Jazz, Blues, and Literature

The Blues is a musical form with its mythic origins between Memphis and New Orleans. A synthesis of spirituals and field hollers, the blues began as a meditative, rural lyric poetry with accompanying guitar or piano, but it also served as a forum for self-expression and social protest as well as up-tempo dance music at Saturday night juke joints. In addition, the blueswomen of the 1920s brought African-American vocal techniques together with the commercial music of the minstrel stage and vaudeville, effectively influencing all American popular music beginning in the Jazz Age. The musical form developed through using European chords, scales, and musical instruments, but musicians Africanized each element: blues singers tended toward “blue” notes often a quarter-tone above or below Western notation; slides and bent notes made guitars “talk” as if vocalizing; sophisticated African-derived rhythmic elements transformed guitars and pianos into percussion instruments used as much for dance grooves as to carry melodies. Blues first became an urban music in cities such as Memphis and St. Louis, then shifted into the more upbeat rhythm-and-blues in the 1940s.

After World War II, the Blues developed into a range of rhythm-and-blues styles: the slick West Coast style of Charles Brown and T-Bone Walker, the jump-blues style of Louis Jordan and its swing singers such as Dinah Washington and Ruth Brown, and the stamp-press Chicago blues sound that came up from the Mississippi Delta. The careers of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf are emblematic as professional musicians from the primal Delta origins of blues who played, apprenticed or experienced the first generation of musicians: Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson. In the bands of these two blues kings of Chicago, the rural, acoustic blues developed into urban, industrial, electric blues powered by electric guitars and pounding bass drums. The musicians of the British Invasion passed their records from hand-to-hand as if they were sacred texts – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Pete Townsend, and Van Morrison, to name only a few – and later albums such as The London Muddy Waters Sessions (1970) and The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (1971) remain documents of this transatlantic cultural influence.

Jazz was America’s most popular music from 1917-1945. The musical practices that jazz brought into American culture — its rhythmic sophistication, improvisation, and space for individual soloing — have influenced all subsequent popular musical forms, from swing to soul, from rock-and-roll to hiphop, from funk to techno. Yet the artistic achievement of blues and jazz musicians remained un-sung until the 1970s due to artistic (and aesthetic) racism. Jazz and blues were often considered folk music or just popular music (or worse, commercial music); jazz did not fit into Eurocentric artistic objectives or ideals around the composer or written score. Jazz creates an artistic forum for musical conversation that also requires individual self-expression: each musician must contribute to the creation and sustenance of a groove and also out and solo, an act of spontaneous artistic composition. As a musical form, jazz created something entirely new through its emphasis on improvisation and conversation: an ideal of ensemble individuality.

There were three generations of culture wars fought around the recognition of jazz as an indigenous American art form and now often called “America’s classical music.” The social mobility of jazz raises the following questions central to the fields of history, art history, sociology, race and ethnicity, and culture:

1. What constitutes vernacular American culture?
2. How does artistic production by Americans emerge?
3. What is the process by which it achieves value as part of national identity?
4. What can cultural wars around definitions of American culture tell us about issues of race, ethnicity, culture, and national identity?

Recognition for jazz from Europe — in particular, from France — took American music critics by surprise. The first full-length study of the music, Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music (1934), was by French critic and jazz enthusiast Hugues Panassie and soon full-page ads appeared in the first magazine focused primarily on jazz, Down Beat (first issue, 1934).

Here is an early example of a French intellectual recognizing the artistic and aesthetic power of the jazz solo. Philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir caught New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet and his band at a nightclub on 52nd Street in New York in 1947. She left this evocative observation of how his solos provided musical joy, therapy and resistance to an African-American female cook who kept peeking out of the club’s kitchen to listen to the band:

Bechet could not dream of having a public worthier of his genius than the dark-faced woman in the white apron who appears from time to time at a little door behind the platform. She’s probably the cook, a stout woman in her 40s with a tired face but big, avid eyes. With her hands resting flat on her stomach, she leans toward the music with a religious ardor. Gradually, her worn face is transfigured, her body moves to a dance rhythm; she dances while standing still, and peace and joy have descended on her. She has cares, and she’s had troubles, but she forgets … [them], forgets her dishcloths, her children, her ailments. Without a past or future she is completely happy: the music justifies her difficult life, and the world is justified for her. She dances … with a smile in her eyes that’s unseen on white faces, in which only the mouth expresses gaiety. And looking at her, we understand the greatness of jazz even better than by hearing Bechet himself.

