Jazz on a Summer’s Day

Directed by Bert Stern (1960) ****

In 1958, commercial photographer Bert Stern (he designed and shot, among other projects, the promotional photos for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) made his only feature film, an 85-minute documentary on the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. The festival, through some name and venue changes, started in 1954 and continues to this day.

Many passionate jazz fans are disappointed by the festival acts Stern didn’t film that weekend. Those include: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, Lester Young, Ray Charles, Sonny Rollins and, especially the Miles Davis Sextet (before they recorded the classic LP, Kind of Blue). Moreover, some act’s visual footage is interrupted by cutaways to water reflections and looks at the contiguous 1958 America’s Cup yacht races. While successful at setting the mood of the place and time, these cutaways can make music lovers want to tear their hair out. But — let’s look at what Stern did include in this wonderful, important document.

As Jazz on a Summer’s Day begins, the vast sea of wooden audience chairs are empty. Stern shoots in tight close-up on the Jimmy Giuffre 3 performing “The Train and the River”, already halfway done — a shot so tight, Giuffre’s face sometimes leaves the frame and guitarist Jim Hall can’t be seen performing at all. The music is exquisite.

Thelonious Monk’s performance of “Blue Monk” is marred by too many voice-overs and cut-away shots and the next act is introduced in mid-solo: Sonny Stitt, tenor sax and Sal Salvador, guitar. What we do hear, though, is great; Salvador, despite his time with the Stan Kenton orchestra, should have had a much longer and more substantial career.

Anita O’Day, little known now but a timeless powerhouse, sashays onstage in regal splendor and sings/scats two songs with delirious precision and grace. She steals the show with her vocal technique, humor and poise, accomplishing vocally what bebop instrumentalists bring.

Throughout the film Stern and editor Aram Avakian (brother of Columbia Records jazz producer George Avakian) cut to the diverse audience, males, females, blacks, whites, rich and not so rich. The music transcends all social strata (most of the bands are racially integrated, too). Seeing the film now, it’s also jarring to see a huge crowd concentrated on what’s transpiring on stage (or murmuring to each other) instead of taping, tapping and texting on phones. This audience is present, alert, involved. Stern also takes downtime to shoot tableaus of nearby residential life, with the acute eye of a novelist or sociologist. A band practices in a dark apartment room. Parties and dancing and music and kissing are everywhere. Jazz holds sway over this otherwise patrician locale.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day, though shot out of order on different days, is triumphant in showing the changing atmosphere as sunlight leads to dusk and into the night. The performances somehow become more electric and mysterious as the daylight fades. Few films I’ve seen capture the phenomenon like this one.

After performances by George Shearing and Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan tears through his “Catch as Catch Can”, with Art Farmer at his side. Then, just to mix it up, legendary R&B singer Big Maybelle and then Chuck Berry are up next; Berry is always fun to watch, but he needs a rock and roll backing band. The house band behind him is relatively subdued and possibly puzzled or bemused by this upstart genre.

Before Louis Armstrong performs, the Chico Hamilton Quintet play the quietly powerful “Blue Sands”. Then it’s Armstrong and jazz trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden, hamming it up, among other songs, on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair”. Armstrong was the most expensive musician Stern had to arrange to pay ($25,000), but his star appeal is universal and will probably always remain so.

Lastly, after midnight (it’s now Sunday), gospel titan Mahalia Jackson takes the stage brightly lit in a sea of darkness, singing three gospel songs and ending with “The Lord’s Prayer”. The audience is hushed and ending credits appear.

To further complicate the compromises Stern had to make to get the film produced, his selection of musical tracks was dependent on George Avakian’s cooperation (Columbia recorded the music) and recommendations, with an emphasis on what music could be easily cleared and affordable. This, coupled with the amazing array of acts Stern didn’t film, can seem a lost opportunity. However, there’s an immense amount to enjoy in what was fortunately filmed and recorded. I first saw the documentary around thirty years ago, and in the passing of those three decades, Jazz on a Summer’s Day seems more essential, more precious, more full of life and more needed than ever before. In 1999, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

The New Yorker Video DVD included an extensive booklet and a documentary on Stern’s career. In it, we discover Stern originally tried to create an interesting narrative story to wrap the performances around. Be grateful he didn’t!

Beware: the DVD (unlike other DVDs) would not play in my laptop, caused the laptop to freeze up, would not eject, and had to be manually dislodged from the device in a precarious maneuver. The disc, on the other hand, played fine in a DVD unit. It’s hoped the problem is relegated to the particular DVD copy I played, and not in all the copies across the board.

—Michael R. Neno, 2018 June 16