Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (1959; his only film), codirected by Aram Avakian (who also served as editor), features Thelonious Monk, with Henry Grimes and Roy Haynes, Louis Armstrong with Trummy Young and Jack Teagarden, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Jimmy Giuffre with Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall (playing The Train and the River), the George Shearing Quintet, Sonny Stitt with Sal Salvador, Dinah Washington, Anita O’Day, Gerry Mulligan with Art Farmer, the Chico Hamilton Quintet (with Eric Dolphy and Fred Katz), Armando Peraza, Eli’s Chosen Six (a Yale University student ensemble that includes Roswell Rudd), and many others, including such unexpected presences as Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, and Big Maybelle. Shot in gorgeous color, it’s probably the best feature-length jazz concert movie ever made. Despite some distracting if attractive cutaways to boats in the opening sections, it eventually buckles down to an intense concentration on the music and the audience’s rapport with it as afternoon turns into evening. Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of The Lord’s Prayer and Anita O’Day’s up-tempo and partially scat version of Tea for Two are especially luminous highlights. Stern didn’t have much of an idea of what distinguishes mediocre from good or great jazz, so all three get equal amounts of his attention. But he’s very good at showing people listening, and digging what they’re listening to. Selected in 1999 for preservation by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” – in this case, quite clearly, all three.

Jonathan Rosenbaum