Jazz on a Summer’s Day

In 1958, jaz­z’s place in Amer­i­can cul­ture was chang­ing. It was climb­ing out of the smokey night­clubs and into the sun­ny embrace of the bour­geoisie. A younger force, rock and roll, was start­ing to push it aside. That sense of tran­si­tion is pre­served in Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val.

Kei­th Richards has called Stern’s movie “a para­ble on film of the changeover of pow­er between jazz and rock and roll.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Life, Richards describes his youth­ful pil­grim­age with Mick Jag­ger to see Chuck Berry’s per­for­mance in Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day:

The film had Jim­my Giuf­fre, Louis Arm­strong, Thelo­nious Monk, but Mick and I went to see the man. That black coat. He was brought on stage–a very bold move by someone–with Jo Jones on drums, a jazz great. Jo Jones was, among oth­ers, Count Basie’s drum­mer. I think it was Chuck­’s proud­est moment, when he got up there. It’s not a par­tic­u­lar­ly good ver­sion of “Sweet Lit­tle Six­teen,” but it was the atti­tude of the cats behind him, sol­id against the way he looked and the way he was mov­ing. They were laugh­ing at him. They were try­ing to fuck him up. Jo Jones was rais­ing his drum­stick after every few beats and grin­ning as if he were in play school. Chuck knew he was work­ing against the odds. And he was­n’t real­ly doing very well, when you lis­ten to it, but he car­ried it. He had a band behind him that want­ed to toss him, but he still car­ried the day. Jo Jones blew it, right there. Instead of a knife in the back, he could have giv­en him the shit. But Chuck forced his way through.

Lat­er gen­er­a­tions of jazz lovers have been per­plexed by the film, not because of Chuck Berry, but because of the film­mak­er’s focus on every­thing but the jazz. At one point Thelo­nious Monk is soul­ful­ly play­ing “Blue Monk” when the film sud­den­ly cuts to the Amer­i­ca’s Cup sail­boat race and the jar­ring voice of a radio announc­er describ­ing the scene. Ouch.

Just as painful, in ret­ro­spect, are the omis­sions. The film­mak­er took a pass on per­for­mances at the fes­ti­val that year by Duke Elling­ton, Dave Brubeck, Lester Young, Son­ny Rollins and the Miles Davis Sex­tet. “Yes,” writes Alan Kurtz at Jazz.com about the Davis sex­tet, “the last unit fea­tur­ing Can­non­ball Adder­ley, John Coltrane and Bill Evans was the same super­group as would eight months lat­er record Kind of Blue and of which no motion pic­ture or video footage now exists.” Ouch again.

But Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day is still a won­der­ful film. Stern was one of the great­est adver­tis­ing and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers of his gen­er­a­tion. He was a 28-year-old still pho­tog­ra­ph­er when he went to New­port and basi­cal­ly invent­ed the music per­for­mance film genre. While Stern’s com­mer­cial work tends to be care­ful­ly con­trolled, Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day exhibits the pho­tog­ra­pher’s con­sid­er­able gift for observ­ing peo­ple in their nat­ur­al set­ting. There are many doc­u­ments of the way peo­ple looked in the late 1950s, but few are this vivid. Or this visu­al­ly elo­quent.