“Jazz on a Summer’s Day”

“Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is a series of tender tableaus about an America vibrant with nuanced character, curiosity and hope.

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Bert Stern’s and Aram Avakian's film is set in and round the Newport Jazz Festival, the July 4th weekend of 1958, and Sunday, July 6th in particular.

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Music sustains its montage, but its syncopation moves also by way of quiet and reflective pans. Scenes of Americas Cup yachts racing and the attendant, masts-climbing and masts-perching spectators segue with scenes of fans at the Festival. Fans contemplative. Fans judgmental as they smoke cigars. Fans in jerseys, fans in stripes, and one afternoon's fan striving with her camera between spectators and stage for that right angle  and INSIGHT as she also manages the two-tone hat on her college-age, focused and seeking pretty head.

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Everyone looks alive. Fun is in the air. An open-air roadster bears Trad Jazz enthusiasts blowing atop their seats--Eli's Chosen Six, from Yale University, including Roswell Rudd. Sincere creation is the guiding spirit. Bay water ripples and dancers step with drinks high on balconies and rooftops.

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Monk and Trio of Roy Haynes and Henry Grimes play a daylight slot, introduced with reverential non-analysis by Willis Conover. Listeners bend their heads respectfully to the dancing dissonance. Chico Hamilton rehearses his Quintet through  "Blue Sands" in the third-story of a stately downtown house.  At night in Freebody Park before Newport’s crowd Eric Dolphy's flute and John Pisano's guitar and the mallets-reverberant groove (Yes, Charlie Watts, Chico was a monumental model) are a padding, provocative ritual like Vodun and Alap. Art Farmer solos twice in the Quartet (Henry Grimes again) led by an uplifted and then digging-into his heels Gerry Mulligan. Anita O'Day has two songs, resplendent in HER big black set off by white fringe and the rhythms and innuendos she intones ("Sweet Georgia Brown" in many ways and means) through the horn of her white teeth. Dinah Washington's "All Of Me" is glorious and couples' delight. 

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Chuck Berry has a turn of duck-walking Rock ’n Blues before appreciative Newport Blues All Stars (Jo Jones, Jack Teagarden, Rudy Rutherford, ... ) and more dancers in their T-shirts blue jeans bob, twirl, and shake IT up.

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Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson are the movie’s last two main performers. Grand professionals, knowing their effects, they’re spiritual beyond calculation, too. Louis with Jack Teagarden sings of that rascal they’re glad the butcher did cut down, and Mahalia of New Orleans’ Black Pearl, a near generation younger than Louis in her nurturing by that city most American in its multi-racial mix, brings the rows of rapt and admiring more to stillness as her voice digs deep and they feel some God or Gods swell.

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“Jazz on a Summer’s Day” was shot by a mere three cameras, Bert Stern’s and Courtney Hafela's and Roy Phelean's. "How did they get ALL those shots?" Maryse and I wondered. "We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know what we couldn't do. We just wanted to make a movie." Aram Avakian edited the footage like a painter hop-skipping with his palette and delighted by how the discoveries gel. Energies and sympathies are marvelous like those bellwether interstices of Summer 1958—Rock ’n’ Roll and Beat and emergent, unrelenting Revolutions pressing edges of the mainstream toward coalescence. The whole of musicians and crowd—Black, White, Brown, Jewish, Latin, Irish, WASP, ...—feels like one variegated piece. “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is reminder of the America that once was and still can be. 

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The otherworldly vitality, empathy, sensuality and individual intelligence so lovingly rendered by Bert, Aram, Courtney and Roy was just 64 short years ago.

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                                                                                  Don Paul, first completed 8:37 a.m., 1/20/22