Jazz on a Summer's Day (1958)

Mahalia Jackson and Duke Ellington around the time they made their album together.  

Jazz on a Summer's Day is an unusual and unique concert film taken from the Newport Jazz Festival of 1958, the only film of its kind ever released with just some of the greatest performance footage from such artists as Chico Hamilton, Eric Dolphy, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Big Maybelle, Chuck Berry, Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong. It begins magically with this little piece by Jimmy Guiffre.  George Avakian determined which songs were shot based upon his knowledge of which songs would be cleared for release. 

Tonight I felt the urge to see once again the fascinating sequence of a very handsome and focused Chico Hamilton playing something really special on the drums, almost operatic in intensity with Eric Dolphy on flute the only time I've ever seen him play that I can recall.  Directed by the photographer Bert Stern, who had never done anything of this type before, and shot entirely in a lush color, Hamilton plays against a red background.  

He had some notion of casting Chico Hamilton as a leading man although it seems as though the plot ultimately fell away and it is a concert film.  Nonetheless, Chico Hamilton's time on screen is absolutely magical. 

Otherwise, there is also wonderful footage of the audiences, the town, the seagulls and the sail boats entirely in period costume.  The late 50s seems a strange, photogenic place. 

This is the photographer who took those extraordinary shots of Marilyn Monroe in the nearly nude shortly before her death.  Still he isn't necessarily the kind of photographer I love, very conventional, very mainstream.  Duke Ellington and Miles Davis were there that year but not in the film because he had been told he wouldn't be able to get clearance to screen them.  He actually says he didn't like Miles Davis anyway because he was too far out so this is no musical connoisseur.   Everybody and his brother seems to have played that year and not made the film for some reason or another. 

But I love this film, nonetheless, for what it does have.  It is filled with so many rare musical and visual moments, perhaps because George Wein, who was the Daddy of the Newport Jazz Festival, was rarely in the habit of allowing filmmakers to film and screen films of the Newport Jazz Festival.  Apparently, this deal with Stern did not leave a good taste in Wein's mouth and so there were no more such projects although I would imagine there is quite a pile of footage sitting in some vault somewhere waiting for the dust to settle sufficiently so that it can be re-edited into the version that will be known of the festival by posterity, now that the Newport Jazz Festival no longer exists and that time that no longer is seems so magical with Chuck Berry singing "Sweet Little 16" backed up by Philly Joe Jones on drum and Jack Teagarden on trombone.  

Of course, always the best thing is Mahalia Jackson's set, which ends the film with her rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" the way we use to sing it at Abyssinian Baptist Church when I was a child.