May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 49Netflix drama ‘The Eddy’, featuring two
episodes by ‘La La Land’ director Damien
Chazelle, punctures the romantic myths of
jazz culture by exploring the gritty reality of
the lives of musicians and staff in a club in
modern-day Paris. Jonathan Romney tunes inSONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE
Joanna Kulig, who showed
her vocal skills in Pawel
Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold
War, stars as chanteuse Maja
in The Eddy (left), about a
Parisian jazz club run by
American expat Elliot Udo
(André Holland, right, with
Amandla Stenberg, playing
his daughter Julie)t least since 1925, when clarinettist Sidney
Bechet arrived in the city, jazz and Paris have
been un joli couple. You might say that the city
provided a special transformative optic on jazz in much
the same way that French cinephilia turned American
thrillers into something different, film noir; a jazz record
of the 1940s or 50s means something different depend-
ing whether you’re listening in Paris or New York. Before
and after World War II, Paris became a mythical sanctu-
ary for expatriate jazz to flourish in: in the sojourns of
legends like Bud Powell and Lester Young; in the impro-
vised session in which Miles Davis and French musicians
created the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold
(1958); in later experimental dates like the Art Ensem-
ble of Chicago scoring now-forgotten film Les Stances à
Sophie (1970) and recording with avant-garde chanteuse
Brigitte Fontaine.
There have also been films celebrating, or mythifying,
the connection: Martin Ritt’s Duke Ellington-scored Paris
Blues (1961), with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as
expat musicians and Louis Armstrong as a veteran star;
and Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986), in which
saxophone great Dexter Gordon, himself a one-time resi-
dent, played a jazzman on his uppers, inspired by Powell
and Young.This history is echoed and updated in The Eddy, a
new Netflix series that streams from early May. Its star
attraction for cinephiles is that its first two episodes
are directed by Damien Chazelle, who explored jazz
themes in Whiplash (2013), La La Land (2016) and his
debut Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009). In fact,
the series was originated by songwriter/producer Glen
Ballard, who wrote a set of songs, formed a band to play
them, and suggested to the series’ executive producer
Alan Poul that they could become the basis of a movie.
They brought in first Chazelle, then prolific British stage,
screen and TV writer Jack Thorne (Channel 4 series Na-
tional Treasure;, 2016; and the stage play Harry Potter and
the Cursed Child), who worked on the scripts along with
other names including playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
The other directors, each shooting two episodes, are Poul,
France’s Houda Benyamina (Divines, 2016), and Moroc-
can filmmaker Laïla Marrakchi. But attention will in-
evitably focus on Chazelle’s involvement – and judging
by his episodes, the two I have seen, jazz fans who were
vexed by his previous films (and many were) should be
impressed by the way he has loosened up here and really
captured a modern picture of the music, while some-
what demystifying the Paris milieu.
Set in modern-day Paris, the series revolves around
a club called The Eddy, run by two musicians, French
trumpeter Farid (Tahar Rahim) and Elliot Udo (André
Holland), a pianist and composer from New York who
writes the material for the house band, which he’s trying
to get signed for a record deal. Elliot has his own
formidable CV – he used to record for legendaryA