Jazz on a Summer's Day | |
---|---|
Directed by | Aram Avakian Bert Stern |
Written by | Albert D'Annibale Arnold Perl |
Produced by | George Avakian |
Cinematography | Aram Avakian |
Edited by | Aram Avakian |
Music by | All featured musicians do their own composing |
Release date |
|
Running time | 85 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Jazz on a Summer's Day is a 1959 concert film set at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival [1] in Newport, Rhode Island (which took place from July 3 to July 6 of 1958). The film was directed by Aram Avakian who also edited the film. and was princpal Cinematographer.
Co-Director Bert Stern, (commercial and fashion photographer) Directed the party scenes featuring his friends, and the water scenes.
The Columbia Records legendary Jazz producer, George Avakian, was the fim's Music Supervisor
The film mixes images of water with the performers and audience at the festival. It also features scenes of the 1958 America's Cup yacht races. The film is largely without dialog or narration (except for periodic announcements by emcee Willis Conover).
The film features performances by Jimmy Giuffre; Thelonious Monk; Sonny Stitt; Anita O'Day; Dinah Washington; Gerry Mulligan; Chuck Berry; Chico Hamilton, with Eric Dolphy; and Louis Armstrong, with Jack Teagarden. Also appearing are Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Armando Peraza, and Eli's Chosen Six, the Yale College student ensemble that included trombonist Roswell Rudd, shown driving around Newport in a convertible jalopy, playing Dixieland. [2]
As was scheduled in advance and announced in the program, the last performer Saturday night was Mahalia Jackson, who sang a one-hour program beginning at midnight, thus ushering in Sunday morning. The film concluded with her performance of The Lord's Prayer.
In 1999, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". [3] [4] The film received a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film premiered at the 1959 Venice Film Festival. [5]
The film was also re-released in 2009 by Charly Records and sold with an audio CD of the music and some of the commentary on a 60th anniversary edition. [6] In 2021, Kino Lorber released a version restored in 4K from the best surviving elements on Blu-ray and DVD.
Anita Belle Colton, known professionally as Anita O'Day, was an American jazz singer and self proclaimed “song stylist” widely admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band appearances that shattered the traditional image of the "girl singer". Refusing to pander to any female stereotype, O'Day presented herself as a "hip" jazz musician, wearing a band jacket and skirt as opposed to an evening gown. She changed her surname from Colton to O'Day, pig Latin for "dough", slang for money.
Foreststorn "Chico" Hamilton was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He came to prominence as sideman for Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, and Lena Horne. Hamilton became a bandleader, first with a quintet featuring the cello as a lead instrument, an unusual choice for a jazz band in the 1950s, and subsequently leading bands that performed cool jazz, post bop, and jazz fusion.
James Peter Giuffre was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He is known for developing forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation.
The Newport Jazz Festival is an annual American multi-day jazz music festival held every summer in Newport, Rhode Island. Elaine Lorillard established the festival in 1954, and she and husband Louis Lorillard financed it for many years. They hired George Wein to organize the first festival and bring jazz to Rhode Island.
Sonny Stitt was an American jazz saxophonist of the bebop/hard bop idiom. Known for his warm tone, he was one of the best-documented saxophonists of his generation, recording more than 100 albums. He was nicknamed the "Lone Wolf" by jazz critic Dan Morgenstern because of his tendency to rarely work with the same musicians for long despite his relentless touring and devotion to the craft. Stitt was sometimes viewed as a Charlie Parker mimic, especially earlier in his career, but gradually came to develop his own sound and style, particularly when performing on tenor saxophone and even occasionally baritone saxophone.
The Village Vanguard is a jazz club at Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village, New York City. The club was opened on February 22, 1935, by Max Gordon. Originally, the club presented folk music and beat poetry, but it became primarily a jazz music venue in 1957. It has hosted many highly renowned jazz musicians since then, and today is the oldest operating jazz club in New York City.
Beryl Cyril "Jack" Sheldon Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, singer, and actor. He performed on The Merv Griffin Show and participated in episodes of the educational music television series Schoolhouse Rock!
"'Round Midnight" is a 1943 composition by American jazz pianist Thelonious Monk that quickly became a jazz standard and has been recorded by a wide variety of artists. A version recorded by Monk's quintet was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993. It is one of the most recorded jazz standards composed by a jazz musician.
At Newport or Live at Newport could refer to a number of live albums recorded at the Newport Folk Festival or the Newport Jazz Festival:
James Milton Cleveland was an American jazz trombonist born in Wartrace, Tennessee.
Charles Thomas Potter was an American jazz double bass player, best known for having been a member of Charlie Parker's "classic quintet", with Miles Davis, between 1947 and 1950.
Rossiere "Shadow" Wilson was an American jazz drummer.
Joseph Barry Galbraith was an American jazz guitarist.
The Oscar Peterson Trio with Roy Eldridge, Sonny Stitt and Jo Jones at Newport is a 1957 live album by Oscar Peterson, accompanied by Roy Eldridge, Sonny Stitt and Jo Jones, recorded at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival.
This is a timeline documenting events of Jazz in the year 1959.
By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, with the sounds of cool jazz, which favoured long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, as a result of the mixture of the styles of predominantly white swing jazz musicians and predominantly black bebop musicians, and it dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s. The starting point were a series of singles on Capitol Records in 1949 and 1950 of a nonet led by trumpeter Miles Davis, collected and released first on a ten-inch and later a twelve-inch as the Birth of the Cool. Cool jazz recordings by Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet usually have a "lighter" sound which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene, but also had a particular resonance in Europe, especially Scandinavia, with emergence of such major figures as baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin and pianist Bengt Hallberg. The theoretical underpinnings of cool jazz were set out by the blind Chicago pianist Lennie Tristano, and its influence stretches into such later developments as Bossa nova, modal jazz, and even free jazz. See also the list of cool jazz and West Coast musicians for further detail.
Newport 1958 or Live at Newport 1958, etc. can refer to one of several albums recorded at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
Jim Hall was an American jazz guitarist, composer, and arranger. His discography consists of 39 studio albums, 10 live albums, 1 EP, 1 single, 10 videos, and 22 compilations, all released between 1957 and 2016. In addition, he was a sideman on numerous albums by other artists.
The Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame is part of a US-based non-profit organization that began operations in 1978 and continues to the present (2022) in San Diego County, California. David Larkin is current president.
The discography of American jazz drummer Roy Haynes includes at least 32 records with Haynes as leader or co-leader, as well as a large number of records where he played as a sideman, and a number of compilation albums.