The blues women of the 1920s produced the first feminist body of work in American culture (and literature) and yet they were stars across gender and racial lines. For African-American audiences, their songs mediated the excitement and nostalgia generated by the Great Migration from the agrarian environment of the South to the urban, industrial North and West. The role of these women as cultural leaders was captured early by Sterling Brown’s poem, “Ma Rainey” (1932) and later in August Wilson’s Broadway play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982). The songs and performances of Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, and Clara Smith (among others) focused on young women afoot in a brave new world of independence, transience, sexuality, violence, loss, and mobility. In the songs of blueswomen, the themes of family and domesticity are conspicuous by their absence: there is barely a husband, child or kitchen in the entire body of work.

With her deep, powerful contralto, Bessie Smith’s songs foregrounded an individual woman’s experience: she sang alternately with lusty pride and melancholy of sexual desire and economic hardship. She ran her own vaudeville troupe, drank and fought hard and often, and once scared off a bunch of Klansmen by herself. The protégé of Ma Rainey, Smith sang of the road as a metaphor for life: “I’m a rambling woman…with a rambling mind.” Her artistic influence remains vital in artists from Bonnie Raitt to Erykah Badu to Lucinda Williams.

Lizzie Miles was a Creole of Color born and raised in New Orleans who began singing in the bands of King Oliver and Kid Ory, the original generation of jazz musicians. Born Elizabeth Mary Landreaux, she often sang in both French and English in bands that combined jazz and blues. In the 1920s, she lived in Chicago and New York, where she recorded mostly with session musicians but on occasion Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. She traveled to Europe in Sam Wooding’s band, recorded later with Fats Waller, and after a long illness, enjoyed a successful comeback in the 1950s.

Really the Blues is one of the most evocative memoirs in American literature. Mezz Mezzrow has a conversion experience to jazz as his religion and he describes how New Orleans jazz hit he and his Chicago friends “like the millennium.” A middle-class Jewish-American kid from Chicago, Mezzrow rejects his family’s values and ethnic culture, preferring the excitement of the streets, speakeasies, and black-and-tan night clubs during Prohibition. Mezzrow’s narrative voice is singular and compelling — that of a streetwise gangster raconteur — and his life story is ably organized by jazz critic and writer, Bernard Wolfe.

Really the Blues was also the first respectful analysis of African-American music and culture. Mezzrow’s admiration for Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong as American artists working within a vernacular African-American tradition had little precedent across the color line in 1946. He befriended the first generation of New Orleans musicians who moved to Chicago in the 1920s, including Louis Armstrong, Sidney de Paris and others – and convinced his friends they needed to apprentice with the African-American musicians who invented jazz. In this fashion, he mentored a generation of white jazz musicians, including drummers Gene Krupa and Davey Tough, and indirectly Benny Goodman and Eddie Condon. Really the Blues itself influenced another generation of jazz enthusiasts: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac read the memoir standing up in the Columbia University bookstore and it was almost certainly an influence on the Beats’ writing and thinking about jazz.

As the star jazz vocalist for Gene Krupa’s big band in the early 1940s, O’Day’s streetwise style shifted the idea of the “girl singer” to the postwar “hip chick.” She was a high-profile female cultural rebel in the postwar era. As one reporter wrote in 1946, “Anita…says what she thinks, wears what she pleases, and behaves as she prefers to behave.” She rebelled against gender norms by refusing to wear frilly dresses that accentuated a soft femininity. Instead, she created a professional look for women: a black sports jacket and short skirt. She transgressed the color line by singing with and next to trumpeter Roy Eldridge, angering racists across the country. O’Day admired Billie Holiday and shared her weaknesses for hard drugs and difficult relationships. She spent two stints in prison for marijuana and heroin possession; she often complained that audiences came out as much to see the jailbird as the jazz singer. She stole the show at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with her slow, iconic version of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” as featured in the famous documentary, Jazz On A Summer’s Day (1960). A generation later, she published High Times, Hard Times, a frank memoir of jazz and addiction.

Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray were the most influential theorists and spokesmen of blues and jazz as musical cultures that functioned as embodied philosophies practiced by the African-American community. Baraka’s Blues People (1963), Ellison’s essays in Living With Music (2000), and Baldwin’s essays in The Price of the Ticket (1989) all attest to the role of music and dance in African-American communities as each musical idiom developed and then crossed over into American popular music and then global culture. The most sophisticated analysis of a “blues aesthetic” (broadly conceived) was Albert Murray’s Stomping The Blues (1976).

Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues (1976) exploded into an analytical vacuum of African-American expressive culture as it created a foundation for all American musical cultures. Murray looks at the blues as if it is a jewel: a chapter on the genre name itself, then on the blues as sung, the blues as played in jazz, the blues as danced, and the blues as ritual. He then theorized the permeable boundary of sacred and secular music in African-American music — on display, for example, in the musical overlap of soul and gospel or blues and spirituals — through the double-edged sword of the Saturday Night Function and the Sunday Morning Service (both are Murray’s terms). On Saturday nights, everyday people require percussive, up-tempo, “dance-beat oriented” music to soundtrack their individual good times, romance, and social engagement. Blues and blues-based musical forms are the liturgical music (so to speak) for the Saturday Night Function. For the Sunday Morning Service, gospel is the liturgical music and its repetitions, tambourines, and invocations of God and the spirit call for a soundtrack with a different set of objectives: the penitent’s connection to God, the cosmos, family, community, soul and conscience. Philosopher Kenneth Burke defined a given artistic form or philosophy as “the dancing of an attitude,” and Stomping the Blues was Murray’s book-length study of the blues as a community’s embodied philosophy. Just as Burke once called literature “equipment for living” for all readers, Murray appropriated his phrase to call music “equipment for living” for blues people.

Murray lived until the age of 97 and he was the driving intellectual force behind the founding of Jazz at Lincoln Center (the program) and its orchestra, along with his artistic disciples, Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch.

Tenor saxophonist Lester Young first coined the colloquial phrase “I’m cool,” but he did not mean “I’m the man,” but instead, “I’m relaxed and keeping it together.” Given the racism of the period, Young meant: “I’m keeping it together in here” — in my psyche and spirit — against oppressive social forces. He invoked the phrase on a situational basis to mean at that moment, as an individual, in that environment, he was steady and balanced. Young’s invocation of “I’m cool” or “I’m cool with that” was the rhetorical precedent for saying “I’m chill” or “it’s chill” today. Young also pioneered the new musical aesthetic that became “cool jazz,” a flowing style of understated playing and narrative soloing that projected a sense of emotional self-control, on- and off-stage.

Lester Young and Billie Holiday were musical soulmates who together invented cool as an aesthetic mode of music. Using relaxed phrasing and rhythmic nuance, manipulating musical space and accenting certain words or notes, they created a low-key late-night emotional sphere of adult experience. In the process, they transformed the blues into an urbane American romanticism. Young created the style and phrasing, but Holiday may have first realized the power of cool understatement. Between 1935-1941, Lady Day made four dozen chamber jazz classics in recording sessions featuring the cream of swing soloists under the direction of pianist Teddy Wilson and it remains “a milestone in Western music, from Bach to Mozart to Ornette Coleman,” as jazz critic Will Friedwald claims. On the two dozen tracks featuring Young and Holiday — including such classics as “All of Me,” “He’s Funny That Way,” and “Me, Myself and I” — her voice and his saxophone curl around each other, shape the air into sound, rise into smoky swirls of late-night yearning, then settle into your clothes with the bittersweet taste of romance come and gone. In the early 1950s, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan extended this aesthetic and it became known as “cool jazz.”

Lester Young was born and raised in New Orleans and Woodville, Mississippi, played in his father’s band on the TOBA (Black) vaudeville circuit. He left testimony of hearing music everywhere in New Orleans as a boy and chasing the sounds through the streets until he found one band or another playing off the back of a truck.

