Jazz on a Summer's Day

Bert Stern captures the Newport Jazz festival of 1958 in vivid color and with clarity. While jazz is the primary focus of the film, Stern does meander to the America's Cup race that was being contested off Newport at the time, along with some diversionary local flavor, which gives us a sense of what it was like to actually be there. Continuing along this vein, during the festival itself, Stern spends much of his camera time observing the audience caught unaware reacting to jazz on a summer day; after all, live music does not exist in a vacuum. It's this footage along with the incredible jazz music that makes this documentary really special. As a viewer we get to react to the music, and react to the audience reacting to the music. That girl with the seductively cute smile in the yellow dress, and that gruff man hiding behind the shades with the nervous twitch are people that we can connect to from our own personal experiences at open air summer concerts. The feeling of community one gets as the music breaks down the barriers and the sun begins to set. Stern allows his moving compositions to develop and flesh out the character of his subjects, giving us a nostalgic feeling for a time gone by that may have occurred long before we were even born. It does not matter because we are there! But this particular slice of time has special significance, because jazz would soon be replaced in popularity by Rock & Roll. We watch it happen before our eyes as a young Chuck Berry takes the stage. Backed by some excellent jazz musicians, all looking "amused" but not taking very seriously the music that would knock them off the charts for good within a couple of years. As Berry's classic Rock & Roll riffs project across the audience, young people spontaneously jump to their feet and start moving to the rhythm while their parents watch, perplexed.

Maybe 'cause I'm not a jazz afficionado but am an inveterate people watcher I had the exact opposite reaction to Pres. Washington below. Absolutely loved the crowd shots! A real potpourri of late 50s, left wing/avant garde America where the young men all look like future Kennedy era hipsters and the gals resemble various incarnations of Sylvia Plath. As for the music I'll agree with the pres that Satchmo is pretty damn hard not to like. And I'll see if I can rustle up some Anita O'Day on You Tube. Give it a B. PS...How in the world did rock 'n roll, in the form of Chuck Berry, ever crash this jazz bash?

A treasure to savor is JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY is a concert/documentary of the 1958 jazz festival at Newport, RI. It captures a time and a sound, a mood of America that's now only a fairly distant memory. Interspersed with the music are shots of the Americas Cup trials, some shots of Newport etc. But the focus is the music and the stars. Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Anita O'Day, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonius Monk, Mahalia Jackson, Chico Hamilton, and Jack Teagarden. And in a nod to more contemporary stuff (and a portent to the end of cool jazz), Chuck Berry also sings. There's also Big Maybelle, who I never heard of. It's all cool and relaxing and the audience seems happy and well dressed. Dig those crew cuts and all those people smoking!

While the photography and sound are a little primitive, they don't detract from the stars. Armstrong and Teagarden do their "Rockin; Chair" duet, Washington sings "All of Me," O'Day scorches "Sweet Georgia Brown" Monk plays "Blue Monk" on piano. There's also an impossibly young Mulligan wailing on his sax, and Jackson in a moving set of songs.

The audience is fascinating. Society matrons amid the hipster fans. Smoking, drinking, dancing. Kids and adults. It was a time when music still spoke to a universal audience. Shots of kids enthralled by Chico Hamilton's hypnotic drum set. Smiling faces enjoying the music and patter of Armstrong and Teagarden.

Within a few years, the famed Newport Jazz Festival would be geared more for rock and roll, screaming crowds, and higher decibels. That's exactly what makes this 1958 outing such a cool treat.

This film really stuck with me, and so I feel compelled to say a few things about it.

It's one of the earliest concert films I've ever seen, and honestly maybe one of the better ones. I say that as someone who likes some jazz sometimes but wouldn't count it among my personal favourite music genres. That being said, the performances here are largely great, and it does a fantastic job of showing why jazz means so much to so many people. It conveys how fun jazz can be, how entertaining its musicians can be, the technical prowess involved, and also how it can be surprisingly moving.

Only a handful of names were familiar to me, but all proved entertaining to watch. Chuck Berry stood out in a slightly jarring way, being more of a rock artist than a jazz artist, but he ended up fitting in well. There's a nice flow to all the performers, I liked how it included the MC introducing them, and I loved the concert's progression from day to night.

In general, the visuals are what elevate this from being a good concert film with entertaining music and performances to a great concert film/ documentary. My favourite part might of been the montage of life in Newport on that day, about halfway through the film- of course it could have been filmed on a different day, but it's such great, hypnotic filmmaking that you don't think about it at the time. Seeing these people dancing, drinking, smoking, especially the people on the roof... it was surprisingly beautiful and moving.

I was born almost 40 years after this concert even took place, but somehow, it still managed to evoke a strong sense of nostalgia. I don't doubt that life was still complicated back then, and there were hardships and tribulations in the same way to how those things exist nowadays. Yet for 80-something minutes, you don't think about that. You're transported into a town that for one summer's day, in 1958, allowed all its citizens to have the time of their lives, and there's something incredibly and unexpectedly beautiful about that, even for a 25-year-old, very casual jazz fan like myself.

