IS THERE A PERFECT JAZZ MOVIE? PART TWO - STILL HUNTING

To re-cap on the previous Musing, I’m looking for a film whenever and wherever made which has a look, dialogue and ambience successfully capturing the essence of the jazz culture and experience. 

Once again I stress - film criticism (like jazz criticism) is a very subjective business and those who read this might well disagree with all or some of what I say. As visitors to my house will know, I am a tremendous film as well as music enthusiast and my tastes range over film noir, French and Japanese movies, B westerns and British B crime films.

Thinking about jazz movies for the current project, I’ve already jotted down notes about seven titles…………… But the fact is that I have only ever come across ONE such film which does it for me (and one near miss).

Having examined The Connection, Ornette Coleman made in America and I called him Morgan last time, I’m going to look at two more quite famous ‘nice tries’ this week. As before,  Points out of ten!

4.  BIRD (1988)

Directed by Clint Eastwood (serious jazz fan whose own son is a professional bass player), this is a worthy and brave attempt to capture the life and work of be-bop founder and genius of the alto saxophone Charlie Parker. 

It must have been very difficult to cast anyone as a convincing Parker, the most enigmatic human being. The role went to major film star FOREST WHITAKER . He won a Best Actor award at Cannes but I don’t find him convincing. Indeed, in any film I’ve seen him in, he seems, whether he’s a doctor, a cop, a hitman or a gay British soldier, to be playing himself. It’s almost as if his own persona always gets in the way of the character in question.

By contrast, there is one magnificent, stand-out performance: DIANE VENORA gives a moving portrayal of Chan Richardson, the last partner or “common-law wife” in the parlance of the 1950s of Bird.  The episode of the death of their baby daughter Pree is very well handled.

Eastwood had certainly done his homework on the apocrypha of Bird’s frantically lived life, down to the legend that drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal across the stage to land at the young Parker’s feet as a token of his disapproval. Good visual footage, especially in slow motion, but not a detail to dwell on, even if historical, bearing in mind how brilliantly we hear Parker soloing on Cherokee in 1941 at age 21 on a rare recording. 

Talking of rare recordings brings me to my main problem with this slightly glossy biopic.

 The word is that Columbia front-office executives insisted that current musicians were hired to re-record Parker’s music. So Eastwood was obliged to get a sound engineer to electronically isolate* Bird’s solos from the original recordings in order that modern backing in smooth hi-fi could be grafted on.

*(yes, I’m a split-infinitive enthusiast like Raymond Chander!)

 Quality musicians were brought in (the likes of Ray Brown, Walter Davis jnr , Jon Faddis and Barry Harris, no less) but the results sound very contrived and artificial, at least to all of us who have worn out the grooves on scratchy records of Bird heard with the actual contemporaneous be-boppers Max Roach, Tommy Potter, Bud Powell, McKinley Dorham et al. 

The script for BIRD is based on Chan’s memoirs. Thus once again, while this gives a certain air of authenticity, we end up with what is essentially (shades of the later I CALLED HIM MORGAN discussed last time) the story of one relationship. 

The film sacrifices any attempt to answer the fundamental question why was Bird a key figure (or perhaps the key figure) in the history of modern jazz. 

Instead, perhaps predictably, it concentrates on the more box-office question of why did he die so young.

7/10

5.  ROUND MIDNIGHT (1986).

I’m a huge fan of French director Bertrand Tavernier. I have a number of his films in my DVD collection which I would happily watch any evening: L’horloger de Saint Paul with the superb Phillipe Noiret, Coup de torchon (a very original version of Jim Thompson’s novel Pop.1280), L.267 about a suburban police narcotics squad, or L’appat based on a juvenile murder case – the list goes on.

 And yet. AUTOUR DE MINUIT, one of his most ambitious, well known and well-loved projects, leaves me with a few reservations.

On paper, it looks like a win-win. Pay “hommage” to the Paris jazz scene in 1959 (fertile nostalgic ground). How?

