Spike Milligan monologue to premiere at the Sligo Jazz Project + 10 jazz moments from classic films to savour
Tomorrow at the Sligo Jazz Project sit back and enjoy a short presentation of clips featuring classic moments capturing the essence, and redefining the image, of jazz on film to be found within some classic feature films over the years. Part of the vibrant free entry Friday Night Social at The Model the presentation includes the premiere of a new Spike Milligan monologue starring actor Barry Cullen, who played the blind man in W. B. Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand in the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company production recently mounted on Cummeen strand. Both the monologue and film spot, produced by Spike Sligo, will also be shown at a lunchtime Sligo jazz project summer school spot.
There’s a great deal to consider when you approach the subject of jazz on film and even more so jazz “moments.” It’s not just jazz as soundtrack. There’s also the jazz atmosphere conjured up. But what about improvisation, how can you capture that sense in film? And is there an ultimate jazz location, and if so should that be New Orleans, Chicago, New York, or is that too corny? Is there a time, an era, and do you really have to go all the way back to when the quasi-mythical Buddy Bolden walked the streets of New Orleans to really get inside jazz on film? One thing’s for sure: you can’t be too literal or cliché-loving in dealing with jazz. The more film-makers are the bigger traps they fall into. Need I mention Lady Sings the Blues?!
In these clips, all from feature films, you’ll get a spread of emotions and atmospheres and types of jazz and a sense of moment, the sort of impact you might experience in hearing the music live at a gig.
The image of the music encompasses a range of preoccupations. As you’ll see there's psychodrama, for instance in the Roman Polanski clip from his classic early film Knife in the Water where jazz, represented in the clip by the saxophone playing of Bernt Rosengren, is a metaphor for freedom.
There's jazz as a big city music introduced by the music of a jazz-influenced classical composer in George Gershwin opening jazz-mad director Woody Allen’s wonderfully evocative hymn to Manhattan.
And biopic gets in too: Clint Eastwood’s warts-and-all portrait of the doomed genius Charlie Parker, Bird a great example. Eastwood in some ways has been one of the Hollywood directors since the 1970s to most put jazz centrestage, although not without controversy. Yet his use of a jazz standard as a leitmotif and plot device in his stalker drama Play Misty For Me, in just one example, one of his most original ideas in a long career of movie-making where jazz often features more prosaically as part of the furniture.
The seedy jazz club atmosphere is well captured in the earlier noir Sweet Smell of Success with music by the great film composer Elmer Bernstein. Its latterday image is also here, too, captured in the much more recent Spike Lee film Mo Better Blues with African Americans as the main plot protagonists rather than bit players as they tended to be in early, deeply unsettling Hollywood films dealing with jazz in a still segregated America.
In terms of capturing the romance of the music, there’s none finer than Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight just one example of the enduring French love affair with the music.
Yet there’s little here to represent free jazz or more experimental jazz forms (documentaries to an extent are much better than features in this regard), although John Cassavetes’ Shadows comes closest. Not only did he use jazz as his music of choice even if Mingus didn't deliver the music he wanted but the director also explored improvisation as a dramatic process with his actors, along the way giving birth to independent cinema in the US.
Comedy is best captured in the Blazing Saddles and Some Like It Hot clips, potent reminders to all jazz people, film makers included, not to take themselves too seriously. The sound of laughter as crucial here as the sound of surprise captured elsewhere.