 88, 102, 109, 115 Eggeling, Viking, 35 Eisenstein, Sergei, 13 Eldridge, Roy, 20 Ellington, Duke, 31–​32, 60, 67–​68, 93, 99, 128 1933 UK tour and broadcasts, 42, 97 Ellington at Newport album (1956), 60 on Jazz 625 96–​100, 104, 107–​108 Ellitt, Jack, 27, 29–​30, 33–​34, 45

Garner, Erroll, 96, 105 gaze, the male, 5, 7–​11 genre, 9–​11, 100, 120 Gershwin, George, 67 Getz, Stan, 92 Gillespie, Dizzy, 110 Goode, Coleridge, 87–​88 Goodman, Benny, 68 Gottlieb, William, 19 GPO Film Unit, 12, 28–​29, 121 and advertising, 23, 38 experimentation within, 26, 28, 30 paternalism, 28, 36 politics of, 24–​25, 42, 48–​49 sound and music, 30–​31, 33, 41 Grainer, Ron, 90, 111 Grant, Duncan, 34–​35

172

173

Index Granz, Norman, 52, 67–​70, 72–​74, 77–​78 Grappelli, Stephane, 45, 93 Grierson, John, 28, 30–​31, 36, 38, 44, 49 Harris, Bill, 77 Harris, Rex, 93 Hawkins, Coleman, 18, 77–​80, 105–​106 Hayes, Tubby, 93, 104–​105 Henebery, Terry, 93, 100, 108, 128 later jazz programming, 106, 111–​112 plans for Jazz 625 93–​95 Hentoff, Nat, 18–​20, 62 Herridge, Robert, 18, 62, 89 Herth, Milt, 45–​46 Hinton, Milt, 20 Hitchcock, Alfred, 7–​8, 11, 69 Holiday, Billie, 17, 19–​22, 21, 60, 67, 128 Hollingshead, Gordon, 70 humour, 4–​5, 40 improvisation as construction, 6, 12–​13, 19, 22, 26, 52, 75, 77 mediated by recording 14–​16, 19, 107–​108, 117 instruments and editing, 8, 15, 65 and spectacle, 1, 11, 55, 63, 71, 81, 109–​111 Jacquet, Illinois, 69, 74–​75 Jazz 606 114 Jazz 625 12, 83–​115, 127–​128 camera movement in, 86, 97–​98 deployment of 625-​line UHF system 84, 95–​96, 107–​108 discarded titles, 94 as public service programming, 83, 107, 114–​115, 118, 128

rehearsal schedule, 97, 108 rejected venues, 94–​95 relationship to touring schedules, 92, 96, 100 repeats, 100, 112–​115 shooting schedules, 97, 99, 100, 108 staging of, 93–​95 visual commentary on music, 86, 109 visual experimentation, 100, 106, 110–​112, 128 Jazz at the Philharmonic, 18, 77–​78, 89, 121 first concert, 68–​69 Jazz Britannia, 83–​84, 114–​115 Jazz Casual, 12, 89, 100 Jazz Club, 92–​93 Jazz Goes to College, 106, 111 Jazz Is Where You Find It, 87–​88, 90 Jazz Journal, 93, 106–​108, 122 Jazz Monthly, 108 Jazz on a Summer’s Day, 106 Jazz Scene USA, 89 Jazz Session, 88, 90 Jazz Singer, The, 70, 122 Jennings, Humphrey, 28, 30, 48–​49 Johnson, James P., 60 Jones, Dill, 88 Jones, Hank, 77–​78 Jones, Jo, 64, 66, 69, 73–​74 Kessel, Barney, 52, 69, 72, 75 Knight, Arthur, 5, 122 Koller, Hans, 93 Krupa, Gene, 58 language, metaphor of, 16–​17, 22, 24, 39–​40, 123–​126 Latin music, 24, 31–​33 Le Sage, Bill, 93, 104 Lee, Spike, 81 Legg, Stuart, 28–​29

173

174

Index Leonard, Herman, 81 LIFE magazine, 52, 57, 59–​62, 69 lighting, 4, 117 chiaroscuro, 52–​53, 55, 65, 81 in film, in photography, 57–​58 in television, 18, 80, 98, 109–​111 Littlewood, Yvonne, 96–​100, 104 Lust for Life, 6 Lye, Len, 12, 23–​49, 52, 57, 126–​127 Birth of the Robot, The, 38 Colour Box, A, 23–​26, 25, 27, 29–​40, 33, 41, 48–​49, 126–​127 Colour Flight, 38 contracted by GPO, 30 direct film-​making process, 23–​24, 26, 29–​30, 33–​36, 37–​38, 44, 126–​127 engagement with film technology, 23–​25, 26, 29–​30, 33, 39, 41–​42, 47–​48 Free Radicals, 27 Full Fathom Five, 30, 33 Kaleidoscope, 31, 38 N or NW?, 39, 45 Particles in Space, 27 Peanut Vendor, 30 and primitivism, 27, 29, 34, 36–​37 Rainbow Dance, 31 Rhythm, 27 Swinging the Lambeth Walk, 44–​47 Trade Tattoo, 31 Tusalava, 29, 34 use of jazz soundtracks, 23, 24, 26–​28, 30–​33, 36–​37, 41–​42, 45–​47 work in advertising, 29, 37–​40, 48, 121, 126–​127 youth, 29–​30, 37 Lyttelton, Humphrey, 85 as critic, 20, 87 as musician, 93, 104 as television presenter, 84–​86, 113–​114