I'd recommend this to all fans of concert films and documentaries, or maybe just films in general. I'm happy to see a high score on here, but the low number of ratings is a little saddening. This deserves to be considered at least a minor classic, but even if that never happens, I'm glad I watched it, and am thankful to my grandfather for recommending it; without him, I may have never even heard of it.

I think you can enjoy this film on a few levels.

First, it's a great chronicle of mid-century music. Although nominally a jazz festival, producer George Wein put Berry, a rock 'n roll star, and Jackson, the leading gospel singer of her day, on the roster, probably to attract a larger crowd.

The images are superb. If you're over 50, you probably recall Bert Stern's photography. It was a pinnacle of mid-century advertising (the Smirnoff ad shot in the Egyptian desert with the pyramid, inverted, in a refreshingly cool vodka martini glass with a twist). It was his stills of Sue Lyons in Stanley Kubrick's version of Lolita that everyone remembers. Almost everyone has seen his iconic nude photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe ("The Last Sitting").

Here you have the still photographer's sensibility brought to a documentary. You can see the same thing in Ken Burns' earlier works for the same reason. The tight shots of the performers using very long lenses (something that was not yet common in film but was emerging on TV at the time). The long, languid, at times voyeuristic shots of the audience. The Festival was taking place at the same time as the America's Cup trials. Stern shot some of this from a Piper Cub (inexpensive to rent and almost as slow as a helicopter), and there are some long cutaways to this footage. At times, the images on the screen resemble the LP covers of the era – the original "Miles Ahead" cover, for example, featuring the beautiful (white) model on a sailboat (which Davis despised).

The mono sound is surprisingly good given the circumstances, probably because the audio track was engineered and recorded by Columbia Records, which was there to record its artists. They used then-state-of-the-art studio microphones rather than the more durable lower quality ones you'd typically see in a concert setting in those days. Yes, sound recording technology is better today.

Second, you can appreciate the back story of making the film. Today, people in their 20s and 30s making documentaries probably have no appreciation of how tough it was to pull off this project. Today, high definition video cameras and tape can be had for a tiny fraction of what film cameras, 35MM stock and processing cost in those days. Sound synchronization is a given. Today, for a fraction of the cost of a Moviola you can assemble your A and B rolls and soundtrack on a computer, without having to pay extras for optical effects or sound processing. You no longer have to assemble and keep track of miles of film and mag stripe audio reels, as well as handle the negative with loving care. It's all there on your hard drive and you get unlimited do-overs. Aram Avakian, the editor (also a photographer and filmmaker), was at it night and day for months and months largely by himself. (Woodstock, by contrast, had a large team of editors and assistants.) Avakian, as much as Stern, is responsible for the film (the two share the director's credit). Also, trying to sync up the images from all those different cameras with the soundtrack had to be challenging and I'm guessing it must have required a lot of work and inspired work-arounds to get it looking as good as it did.

Not to mention just how audacious it was for Stern to put the money up for shooting it himself and how he managed to get a large number of professional cameramen to help out. Since he didn't have enough money to shoot (or even light) everything, Stern used George Avakian, a legendary producer at Columbia Records and Aram's brother, to cue the film crew to turn on the lights and start rolling when he thought a number would be worth shooting.

After scouting the location, Stern was so unimpressed by the Festival's cruddy venue (the local high school athletic field) he decided not to make the film, only to have his mind changed by the person sitting next to him on his flight back to New York. He originally planned to create a story line around the festival. Luckily, it proved impossible to film the hokey stuff they had written.

Third, it's an authentic look at mid-century America. When I was growing up in the 60s, I used to look at back issues of Life magazines of the 30s and 40s. At first to "goof on" at the earnestness and corniness of the ads and the stories. But then to appreciate the nuances of living everyday life in the decades before I was born, which you could glean from leafing through those pages. "Anonymous history" is infused in the film. The kid holding several empty soda bottles is probably there at the festival because sneaking into an event like this and picking up empties was an easy way to earn some money. In those days, the deposit you paid on bottles was much larger in real terms than today.

Shows like "Mad Men" do a decent enough job of picking up some of the atmospherics of this time (usually by showing people smoking cigarettes like madmen), but this is the real thing. The clothes, especially, but also in the gestures and the way people move. And then there's the White/Negro thing in this film. There wasn't the kind of overt racism in Newport, Rhode Island that you would find in the south but there was definitely separateness. Remember, in 1958 Amos 'n Andy was still being shown on TV, and only white people were in TV ads. The two groups are integrated in the movie, but this wasn't typical. Stern was told that he probably couldn't distribute the movie in the south because of this.

In all, a real gem for anyone who loves jazz. A must-see for anyone who likes, makes or wants to make documentary films.