Both “hip” and “cool” are terms with their origins in postwar African-American jazz culture and the Black vernacular. Writers such as Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer attempted to explain the complexity of these concepts in the late 1950s but eventually these words became commodified and superficial. They were lost in translation. Miles Davis remains the touchstone of cool when it first emerged from jazz culture and African-American culture, both through the recordings released as Birth of the Cool (1957), and his fierce, quiet defiance of all racial stereotypes in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Being cool,” as Amiri Baraka wrote in Blues People (1963), “defined an attitude that actually existed” among African-American men in postwar American society. Led by jazz musicians, Black men stopped “acting the Uncle Tom” in front of white Americans and refused to smile, the sign of accommodation to the racial order. Jazz musicians offered only impassive faces to whites and were the first to wear sunglasses at night, on-stage and off. They used an impenetrable jazz slang pioneered by Lester Young and disseminated by his artistic heirs, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, as well as by Dizzy Gillespie and performers such as Babs Gonzales and Oscar Brown, Jr. This “mask of cool” was an act of cultural politics that preceded (and impacted) the civil rights movement a few years later. The mask of cool projected a collective racial history while signaling self-assertion, rebellion, withdrawal, secret knowledge, and bored exhaustion with racism. It was a sign of withdrawal from second-class citizenship. “In a world that is basically irrational,” Baraka wrote of the absurdity of racism, “the most legitimate relationship to it is nonparticipation.”

In an interview with Alex Haley in Playboy in 1961, Miles Davis invoked the term “Uncle Tom” four separate times as an oppressive image of African-American men and one he actively repudiated. He refused to tour in the South during the civil rights movement since “what they really want is some Uncle Tom entertainment” and expressed hostility towards Hollywood films in which Blacks were always “servants and Uncle Toms.” He claimed that businessmen coming to his night club gigs in New York only wanted “some Uncle Tom entertainment” to look hip in front of their girlfriends. In his autobiography, Miles wrote of an interview where his mother was present and she asked why he was so sullen during performances. “Miles, you could at least smile for the audience… They’re clapping because they love you, [they] love what you are playing because it’s beautiful.” He turned to his mother: “What do you want me to be, an Uncle Tom?” When he invoked this figure, his mother looked at him hard: “If I ever hear about you tomming, I’ll come and kill you myself.”

Two years earlier, Lester Young spoke out against racism in his last interview in Paris. Just four months before his death, Young claimed that whites wanted every Black man to play the fool in front of them, “to be a[n] Uncle Tom or Uncle Sam or Uncle Remus.” Weary of racism and then quite frail, he said simply, “I just can’t make it.” To Young, there were only three acceptable modes of self-presentation in front of Whites: as an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Sam (the patriotic American who asks no questions) or an Uncle Remus (the old plantation storyteller and entertainer of children).

The repudiation of the mask of Uncle Tom had real cultural and political impact. Literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recalled that in the mid-1960s “the term ‘Uncle Tom’ became synonymous with self-loathing” and it referred to “the black man all too eager to please the whites around him.” The figure of Uncle Tom had become “the embodiment of ‘race betrayal’ and an object of scorn…We talked about him as the model to be avoided.” African-American men instead strived to be cool until such time as the nation made good on its promises for social equality.

The literary practice of the Beats owes as much to jazz as to any of the authors they admire, from Whitman to William Carlos Williams to Thomas Wolfe. Allen Ginsberg claims that he wrote the lines of “Howl” to scat along with Lester Young’s composition, “Lester Leaps In.” On the Road is a novel fueled as much by the jazz of its nightclubs as by the gasoline of its joyrides, an attempt to rejuvenate “all these tired faces [seen] in the dawn of Jazz America,” as Kerouac writes.

Jack Kerouac calls himself a “jazz poet” at the outset of Mexico City Blues (1958) and asks the reader to consider the work as if he is “blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam on Sunday,” a song with 242 choruses. Each chorus is limited to a single page, a choice that reflected how a jazz musician must improvise within the chord changes of a given composition. Jack Kerouac worshiped individual jazz musicians — in particular Lester Young and then Charlie Parker. In a late chapter of On the Road, Kerouac digresses to narrate the history of jazz from Armstrong to bebop. Kerouac rebooted an American Romanticism launched by Emerson and Whitman through the figure of the jazz musician, emphasizing personal experience over studied expertise and spontaneous elf-expression over formal composition. As Charlie Parker famously said “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

Kerouac based his theory of literary style on improvisation and jazz practice. In his writing manifesto, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” he aspired to the spontaneous creative production and stream-of-consciousness of the jazz solo; his objective was “bop prosody” (i.e., bebop prose). The hero of Mexico City Blues is alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, the primogenitor of bebop, and Kerouac introduces him in the 239th Chorus. “Charlie Parker looked like Buddha,” Kerouac writes and presents him as the Pied Piper of nuclear apocalypse, either saving humankind through music or leading everyone off a cliff of their own making. In a complex plea built of admiration and guilt, Kerouac asks Parker to “lay the bane off me and everybody.”

