The first images of Jazz on a Summer’s Day are of reflections of Newport piers in disturbed water. Boats and buoys become abstract squiggles of red and blue undulating and stretching as the gentle strains of Jimmy Giuffre’s saxophone croon, the images a kind of impressionist rendering of jazz’s own fluctuations of form. When the frame cuts to Giuffre’s trio, one immediately gets a sense of just how well director and cinematographer Bert Stern can translate the reality of the music and how it is played. Giuffre and trombonist Bob Brookmeyer lightly bob along with their softly phrased “Train and the River,” and the camera drifts and tilts slightly with them, at one point mimicking Giuffre hunching over as he blows a note until you can hear the telltale rasp of him running out of breath. Jazz, that most telepathically inclined of genres, requires such delicate, sharp attention from collaborating players sending slight visual and aural cues for direction, and to the extent that such tacit communication can be captured on film, Stern showcases its subtle inflections.
That approach defines the concert footage obtained from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, which boasted an eclectic range of talents stretching from proven legends to rising superstars. Thelonious Monk, still struggling to find a wide audience for his dense compositions, gets a minor daytime slot and is introduced with amusing fannishness by an emcee who geeks out so much over Monk’s music theory that the crowd becomes visibly bored, only to burst into enthusiastic applause after he and his band run through a knotty but sparkling “Blue Monk.” Vocal icon Anita O’Day shows off her chops running through “Sweet Georgia Brown” with her breathtaking vibrato and a host of hairpin-turn change-ups in which she effectively battles with her backup players’ instruments, and the camera picks up on the subtle contortionism she must perform with her throat and mouth to unleash her scats and warbles and off-kilter enunciations. So much of the fun of music festivals are the odd juxtapositions, and the back-to-back placement of Monk, now a canonical figure but then still rising, and O’Day, a superstar since faded in history, captures the unpredictable fun of the concert.
Amid the warm tone of the performances, the film also captures some of the racial contrasts within jazz. By 1958, jazz was well into its transition from a dominant pop mode into the music of hip aesthetes, who tend to be overwhelmingly white. Many shots of the festival audiences show mostly white people watching each act play, their faces a mix of laidback relaxation or furtive concentration. And the frequent shots of the surrounding Newport town show an upscale community filled with yachtsmen and colonial homes, a place where people drive well-maintained, gleaming classic cars around immaculately landscaped town squares. Giddy montages of nearby carnival hijinks and youthful indiscretion set to Dixieland rag would look like gentrification had Newport ever been anything than almost completely white.
As revealing as such images can be, though, the film is fundamentally a celebration of its documented music. This is especially true when things stretch into nighttime and the film truly comes alive, not only because you get the headlining acts but because the entire atmosphere shifts from the gentle, pleasantly engaging tone of the daytime slots to sweatier, more energetic music. The transition from George Shearing’s piano swing to the orange backlighting and low-angle camera shots of Dinah Washington is almost jolting in the sudden uptick of musical and visual intensity. With stage lights bearing down on them, you can see players taking more pauses for breath as their faces drip, but that only adds to the excitement. Try sitting in your seat as Big Maybelle’s bawdy, gravelly shout bellows over stabs of rhythmic, brassy R&B, to say nothing of the immediate follow-up of Chuck Berry, whose voice is first heard over shots of silhouetted audience members absolutely leaping around in ecstatic dance. The presence of a rocker at the fest must have turned some heads upon announcement, but you’d be hard-pressed to spot anyone in the crowd having anything less than the time of their lives as he plays.
But even that energy pales to the explosive final two acts, Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson. Armstrong by this stage was as popular in the mainstream as he was criticized by jazz purists, a pop crossover who often waffled in taking a public stand on civil rights. Yet it is difficult to convey the sheer star charisma that rolls off the aging legend as he takes the stage and, in pure showman mode, starts cracking bawdy jokes with the emcee that have the crowd roaring with delight. And when Armstrong gets down to playing, however conservative his old-school jazz might have seemed to critics, Stern films audience members ranging from old, suit-wearing gentlemen to young, slick hipsters to literal children all joined in rapt joy, mouthing along to the lyrics and bopping to the band. One shot even captures a woman staring right at Armstrong before shaking her head slightly and mouthing “fabulous.” Compared to Armstrong’s apolitical, jubilant set, Jackson, perhaps the greatest artist figurehead in the Civil Rights Movement, closes with passionate, charged gospel that brings the house down, emitting all the energy of Satchmo but with an added layer of relevance that makes the audience freeze and look on somberly as much as break out into cheers.
Time would reveal the 1958 festival to be one of the last gasps before the coming storm of innovation that would tear through jazz the following year, from the modal breakthrough of Kind of Blue to the birth of free jazz. The latter can only be seen in utero here in the performance of drummer Chico Hamilton, whose elaborate, mystical rendition of “Blue Sands” feels borderline psychedelic and boasts several solos from soon-to-be icon of the avant-garde, Eric Dolphy. The massive changes on the horizon would open major schisms in the jazz community, and in retrospect this festival, as varied as its lineup was, may be one of the last times that jazz existed in its own monoculture where everyone could rub shoulders so comfortably without gatekeeping hostility. Though the 82-minute runtime sadly limits most of these musicians to a single song, Jazz on a Summer’s Day must count with the greatest of concert films, a triumph of minute observation that also, almost casually, captures the fraught context of both the concert’s surroundings and the period of time.
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