Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film by Kevin Whitehead (2020)

The movies and jazz, two distinct and very creative forms of impressions, have produced quite a few gems, whenever allowed to cooperate and great composers, musicians, cast and directors would meet.

Apart from the many short clips, early varieties of the music video, and brief live footage, there are also several film genres that deal more or less exclusively with jazz musicians. This could be some of the many musical shorties of the 1940s, the soundies, a short musical clip that featured a particular band. Alternatively, a full-length movie, following, for example, the rise, development and sometimes fall of a jazz musician, who more often than not was portrayed by a (mostly white) actor whose musical performance was dubbed by a real jazz man.

In the title at hand, however, Kevin Whitehead, longtime jazz critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and author of many titles on jazz, on 390 pages has the focus on the way jazz and its protagonists are perceived as part of American popular culture, or how a jazz subculture at a particular time was perceived by its respective director. This makes sense, as there already are several guides and reference titles on the shorties and soundies; and representing an entire subculture would be much easier in a full-length feature film, too.
“Play the Way You Feel is partly about jazz movies as a narrative tradition with recurring plot points and story tropes, and we will trace their spread not just through the best-known films that deal with jazz – the likes of Young Man With a Horn, Lady Sings the Blues, or La La Land – but also overlooked low-budget features and TV movies: any pertinent commercial release in English we could identify and view. … [P]lus longer looks at jazz-related series Staccato and Treme.”

There were years with busy jazz film production, and those times when jazz vanished from the scene, if we rate public interest in jazz music by its representation in contemporary movies. Depending on the production year, “… for a while anyway, jazz represented a kind of artistic and cultural sophistication.”

It is hard to say how one art form may have developed without the other, had their popularity and technological advancement been set apart by many decades. As jazz shorts would dramatically increase the popularity of musicians in places they would never tour, but that provided access to their music whenever there was a movie theater in town. Luckily, both arts profited from an era most productive and inventive, argues Whitehead.
Furthermore, they share many stylistic and compositional features: “Jazz and the movies make natural allies. These signature twentieth-century art forms grew up side by side, building on extant traditions. … Jazz and film are performance arts that unfold over time. Making time fly is all about rhythm, and patterns of tension and release.”

Following this thought, for example, a camera close-up equals a musician playing a solo, as both get maximum attention for a short time. And movies “cross-cut between simultaneous scenes to build tension. Jazz orchestras build similar tension via call-and-response: punchy phrases between brass and saxes, recalling the byplay of preacher and choir.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to presenting/filming such artistic expressions, or in a way converting the jazz style improvisation into camera moves, cuts and various forms of flashbacks and fading images, the transformation or adaptation failed to find huge audiences. Those films quickly were labeled rather experimental in nature and would not attract many viewers. As movies can only go so far to assimilate certain techniques from another art form. And there were more obstacles of atheistic, technical and even political nature, as indeed musicians’ biographies get flattened to fit a common scheme, poor miming of instrumental scenes or “how the movies whitewash jazz history.” Besides, most real jazz musicians were not fond of their parts or brief scenes whenever cast.

In 11 chapters, Kevin Whitehead moves through the history of jazz in film and films with jazz, thereby covering almost one century of artistic cooperation. He starts chronologically and presents a good perspective on the development of jazz, its performers and how directors and audiences would be trained to connect jazz and film. “In charting how movies tell jazz stories, Play the Way You Feel connects examples over time, spotlighting a few endlessly varied themes. Black musicians educated white ones, who then play their feelings, expressing themselves in subterranean venues; cats of any color would rather fight than compromise their art, Jazz occasionally clashes with classical music, rock, or pop. Where people or styles are in conflict, a climatic (Carnegie Hall) concert may help sort things out.”

The first two sections briefly analyze a few jazz shorts, to serve as a rough design for several jazz-related long films of the swing years. With WWII and the theme of service stints and the draft for jazz men, chapter three observes daily routines and camaraderie in selected movies. Biopics and a huge amount of both film and TV productions surfaced in the 1950s, so the focus is on just a few favored items in chapter four.

Chapters five and six (the most interesting sections, one could say) deal with jazz tales of the 1960s, in particular with John Cassavates’ series Johnny Staccato, a masterpiece of its time and still one of the best noir/detective/jazz series ever. (And having so few jazz serials to choose from, this is easily explained). His feature film Shadows opens chapter six, followed by classics such as Paris Blues, The Connection, All Night Long, Sweet Love Bitter, and A Man Called Adam. All of these films came with great soundtrack LPs, following the film starts, by the way.

New York, New York, Lady Sings the Blues and other big studio productions of the 1970s make up chapter seven. ‘Round Midnight, the remarkable Bird and The Gig are among the few 1980s productions of the next chapter, while the young guns of the 1980s who appeared in films of the 1990s open chapter 9.

A rarely considered aspect, namely the depictions of the fan and jazz man in film in general are the subject of the short chapter 11, while the final section follows the many New Orleans jazz films. The last movie under discussion is Bolden, devoted to one of the very first jazz men ever (who played rather an early form of ragtime/blues style), whose tales and exploits live on mostly in oral history and who never recorded, lacking the technology of its days. So the title here comes full circle, going back to the humble beginnings of jazz.

With a lot of research, insights and background on jazz, jazz biographies and the eye and ear for a certain lore, mystery, and irony whenever biographies, anecdotes and oral jazz history are referred to, Whitehead presents a fine work on some aspects of the jazz film. Well worth reading and having on the shelf.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2022

Kevin Whitehead. Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film. Oxford University Press, 2020, 380 p.