John Clellon Holmes’ The Horn (1958) remains the most underrated and least known novel about jazz. Holmes learned jazz from Kerouac and crafted a novel based on the legends of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. The novel is a roman a clef with Edgar Poole as Lester Young, the dying father figure whose self-appointed Romantic sense of individual artistry fueled the dreams of all the younger musicians. In the novel, the saxophone figures as a complex symbol of art, freedom, individuality, dissent, and citizenship, as in this interior monologue of the young Walden Blue. In the opening pages, Blue wakes up and simply stares at his instrument:

Looking at it, he knew it to be also an emblem of some inner life of his own, something with which he could stand upright, at the flux and tempo of his powers…To Walden, the saxophone was, at once, his key to the world in which he found himself, and the way by which that world was rendered impotent to brand him either failure or madman or Negro or saint…[S]ometimes on the smoky stand, between solos, he hung it from his swinging shoulder like one bright, golden wing (5).

The black nationalist saxophonist Archie Shepp wrote a foreword to a reissue of The Horn and claimed it successfully conveyed “the basis, the source, of black music: a pain, a hurt, that is…an inexplicable pain,” as well as the ways in which jazz provided an artistic forum to address this hurt for its audiences.

It would be hard to overestimate the role of music in the civil rights movement. The vernacular forms of jazz, blues, and spirituals – along with their extensions such as Motown and soul music – all provided cultural resistance and spiritual sustenance in the 1950s and 1960s. The same year as Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, a now familiar soundtrack featuring John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (an elegy for the four girls murdered in Birmingham), Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets,” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” all invoked a musical useable past to register a national public Black presence. That year also saw the publication of Leroi Jones’s Blues People, the first work to analyze African-American vernacular musics as art forms capable of representing Black thought and resistance in each historical stage. In his influential collection of essays published the following year, Shadow and Act (1964), Ralph Ellison testified to the cultural leadership of swing-era jazz musicians such as Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing, Lester Young, and Charlie Christian from the Harlem Renaissance and on up through the Cold War and the freedom struggle.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the melding of the personal, political, and racial aspects of freedom were explicit in albums such as Sonny Rollins’ Freedom Suite (1958), Max Roach’s We Insist: Freedom Now Suite (1960), and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ The Freedom Rider (1961), as well as in Charles Mingus’ thematic compositions such as “Fables for Faubus” and “Freedom.” In addition, many jazz musicians – especially drummers such as Art Blake and Max Roach — traveled to Africa to bring jazz back to its ancestral roots.

Jazz is an indigenous American art form, a creolization of the musical cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Its keynotes are groove and interplay, self-expression and improvisation, flow and flexibility. What jazz has always offered any and all individuals is a method for creating a singular artistic voice and then merging it with others who share common musical ground. As guitarist Jim Hall reflects, “I’ve played in many countries, and in this music, I can communicate fully with musicians whose native language I can’t speak.” What’s American about jazz? According to Duke Ellington, “Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. The music is so free that many people … around the world say that it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.” For such reasons, jazz was often banned by totalitarian governments: in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1940s, in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories from 1935-1945, in Japan and Italy during World War II. In each of these nations, jazz became the music of underground resistance, as can be seen in the film Swing Kids (1997) or the novels and essays of Czech writer Josef Skvorecky (e.g., The Cowards (1956), The Bass Saxophone (1967), Talkin’ Moscow Blues (1988)).

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US State Department sent Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie out on tours during the Cold War hoping to display an idea of freedom to Asians and Africans that would counteract the messages of the Soviet Union about racism in the US. All the artists received heroes’ welcomes at airports – for Armstrong, especially in Africa – and yet it did not work out quite as planned. The State Department crafted tightly-controlled itineraries for the bands: performances at political dinners, concerts for colonial officials or American businessmen and their families. Each and every band strained under the control and simply went out and played with local musicians – in local clubs, in tents or private houses, even in the streets. In addition, Ellington, Brubeck, and especially Gillespie spoke freely about racism in the US and made no apologies for the government’s actions during the civil rights movement.

