A Film by Jean Bach
The Story and Sounds Behind the Most Famous Photo in the History of Jazz!
HARLEM MORNING
By Whitney Balliett
Around ten o’clock on a morning in mid-August of 1958, an extraordinary group of jazz musicians began gathering outside a row of brownstones on 126th street. between Fifth and Madison Avenues. They had been invited by Esquire to have their picture taken for a special jazz issue, scheduled for January of 1959. Fifty-eight musicians turned up. They included New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Kansas City and bebop musicians – the whole glorious jazz schmear as it existed in the late fifties in New York. There were megastars (Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Gene Krupa); future stars (Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Art Blakey and Horace Silver); former Ellingtonians (Rex Stewart, Lawrence Brown, Tyree Glenn, Oscar Pettiford and Sonny Greer) and former Basieites (Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Jimmy Rushing, Vic Dickenson, Jo Jones and Emmett Berry); great teachers and shapers (Mary Lou Williams, Luckey Roberts, Willie the Lion Smith, Red Allen and Zutty Singleton); indispensable journeymen (Milt Hinton, J.C. Higginbotham, Joe Thomas, Stuff Smith, Wilbur Ware, Chubby Jackson, Hank Jones and J.C. Heard); an Eddie Condon contigent, minus its leader (Pee Wee Russell, Miff Mole, Bud Freeman, Max Kaminsky and George Wetting); one American woman singer (Maxine Sullivan) and one English woman pianist (Marian McPartland); a ringer (an unknown musician from Buffalo named Bill Crump); and one mess-up (Willie the Lion), who, bored with waiting in the hot sun, had wandered off when the chosen shot was taken, leaving a noticeable gap next to Luckey Roberts. The youngest musician, at twenty-eight, was Eddy Locke, and the oldest, at seventy-one, was Roberts.
It had been the notion of Robert Benton, then the art director of Esquire, to include a batch of new photographs of jazz musicians for the January issue. He brought in Art Kane, a young hotshot freelance art director, and Kane suggested that a group photograph be taken in Harlem, the cradle of New York jazz. He also offered to take the picture himself, even though he’d had almost no experience as a photographer. The word went out on the jazz grapevine, and the musicians began trickling in on time, despite the heavy duty of being anywhere but in bed at ten in the morning, (Jazz musicians are night creatures; a musician at the shoot said he was astonished to discover that there were two ten o’clocks in each day.) Because they are peripatetic, jazz players sometimes don’t run into one another for years at a time; as the crowd swelled, so did the milling, the pressing of the flesh, the hugs and the how-ya-beens. Kane started shooting anyway. Milt Hinton, a fine amateur photographer, handed his wife , Mona, his 8mm movie camera and told her to aim it and press the button. He himself began taking stills; so did a student of Willie the Lion’s named Mike Lipskin. Eventually, the crowd formed a ragged line on the sidewalk between two high brownstone stoops. Then, with Kane pleading and shouting from across the street, part of the group, led by Red Allen, rose up onto the stoop, in between, so that the assemblage resembled an upside-down “T.” Count Basie, tired of standing, sat on the curb, and twelve kids, mostly from the neighborhood, sat next to him, forming an emphatic line under the picture. Some of the musicians were coatless and in sports shirts, but most wore ties and jackets. Some were even in dark suits, and seven had hats on. Except for a few nervous Young Turks like Johnny Griffin, Mingus, Sahib and Rollins, everyone looked pleased and relaxed about being where he was. Dizzy Gillespie, standing at the far right with his legs crossed, is sticking his tongue out at his one-time idol, Roy Eldridge, who is directly in front of Gillespie and has turned his head awkwardly toward him. Gillespie, the irrepressible, had obviously just called, “Hey, Roy!”
Kane took a hundred and twenty exposures, and the final selection duly appeared as a double-page spread in Esquire. It caused a small sensation and soon became a permanent part of jazz arcana. The image also stuck in the head of a pretty, witty, famous New York blonde named Jean Bach. Born in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee, Bach has been a passionate jazz fan since she was eighteen and began hanging out with Duke Ellington and Roy Eldridge. In 1941, she married an Eldridge imitator, Shorty Sherock, and spent seven tumultuous years travelling with Sherock’s group. (“It was a strange band,” she once said. “It had a floating Basie-type rhythm section and an Italianate trumpet section that played a little sharp and real loud.”) Then she got a divorce, moved to New York, married a TV producer named Bob Bach and, in time, began producing the Arlene Francis show on WOR radio. She retired in the eighties, and several years ago she began brooding about Art Kane’s picture. The surprising result is a brilliant, funny, lissome documentary film called A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM. It’s about the taking of the picture, and it’s also about mortality, loyalty, talent, musical beauty and the fact that jazz musicians tend to be the least pretentious artists on earth.
