Programme curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Now that jazz is no longer assumed to be automatically synonymous with decadence and the forces of darkness, it can finally be experienced and evaluated on its own terms, and we can begin to look back on a century-long partnership of jazz and film with a certain objectivity. Both are relatively new arts roughly contemporaneous with the 20th century, having grown out of socially disreputable origins and having fought for serious recognition.
Part of this partnership has yielded the ‘jazz film’, a subgenre basically devoted to the recording of performances. But there are also successful collaborations between the expressive possibilities of jazz and film. And the ways in which jazz has been used in movies invariably tells us a great deal about the social, ethnic, aesthetic, and cultural biases of diverse societies and periods. The various responses of film producers to integrated jazz groups in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, provide a kind of thumbnail social history. Sometimes black musicians were forced to play off-screen while white stand-ins mimed their solos and sometimes white musicians were kept in the shadows to appear black.
Perhaps the first known conjunction of jazz and the fiction film took place in the same year that the first jazz recording was made, when The Good for Nothing (1917), a now lost silent comedy showed the Original Dixieland Band. Leaping ahead to the sound film, we come upon Black and Tan Fantasy, a remarkable short made in 1929 by Dudley Murphy. Later on, while Soundies saw jazz films mass produced and turned into jukebox attractions, the dream of a ‘pure’ jazz cinema was made a reality in films made by artists with a background in animation or photography.
Some directors are more adept at using jazz than others. Directors who like to improvise on occasion seem to have a special feeling for the music. In the movies of jazz aficionado Howard Hawks, musical get-togethers between allies always have strong communal functions. Only Ball of Fire (1941) and its remake, A Song is Born (1948), use unadulterated jazz explicitly to advance the mood of fellowship in the plot, but the principle is the same in the songfests of some of his best films.
Private torments as well as collective euphoria infuse the atmospheric surfaces of such fiction films as All Night Long (Basil Dearden, 1961) and When It Rains (Charles Burnett, 1995), while Bert Stern and Aram Avakian’s exuberant Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959), a documentary filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival, finds the same euphoria in the audience as well as onstage. Finally, Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (Johan van der Keuken, 1967) presents a portrait of a jazz great in exile.

Ehsan Khoshbakht and Jonathan Rosenbaum