Ellington and Gillespie brought rhythms and musical motifs from all over the world into jazz and vice-versa during this period. Gillespie’s main focus was Latin American music and rhythms, beginning with bringing Afro-Cuban drummer Chano Pozo into his big band in the late 1940s. Long after these tours, Dizzy Gillespie’s dedication to jazz as the first global music remained unsurpassed. In the last band he organized, the United Nations Orchestra, musicians included men and women from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Italy, as well as Euro-Americans, Latin Americans, and African-Americans. (See video.)

These tours showcased jazz as the first global music. Jazz emerged as an African-American artistic form but its practices can be adapted and reshaped to any musician’s subjectivity. Consider the musical journey of popular Argentinian saxophonist, Gato Barbieri, in the 1960s. Listening to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Barbieri experienced a series of musical revelations and simply wanted “to be a black jazz musician.” After a few years, he felt the need to express his own cultural heritage within his own sound (on the saxophone) and compositions, in part to bring into jazz the story of another “part of the world where there is great oppression.” He found an answer first in Argentine folk rhythms and later by hanging out with his country’s best tango musicians. He heard in their music something similar to jazz, musicians “telling their stories [with] the same power, feeling, and spontaneity.” Then and now, the individual jazz musician remains the primary method by which jazz travels around the world and back.

Poets have always shared an artistic bond with jazz musicians as artists meditating aloud and often on-stage, whether verbally and on-the-page or non-verbally and on-record. Both poets and jazz musicians share the same primary challenge: to craft a personal voice and artistic style, crafted of aesthetics and experience. In jazz, this is referred to as having one’s own “sound” and in poetry as “voice.” There are a surprising number of tributes by poets to jazz musicians for the quality of this “sound” and for the inspirational model of their non-verbal communication. Langston Hughes analyzes the aspect of jazz as communication in an essay of the same name.

Beat poet Gregory Corso praised Miles Davis’s achievement in “For Miles”: “Your sound is faultless / pure & round / holy / almost profound/ Your sound is your sound / true & from within / a confession.” In “Art Pepper,” Edward Hirsch focused on the jazz musician’s symbolic action: “Playing solo means going on alone, improvising,” he writes at first, then inverts the riff: “It’s the fury of improvising, of going it alone.” Ted Joans, another Beat poet and also a jazz trumpeter, meditated upon artistic and cultural leadership in “LESTER YOUNG”: “Sometimes he was cool like an eternal / blue flame,” but then again, sometimes he was “preachin’ in very cool / tones.”

Jazz has not been well-served by Hollywood films, from the earliest attempts to represent its emergence in New Orleans to respectful biopics. In New Orleans (1947), Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday struggle to maintain their dignity in a mythological rendering of the close of Storyville. The film does provide an iconic version of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” In the postwar era, Hollywood capitalized on the demand for films about the big band heroes of the Depression and World War II with The Glenn Miller Story (1954), The Benny Goodman Story (1956), and The Gene Krupa Story (1959). Yet due to the de facto boycott by Southern theaters of films with African-American protagonists, there were no such films about Duke Ellington, Count Basie, or Cab Calloway.

In the 1980s, directors became enamored of the lives of jazz and blues musicians. Clint Eastwood directed a biopic of Charlie Parker (Bird (1988) and French director Bernard Tavernier created a composite jazz protagonist of Bud Powell and Lester Young in the character of Dale Turner in ‘Round Midnight (1986). Turner was played by tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon and his performance remains a high-water mark of the travails and imagination of a jazz musician passed his prime. Certain directors simply played into the myths of jazz and blues and only reinforced the legends. Robert Altman tried to capture the jazz music workshop of 1930s Kansas City in Kansas City (1996) and succeeded only in one of the jam session scenes. Walter Hill updated the myth of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in Crossroads (1986) by creating a fictional harp-playing running-buddy of the tragic blues guitarist.

Only documentaries have provided insight into the workings of jazz and blues artists through footage of live performances and interviews with friends and family, for example, The Howlin’ Wolf Story (2003) and Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988).