Jean Bach lives in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s old studio on Washington Mews, and the other day she sat in her living room and talked about her film. “I kept asking myself how all these fabulous musicians had got together on somebody’s brownstone stoop in Harlem to have their photograph taken. All I knew was that a man named Art Kane had taken it and that it had run in Esquire. I started asking musicians I’d run into who were in the picture how it had come about, and I’d generally get the hazy, gee-I-can’t-remember-man answers. One day I noticed that only a dozen or so of the fifty-seven people in the picture were still with us, and the electric light went on. It was time for me to interview the survivors, and maybe film the interviews, for the record.”
Bach talked to her friend Bill Harbach, who had made some short films, and he put her onto a film person named Kemper Peacock, who found her a cameraman named Steve Petropoulos. Before she knew it, she had fifty or sixty hours of interviews. She talked to Johnny Griffin and Art Farmer, both of whom live in Europe, at New York gigs, and she filmed Bud Freeman in a retirement place in Chicago. She finally caught up with the elusive Art Blakey in “his gorgeous West Side apartment.” She shot Gerry Mulligan in his house in Connecticut, and she did several interviews in her living room, placing each musician in a different part of the room to fool the viewer. Sahib Shahab died two weeks after she talked to him, and Blakey three months later, and since then Freeman, Gillespie, Buck Clayton, Max Kaminsky. Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Basie and Eldridge have gone. Then Milt Hinton told Bach’s friend Charles Graham about Mona’s 8mm film, and she decided to somehow combine that footage, if it still existed, with the filmed interviews-in other words, to make a movie. Bach asked her friend Kathryn Altman, Robert Altman’s wife, for advice, and she suggested that Bach get in touch with a producer named Matthew Seig, who works with Altman. Seig said yes, and when Mona Hinton’s film was finally found, in Milt‘s basement in Queens, Seig told Bach that it was time to rent a studio and hire an editor. They hired Susan Peehl, who edited the fine 1993 Billie Holiday documentary Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holliday, and put her in a studio apartment over on Third Avenue, where she lived the picture night and day for the next year and a half. Seig also came up with the brilliant idea of using footage from the Sound of Jazz television show, which aired just six months before the Harlem shoot and included many of the same musicians.
Bach went on, “Then I discovered the joys of getting permissions from music publishers to use their music. There are twenty-three songs, or pieces of songs, in the picture, and to date they have cost well over a hundred thousand dollars. I realized early on that I couldn’t swing all the costs myself, and I applied to every foundation that exists, and all I could hear was the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut across the country. I finally got a grant from a baby friend in Milwaukee. She and her husband have the Jane and Lloyd Pettit Foundation.”
The film was first released in 1995, and it has been praised worldwide. “So far, I’ve only had one real demurrer,” she said. “And it came from Artie Shaw. We’re old friends, and when we had lunch on the Coast a little while ago I asked him what he thought of the picture, and he said, ‘Jean, do you want me to be polite, or do you want me to be honest?’ I said the latter, and he had all these niggling criticisms, and then I realized what was really bothering him. In the film, sweet Bud Freeman speculates that in a hundred years Pee Wee Russell might prove to be more highly thought of than Benny Goodman. What rankles Artie is that Freeman said Goodman. If he had said Shaw, Artie would have just laughed and said something like, ‘Oh, Pee Wee.'”
Susan Peehl’s quicksilver editing of A GREAT DAY mixes interviews (she sometimes cuts rapidly back and forth between two musicians talking about the same subject, to give the impression that they are conversing with each other), archival footage, sequences from the astonishing Sound of Jazz, Mona Hinton’s film, Hinton’s and Mike Lipskin’s stills and more than a dozen of Art Kane’s alternative shots. She mixes these last in such a way that the musicians move and talk and gesticulate: you are on 126th Street in 1958. She also gives us miniature portraits of Thelonious Monk playing (his feet flapping like flounders on the floor beneath the piano) and doing one of his impromptu dances and of Lester Young in his famous black porkpie hat, his flat eyes peering out of his pale, flat face. Near the end of the film, there is a calm, and Art Farmer says, “We don’t think about people not being here. If we think about Lester Young, we don’t think, well, Lester Young was here, but he’s not here any more. Lester Young is here period. Coleman Hawkins is here. Roy Eldridge is here. They are in us, and they will always be alive.” Farmer has a dark, heavy voice, and he makes you shiver.
From the accompanying booklet in the DVD case
In August 1958,in front of a Harlem brownstone, first-time photographer Art Kane assembled 57 of the greatest jazz stars of all time and snapped a picture that would live forever. Narrated by Quincy Jones, this “irresistible” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times), Academy Award-nominated documentary (1995) examines the fascinating lives of the musicians who showed up that day to make history. Through remarkable interviews with nearly 30 jazz greats (including Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey), home movies shot by Milt and Mona Hinton, and rare, archival performance footage, A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM tells the story behind a legendary photograph that is still alive and kicking – and jammin’!
From the back of the DVD case