You secure the services of veteran designer Alexandre Trauner – famous for his work on ‘poetic realism’ films of the thirties like Quai des brumes and Hotel du Nord – and ask him to build a studio set recreating the old streets including a replica of the Blue Note club as it then was.  

And you put together a script by adapting the book about BUD POWELL written by his friend and amanuensis in Paris FRANCIS PAUDRAS

and merging these reminiscences with the story of LESTER YOUNG’s last visit to Paris at the end of his short life. i.e. you roll into one visiting American legends Bud and Lester, blending their respective personal problems – in Bud’s case mental illness and a domineering wife, in Lester’s alcoholism, debilitation and despair.

Finally, you pull off the masterstroke of getting the single resulting amalgamated fictional character (“Dale Turner”) to be played by a slightly later generation iconic American visitor to Europe: tenor saxophonist DEXTER GORDON.

Except that the film is not only or mainly about the fictional character played by Dexter Gordon. It is also about (arguably with more emphasis on) the French fan called “Francis”, played effectively by actor Francois Cluzet. [Cluzet’s finest performance, which I highly recommend, is as a paranoid jealous husband in Claude Chabrol’s thriller L’enfer.]

 The part he plays here – “Francis” – is of course the above-mentioned real life Francis Paudras. Because Tavernier’s film is  based on Paudras’ book, and because Cluzet gives such a vital and engaging performance, it is not difficult to see why“Francis” plays at least as big a role as “Dale Turner”.

DEXTER is captivating on screen. You have to accept from the start, however, that he is just being himself. After all, he always was larger than life. (I know - I’ve been on the stand with him.) 6 foot six. Striking blue eyes. Deep, drawling voice. This is an endearing cinematic self-portrait. And the scene on the beach with Francis’s daughter is enchanting.

But then we have to consider his age. He was already 63 at the time of filming in 1985/6 and he would be dead four years later.

In Paris at the setting of the film, Bud Powell was only 35 and Lester Young was only 49. Although they would both soon be dead too ( Lester as soon as he returned to the States before the age of 50 and Bud in 1966 at the age of 41), Dexter seems strangely already too old and tired for the role. 

His shambling gate and ultra-slow speech make him seem like a 70-year old at least.

But, for me, the main stumbling block is his playing.

Having been a Dexter fan all my life, I always think of the towering power and energy of his playing on the classic recordings of the 1960s – Doin’ allright, Go, A swinging affair, Dexter calling, even Our man in Paris (recorded with Bud Powell! in the French capital back in 1963).

Here, his playing is so lack-lustre and lethargic that it’s just not credible, let alone convincing, that Francis and his contemporaries would go into raptures about it. Lester Young, ill and frail as he was in Paris in 1959, still played with creative invention and flashes of beauty which were captured on record.

A further problem about the music (mostly provided by Herbie Hancock, who appears on screen on piano) is a similar one to that encountered with the Eastwood film BIRD – the backing groups are far too modern and slick for the tired sounding Dexter, let alone for resembling a 1959 French rhythm section.  The one welcome detail of authenticity is the appearance on the bandstand of veteran French bass player PIERRE MICHELOT who was actually on the local scene in 1959.

At the end of the film “Dale” goes back to New York. This part of the story line echoes the fate of Lester Young, even including a flea-pit hotel obviously modelled on the ALVIN hotel opposite BIRDLAND where Lester spent his last days staring out of the window at the comings and goings to and from the club where he had played so often in earlier days. 

One historically wrong and rather unsuccessful subplot is to show “Herschel Evans” (Lester’s old tenor rival in the prewar Basie band) as having died in the same hotel room.

The New York coda to the film is helped enormously by a hilarious cameo from MARTIN SCORSESE as a hard-bitten manager with a line in bullshit and an eye to cheating his musician clients out of every cent he can.

All in all, a fascinating piece of film making by a master director and something of an acting triumph by Dexter. It just doesn’t all quite hang together for me.

8.5/10

 [In the next Musing, my runner-up and winner]