When you see film footage from the '40s or '50s, it's often hard to look beyond the stiff, sometimes flowery trappings of that era. Jazz singer Anita O'Day performed "Let Me Off Uptown" with trumpeter Roy Eldridge on film in the early '40s, complete with plenty of quaint accompaniment. "Well come here, Roy, and get groovy," she tells Eldridge, before offering a dance like polishing a window; fake palm trees stand behind the band; everyone wears formal attire; dancers high-step through a painted set.
This, it seems, is about as far as you can get from the flash, glitz and overt sexuality of many a modern music video. (On the other hand, Gene Krupa mans the drum kit with an abandon prefiguring Keith Moon's rock antics.)
For modern viewers, all those antiquated Swing Era trappings contribute mightily to the overlooking of the cultural context. Jazz was clearly an established art form by the early '40s, but it's easy to forget just how large a challenge it posed to white American culture in the beginning. Jazz, after all, was the music of African-Americans, and, to gain popularity, had to overcome all the worst stereotypes white listeners brought.
The quaintness of O'Day's interaction with Eldridge was in fact about as far from quaint as you could get when it was filmed. She was not only a young white woman appearing with an African-American musician—scandalous in itself—she was also inviting him to come "get groovy." It may well have been about as envelope-pushing as Britney Spears making out with Madonna onstage a few years ago.
On the other hand, the artistic merits of O'Day's performance leave behind musical lightweights like Spears or Madonna. Her voice is a gorgeous mix of husky and clear, and her deeply adept rhythmic singing taps into something just as primal as the brassy wail of the jazz trumpet. O'Day knew her way around songs like few others, no matter her race and no matter her well-documented hard living.
A documentary about her, Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, just opened a series of jazz films screening at Amherst Cinema. The series is hosted by WFCR's Tom Reney, of the Jazz ? la Mode program.
I asked him about jazz' scandalous air. "Jazz was about personal and social liberation from its inception," said Reney. "Many musicians who are attracted to the form do so because it is so open and unrepressed. This is the art of self-expression. When one is working at the levels that Anita O'Day, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker and others are working at, there's no room for repression. It's not going to make it in the jazz idiom."
It is for just those reasons that the film series is worth checking out. It's too easy to dismiss jazz as yesterday's music, especially when the ubiquity of rock and pop has eroded the capacity of many a listener to comprehend or enjoy the complexities and subtleties of other forms.
Reney says these films are "fairly candid and revealing explorations of who these people are," and for many, that may be the key to revealing that all-important cultural context, to understanding the long-term cultural impact of a purely American art form.
And it doesn't hurt that, with the remarkable singing of Anita O'Day or the sophisticated harmonic explorations of Thelonious Monk's piano playing, the soundtrack is unparalleled.
The next installment of the jazz film series is Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser, screening Oct. 6.
