Sight&Sound - 05.2020

52 | Sight&Sound | May 2020

THE EDDY

TEN KEY JAZZ FILMS CONTINUED

A Great Day in Harlem

Jean Bach, 1994

On 12 August 1958, on East 126th Street, New York, photographer Art Kane

took a group portrait of 57 jazz musicians for Esquire magazine, including

Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Count Basie, Charles Mingus and

Thelonious Monk. Bach’s Oscar-nominated documentary tells how the

picture came to be taken, partly through 8mm footage by bassist Milt

Hinton. Quincy Jones narrates, with Gillespie and Sonny Rollins reminiscing.

I Called Him Morgan

Kasper Collin, 2016

The history of jazz lives is inseparable from high drama, even tragedy, and

this is one of jazz’s most arresting stories: the life and tragic death of

prodigious trumpeter Lee Morgan. Other documentary portraits to

discover: Let’s Get Lost, photographer Bruce Weber’s unashamedly

icon-making 1988 tribute to trumpeter, crooner and all-time pin-up Chet

Baker; and Charlotte Zwerin’s revealing study of the most idiosyncratic of

piano greats, Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988).

Cold War

Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018

Not strictly a jazz film, although it features a virtuoso performance by

The Eddy star Joanna Kulig, who previously played a club singer in his Ida

(2013). About a musical couple who defect from Poland’s institutionalised

folk world, the film is partly Pawlikowski’s tribute to the Polish musicians

who found a new form of expression through jazz, among them composer-

pianist Krzysztof Komeda, whose scores for Roman Polanski’s early

films introduced the Eastern European jazz sensibility to cinema.

Jonathan Romney

Mo’ Better Blues

Spike Lee, 1990

A rare movie about a player who has made a successful career, breaking

away from romantic clichés of squalor and defeat. Denzel Washington leads

as trumpeter Bleek, and the music is by the Branford Marsalis Quartet, with

Terence Blanchard on trumpet. Like many jazz films, this dramatises

musicians’ eternal conflict with the Man, but Lee got into trouble over the

characterisation of two nightclub owners, which many felt was anti-Semitic.

Kansas City

Robert Altman, 1995

Dominated by Harry Belafonte’s balefully rasping gangster ‘Seldom

Seen’, Altman’s drama was a richly atmospheric evocation of a key

music hub of the 1930s. Assorted contemporary musicians play the

roles of period greats, such as Mary Lou Williams and Ben Webster.

Altman’s TV film Jazz ’34 was a performance sidebar to the fiction,

featuring such modern experimenters as Olu Dara, Don Byron and

the late Geri Allen playing their versions of the period music.