David Meeker's Ten Favourite Jazz Films

Duke Ellington behind the scene of NBC's What Is Jazz? (1958) episode#1 [Source: GettyImages]

David Meeker, the author of Jazz in the Movies (and its online, massively updated version, Jazz on the Screen, available on the website of the Library of Congress), has been kind enough to furnish me with the list of his favourite jazz films. I don't think anyone in the world has seen as many jazz films as David has and certainly no-one has bothered spending years retrieving information (including song lists and personnel) from these films, compiling the indispensable encyclopedia that he has given us. For that reason, I think this list should be cherished more than other similar listings — this is the work of a man who has almost seen everything! - EK

By my reckoning the first ever sound film of a jazz performance was produced in 1922, a short featuring pianist Eubie Blake. Therefore, faced with almost 100 years of world cinema and taking a degree of masochistic pleasure in sticking my neck out I have managed with considerable difficulty to reduce untold millions of feet of celluloid to a necessarily subjective choice of 10 favourite titles, undoubtedly quirky but hopefully not pretentious. Try and see them if you can - they all have much to offer both intellectually and emotionally.

David Meeker

David Meeker's Ten Favourite Jazz Recordings

David Meeker, the author of world's most comprehensive jazz and film encyclopedia (regularly updated and available online at the website of the Library of Congress) and the former Head of Acquisitions in the National Film Archive (now British Film Institute's archive) has shared with me his list of ten favourite jazz recordings which I'm sharing with you here. They are sorted in chronological order.


1
Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra (1928)
There Ain't No Sweet Man That's Worth The Salt Of My Tears by Fred Fisher.

Swinging with Clarinet and Harpsichord

It sounds strange and the effect is unfamiliar and archaic. It takes time to get used to one of the most unusual
combos of the swing era -- a sextet with a harpsichord.

While evidently harpsichord has some capacity for swinging, it also delivers a melancholic feeling as one can hear on the sides recorded in September 3, 1940 in Los Angeles by Artie Shaw and His Gramercy Five. This rather experimental sextet is composed of clarinet, harpsichord, trumpet and the rhythm section.

As far as the history of this Renaissance and Baroque instrument in jazz goes, this session was the first to bring it to jazz. Later, from the same family of instruments, Oscar Peterson recorded with clavichord for Pablo Records.

Johnny Guarnieri, one of the unsung heroes of jazz in swing era, is playing the harpsichord which might explain my repetitious listening of these four sides.

"Guarnieri was all music" wrote Richard Cook about the man who started playing classical piano from the age of ten, but hearing Art Tatum changes his life. Cook also pointed out how Guarnieri could play in almost any style whilst "his basic one was a light, at times frolicsome variation on stride." 

On this session, he strides it out with harpsichord.