THE CRY OF JAZZ: WHY JAZZ IS DEAD

“The most prophetic film ever made . . . it predicted the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s and gave the basis for them.” Willard Van Dyke, pioneer American documentary filmmaker, Curator of Films, The Museum of Modern Art, 1971

“. . . packs more of a wallop than the ENTIRE 10 disc Ken Burns Jazz documentary.”

Shandrasblog December 20, 2009

Ed Bland's 1959 film -- THE CRY OF JAZZ -- more current than ever.

"Bland's insights into the art and politics of jazz . . . are profound. . . . the movie, which is as heartfelt as it is analytical, suggests a new dimension in music criticism."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010

“The Cry of Jazz is a deep look into what jazz actually is and its metaphoric relationship to its creators, Blacks in America. . . . The ideas and thoughts expressed by the main character/narrator . . . were the seeds of the civil rights movement. . . . foresees Hip Hop Culture. . . a historically significant picture [that] should be added to the United States National Film Registry.”

Alexander Acosta’s Film Review, January 9, 2009

THE CRY is an essay film. One of its argument is that jazz is dead. This was a highly controversial notion when the film was released in 1959. It still is controversial. Following are more excerpts from the article I wrote for Film Culture magazine (no. 21, Summer 1960), continued from my previous posting.

 . . . although jazz was originally the exorcism of a hopeless and timeless demon, in the past 10 years or so it has become a cult of romantic and futuristic pretensions. No one could be further from the spirit of jazz than the typical member of this romantic futuristic cult: the Hipster who seems to be invading and disturbing the present but shaky sanctum of American conformity.

        

What then, is the future of jazz? None. Jazz is dead!

        

The musical reasons for the death of jazz center around the restraining elements of jazz. The restraining elements are the form and the changes. If any attempts are made to develop the form and/or the changes, the swing or the spirit of jazz is lost. Since the jazz body cannot grow, it can only repeat itself. In so doing, it is stagnant, in so doing, it is dead. The three reasons for the death of jazz are: (1) that the changes cannot evolve and retain the form; (2) that the form cannot evolve and retain the swing; and (3) that both the changes and form cannot evolve simultaneously and have jazz. In all three alternatives, we have no growth in jazz. And this is what is meant by the death of jazz.

         Due to the exhaustion and contradiction of the musical materials which constitute jazz, those materials no longer function as adequate means for the creation of the worship of the vividness of the present moment. New musical means will have to be forged in order to achieve the end of constructing those works which articulate the esthetic and religious dimension opened up by jazz. While jazz as a minimal response served both as a holding action and a delineator of the vividness of the present, it is now incumbent on the hard core of Negro creators and musicians who chose to create thru the American Negro experience to enlarge on the legacy which jazz has left. Otherwise the Negro as he stands now is dead, for he exists in either the ridiculously stilted snobbish and anxiety-ridden Negro middle class, or the smooth fluid amorphous “white” Negro scrounging around trying to find some way of identifying with white America.

Coming April 2010 - NYU Orphan Film Symposium

THE CRY OF JAZZ REVISITED

“The most prophetic film ever made . . . it predicted the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s and gave the basis for them.” Willard Van Dyke, pioneer American documentary filmmaker, Curator of Films, The Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

“. . . packs more of a wallop than the ENTIRE 10 disc Ken Burns Jazz documentary.”

Shandrasblog Dec. 20, 2009

Ed Bland's 1959 film -- THE CRY OF JAZZ -- more current than ever.

"Bland's insights into the art and politics of jazz . . . are profound. . . . the movie, which is as heartfelt as it is analytical, suggests a new dimension in music criticism."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker, Jan. 11,2010

“Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal re-creation in the eternal present.

Denied a future and a past, the present moment must be the accent of time in which the Negro invests his passion. The joyous celebration of the present is the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him.”

Ed Bland, Film Culture, 1960

Following the release of THE CRY OF JAZZ in 1959, Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, head of the New American Cinema and Anthology Film Archives, asked me to write about the ideas that led Mark Kennedy, Nelam Hill, Eugene Titus, and myself to form KHTB Productions in Chicago and make this film. The above and  following excerpts appeared in an article in  Film Culture (No. 21, Summer 1960). Please note that the word Negro was used in the article because that was the polite expression used to refer to blacks or African-Americans at that time.

PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS FOR “THE CRY OF JAZZ”

The Negro was kidnapped and taken to American shores to serve as a tool in the growth of the appetitive American economy. The essence of slavery is the use of a human body and soul as the raw material of another’s creation.

         

After arriving on these shores, the Negro was allowed no future – for him, time stood still. His past was snatched from him by prohibiting him the use of his language, by destroying his tribal and familial ties, and wiping out his Gods. The Negro’s image of himself was destroyed.

No people can live without an image of themselves, and no soul is the raw material for another’s creation. The soul demands freedom; if it cannot fight, it will argue, if it cannot argue nor persuade, it will dance, it will sing. If reason is denied, then art must arise. In a sense the Negro did not create jazz; he was jazz.

 Jazz was the Negro’s act of transcendence; without this act, the Negro would have been a sub-human animal or dead. The question arises, however, as to the absoluteness or total boldness of this transcending act and the nature of its structure.

Given the kind of human outrage perpetrated upon the Negro, his response at best could be no more than minimal – namely, a distillation of the essence of his American experience that would meet the demands of giving him a soul, an image, and a memory. If that could be accomplished, it would indeed be achievement enough under the circumstances. In short, the Negro’s transcendence thru jazz was at best a holding action, a holding action until he was able to make a profounder estimate of his American experience.

If, during the time of the invention of jazz, he had made a yet profounder reckoning, he may have been involved in violence. The failure of over 100 slave revolts convinced the Negro that there was little to be gained thru the continuance of his Apache period, especially when it became apparent that violence was exactly what the American white desired so as to have further justification to destroy the Negro.

This holding action called jazz was a conflict with the endless daily humiliation of American life which bequeaths the Negro a futureless future. Thru jazz one can become aware of the Negro’s image of himself.

 It is an image of a man peculiarly sensitive to the vivid present. . . .

Inherent in this worship in its vivid present is an esthetic and/or religious dimension fundamentally at odds with the romantic and arrogant way white Americans have of looking into the future.

To be continued……

COMING APRIL 2010 to The ORPHAN FILM FESTIVAL

THE CRY OF JAZZ

“The most prophetic film ever made . . . it predicted the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s and gave the basis for them.” Willard Van Dyke, pioneer American documentary filmmaker, Curator of Films, The Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

“. . . packs more of a wallop than the ENTIRE 10 disc Ken Burns Jazz documentary.”

Shandrasblog Dec. 20, 2009

Ed Bland's 1959 film -- THE CRY OF JAZZ -- more current than ever.

"Bland's insights into the art and politics of jazz . . . are profound. . . . the movie, which is as heartfelt as it is analytical, suggests a new dimension in music criticism."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker, Jan. 11,2010

Coming April 2010 - NYU Orphan Film Symposium