Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959)

Directed by: Bert Stern | 83 minutes | documentary, music | Starring: Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Chico Hamilton, Anita O’Day, George Shearing, Jimmy Giuffre, Chuck Berry, Jack Teagarden, Thelonious Monk, Danny Barcelona, ​​Buck Clayton, Urbie Green, Jo Jones, Max Roach

Music festivals are no longer so self-evident these days. After all, less than two years ago (at the time of writing this review) you could basically reside at festivals all summer. It is therefore not surprising that viewers get extra festival jitters when they see the restoration of ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’. However, this time it is not the umpteenth Woodstock edition or a large Dance festival, but a festival registration of Newport Jazz Festival from 1958, then only the fourth edition. Yes, you read that right, a festival where you can enjoy an abundance of music for a few days with hundreds, if not thousands, of people. At that time, the American leisure industry was already rocking.

If you can enjoy the gospel goddess Mahalia Jackson, sublime jazz singer Anita O’Day, and jazz legends Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk, ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’ has you covered. Sometimes the camera is so close to these performers that you can see the beads of sweat rolling down their foreheads. The artists put everything they have into their music. That in itself is a great pleasure to see. Yet the viewer is not completely on the first rank. Certainly by today’s standards, you can sense that sound recording technology was still in its infancy at the time of ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’.

However, even if the sound quality is not quite optimal, you should not only look with your ears, because ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’ offers so much more. The film brings a bygone era to life in a glowing way. At Newport Jazz Festival, people usually sit timidly on chairs instead of headbanging in front of a stage, bouncing around in a muddy mosh pit or being dragged to the nearest emergency room. But they also go wild in the evening. Also pay attention to how mixed the audience is. In addition, the film gives impressions of the Newport area and its population, who are slowly preparing themselves for the musicians and festival goers. Among that audience you already catch glimpses of a youth movement that seems to have come straight out of Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” (1957). Spot the beatnik, so to speak, in this beautiful time document.

Even if the music scene is not entirely to your taste, ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’ still shows all kinds of interesting possibilities for the synergy between image and sound. In the film, her editing follows the rhythm of jazz on the soundtrack. Always moving forward, (a)rhythmic, and above all modern. In addition, the makers made use of unconventional camera angles, overlapping and mirroring of images. These cinematic experiments of form are reminiscent of the playfulness of the silent film classic ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (Dziga Vertov, 1929). Like this Soviet classic, poems are written with images, but to the notes of jazz. In short, the visual rhyme shows how America could be completely jazz for a while, in which experiment and improvisation were central. ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’ shows both our past and future, forever rehearsing and associating, never quite finished, as befits a good jazz session on a summer afternoon.