McLaren, Norman, 12, 48–​49 Marquee Club, The, 84, 95, 100, 106–​107, 128 Martin, Millicent, 90, 105 mass reproduction, 14–​15 materiality, 117–​118 in Lye, 24, 26, 34, 37–​38, 47, 49, 126–​127 in Mili, 51 Matisse, Henri, 1 Melody Maker, 32, 122 Meyer, Ernst Hermann, 27, 45–​47 Mili, Gjon, 12, 89, 106, 127 capturing motion, 56–​58, 75–​76 drawn to musical subjects, 56–​57 Improvisation, 53, 77–​81 inexperience as film-​maker, 69 Jam Session photo-​feature, 60–​62 Jammin’ the Blues, 51–​81, 106–​107, 117 Lindy Hop photo-​feature, 59–​60 photography for LIFE magazine, 52, 57, 69, 127 Stompin’ for Mili, 53, 81 use of flash photography and high-​ speed film, 52, 57–​59, 75, 77, 121 use of white and black studio flats, 53, 57–​59, 73, 118 Mo’ Better Blues, 81 Modern Jazz Quartet, 93, 104 modernism, 2, 4, 15 convergence, 1–​2, 24, 35 link to scientific developments, 25, 43–​44 and mass reproduction, 23, 32–​33, 35, 37–​39 Mondrian, Piet, 1 Monk, Thelonious, 4, 17, 19, 100 Morris, Marlowe, 69–​71 Mulligan, Gerry, 20 music television, 86–​89, 91–​92, 100–​103, 109, 127–​128

174

175

Index musical shorts, 51, 66–​68, 72, 127 Musicians’ Union (UK), 88–​89, 97, 100, 103 narratives of the jazz life, 3, 5–​11, 20–​21, 64 Nat King Cole Show, The, 89 nationhood, 12, 23, 25, 41–​49, 126–​127 New Jazz Studies, The, 2–​3, 5, 16, 122 New York, New York, 120–​121 Old Grey Whistle Test, The, 92, 112, 114 Outside Broadcasts (OB), 84, 92, 94–​95, 106, 112 Painléve, Jean, 44 Parker, Charlie, 53, 77–​80, 105 Peacock, Michael, 94, 97–​98, 106 Perkins, V. F., 15–​16 Phillips, Flip, 77 photography, 13, 59–​62, 81, 89, 121 and myth, 1–​2, 18–​20, 52–​53 physicality, 17, 19–​22, 61, 72–​76, 78–​79, 117 Pilkington Report, 90 pleasure, 3–​4, 15, 26 Pollock, Jackson, 1 Powell, Bud, 93 primitivism, 24, 33–​34, 36–​37, 42, 59–​60 projection, 24, 33–​35, 37–​38, 47, 53–​54, 118 Psycho, 9, 10 Race, Steve, 85, 93 composer of Jazz 625 title music 101 as presenter of Jazz 625 84–​86, 98–​99, 105–​107, 113–​114 as presenter of The Jazz Scene, 92, 94 radio, 15, 41–​42, 56, 61, 87, 89, 96, 118–​119

Radio Times, 42, 97–​98, 105, 112, 122 Raging Bull, 6 records, 13, 28, 31–​33 cover art, 1 liner notes, 81 V-​discs, 60 Red Shoes, The, 6–​7 Reinhardt, Django, 45 Reith, John, 86–​87 Rich, Buddy, 77–​78, 80 Richter, Hans, 35 Riding, Laura, 27–​30, 32 Ronnie Scott’s Club, 92 Ross, Ronnie, 93, 104 Rotha, Paul, 38 ’Round Midnight, 14, 76–​77 Ruttman, Walter, 30, 33, 38 Savage, Archie, 69–​70, 74 Scorsese, Martin, 120–​121 Scott, Johnny, 93, 105 Scott, Robin, 94–​95 Scott, Ronnie, 105, 112 Sheppard, Andy, 112–​113 Short Cuts, 122 Silence of the Lambs, The, 11 Simmons, John, 69 Sloan, Tom, 92–​93, 96–​97 Smight, Jack, 19 Solis, Gabriel, 4 Sound of Jazz, The, 17–​22, 52, 62, 89, 109 standards, 11, 64, 71–​73 stereotype, 2, 6, 56, 86 Surrealism, 33, 36 swing, 52, 64, 72–​73 synchronisation, 14–​15, 30–​31, 33–​36, 44–​47, 51–​52, 55, 77–​80, 91, 102 Tavernier, Bertrand, 14 Terry, Clark, 107, 128

175

176

Index That Was The Week That Was (TW3), 90, 92, 105 Top of the Pops, 112 Vertigo, 7, 11 vision mixing, 102 Vogue magazine, 60 voiceover, 52, 54–​56, 63, 88

Wheldon, Huw, 90–​92 Whiplash, 5, 8–​11, 10, 17, 119–​120, 128 Whistler, James McNeill, 9 White, Christopher Wesley, 110 Whiteman, Paul, 18, 68, 89 Williams, Mary Lou, 60 Wright, Basil, 28–​29, 38, 41 Wrong Man, The, 69

Warner Bros., 12, 51, 69–​70, 72, 77 Watt, Harry, 28, 41, 45 Webster, Ben, 20–​21 Welsh, Alex, 107

Young, Lester, 17, 20–​21, 51, 54, 54–​55, 63, 64–​66, 73–​75, 74, 77, 81 Young Man with a Horn 4, 7–​8, 9, 76

176