Conference Agenda

The subject of jazz’s representation in film has received a good deal of attention in both musicological and interdisciplinary scholarship since the 1990s. This paper is intended to contribute to this conversation through an examination of musician/director Mike Figgis’s 1988 debut film Stormy Monday. Set in Newcastle, the film tells the story of jazz-devoted club owner Mr. Finney (portrayed by Sting) and his relationships with various elements of the city’s business sector, and its connections to the criminal underworld. A key element in the film is the celebration of “America Week,” a festival which serves as the public face of efforts by corrupt American business magnate Francis Cosmo (Tommy Lee Jones) to secure investment opportunities through the use of ethically-dubious practices. Throughout the film, Figgis – himself a musician in his early career – uses jazz to comment upon various aspects of the story. Traditional New Orleans jazz provides the musical veneer to obscure Cosmo’s efforts, complete with a second-line parade through the city’s streets (with entirely white performers). Figgis’s use of a fictional free jazz group, the Krakow Jazz Ensemble, provides a kind of sonic resistance to Cosmo’s efforts. During a kick-off reception for the celebration, Cosmo expresses frustration and anger at the group’s abstract, cacophonous sound, at one point telling a subordinate to “shut those motherf_____s up!” For Mr. Finney, jazz serves as a refuge from the harsh economic realities of late 1980s Britain, losing himself in his bass playing at his club, bookended by portraits of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Figgis’s framing of jazz is deliberately contradictory; it is both a soundtrack to American capitalism and as an act resistance to it. His use of a group from Poland, then still a member of the Soviet-dominated Communist bloc, is especially striking, positioning an experimental jazz group from behind the Iron Curtain as a commentary upon Reagan-Thatcher era capitalist expansion. In this way, Stormy Monday provides an important commentary on the nature of jazz and national identity within the context of both the Cold War, and the pronounced stylistic retrenchment of American jazz in the late 1980s.

In 1956, Duke Ellington with the help of Billy Strayhorn wrote a musical allegory about the history of jazz called A Drum Is A Woman. In his story, a woman who can turn into a drum, Madame Zajj (derived from jazz spelled backwards), travels around the world, visiting Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and even the moon, as a muse to inspire male musicians to play jazz. Ellington had been considering a project like this since his early career—music for the New Orleans scene was borrowed from a failed project about Louis Armstrong led by Orson Welles in the 1930s. A Drum Is A Woman was first released as an LP in 1957 to advertise the full production: a TV episode. A first for Ellington, the tv show dramatized his music, marrying it with scenery, narration, and dance. Together, his music and this visual display make a compelling work. Its title and the work itself, however, are understandably controversial, clearly asserting that women are drums to be beaten.

Years later, Ellington wrote in his autobiography that Paul Whiteman, the white jazz bandleader from the 1920s, “dressed her in woodwinds and strings and made a lady out of jazz,” quoting A Drum Is A Woman’s narration. As revealed by Daphne Brooks, however, Whiteman never made this statement. Instead, it was made by the conductor Walter Damrosch in his commentary about George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F (1925), a piece he commissioned. Despite this prevailing misunderstanding of who made the “lady jazz” statement, it was in Ellington’s consciousness for decades, especially as he finalized A Drum Is A Woman. I argue that Ellington took issue with Gershwin and Whiteman’s mission to “make a lady out of jazz,” and Madame Zajj serves as Ellington’s response to their gentrification of jazz. Ellington’s characterization of Zajj’s ladyhood is unlike the reserved lady of Whiteman’s jazz due to her promiscuity. Therefore, I argue that Ellington’s counter to Whiteman’s lady ultimately suggests that Whiteman was unsuited to the work of elevating jazz. That responsibility belonged to Ellington, a musician who understood and respected Black culture.

This presentation addresses the intersection of two cultural forms that came of age over the course of the 20^th century: motion pictures and jazz music. Indeed, this pair veritably grew up together. Recall that the first commercially successful full-length film to synchronize sound with moving image was called The Jazz Singer, from 1927. Whether or not that movie—or any of the subsequent releases that feature jazz—accurately depicts the lived realities of those who actively participate in this music, jazz films do reflect and shape moviegoers’ understandings of the genre, including not only how, why, by whom, and for whom jazz is created, but also where that music is created. And in this regard, filmmakers have tended to set their jazz scenes in nightclubs. Think, for instance, of Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues (1961), Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986), Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), Robert Altman’s Kansas City (1996), Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), or Disney’s animated feature Soul (2020). To be sure, such venues have long served as vibrant gathering places for jazz musicians and their audiences. Yet most jazz today isn’t performed in clubs or concert halls. Rather, academic institutions—high schools, colleges, and universities—now play the central role in presenting and defining the genre. My talk addresses cinematic depictions of jazz in these less-mythologized locales. Focusing on movies from the middle decades of the twentieth century—that is, before the widespread flourishing of formal jazz programs —I show how these films offer a type of jazz education in their own rights: By considering these relatively early images of, or narratives about, jazz in schools, we gain new perspective on the evolution of the music’s literal and figurative place in the world.