"Jazz on a Summer's Day" at the AFI, June 11, 2003

by Alan Greenblatt

If you've never seen the concert film "Jazz on a Summer's Day," you owe yourself the treat of renting it some day when you're in the mood for that sort of thing. Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, it features performances by a long list of greats -- Jack Teagarden, Thelonius Monk, Mahalia Jackson, Gerry Mulligan and a young Chuck Berry, whose "Sweet Sixteen," featuring a high-energy clarinet solo from some old jazz guy I didn't recognize, shows how close lie the roots of rock and the blues. Louis Armstrong is featured singing and playing trumpet in several songs that are pure pleasure. If you have no familiarity with his music, this set is enough to illustrate why he was so beloved. It's not his greatest music ever, but his joy in performance and his amazing sense of time are more than enough.

Still, the highlight, for me, is a pair of songs performed by Anita O'Day. Looking so cute and smart in a black dress and a big feathery hat, O'Day changes the familiar rhythms of "Sweet Georgia Brown" and offers a breakneck reading of "Tea for Two." Here, you understand why she was always considered not just a singer but a real thinking musician.

"Jazz on a Summer's Day" was filmed by Bert Stern, an old Life magazine photographer and features smart close-ups of the performers but also sailing footage (the America's Cup trials were going on) and funny shots of crowds while the music is playing, people having a good time on a summer's day, kissing and dancing and looking poignantly alive and young in comparison to where they must be now.

The film was screened on Sunday at the AFI Silver Theater, in conjunction with an appearance by George Wein, the founder and promoter of the Newport festivals, who was promoting his memoirs. Unfortunately, Wein was interviewed by Murray Horwitz, a former NPR culture czar who is now running the Silver. Horwitz does a lot of this sort of thing but never does it well. His humor is annoyingly mincing and self-congratulatory.

He also asks the wrong questions. He kept saying things like, "I've known you for so many years and... you have such beautiful paintings. Do you consider yourself a collector?" The conversation dragged, but finally when Horwitz was wrapping things up, Wein, wanting to sell some books, told us about how personal it was, how so much of it was about race. He's white and married an African American woman in 1959 and had his eyes opened about casual racism from working with so many black musicians. Suddenly, it seemed interesting.

But the film was pleasant and the reopened theater is a gem amidst the construction site that is downtown Silver Spring, with lovely Art Deco touches. There's lots of leg room and the seats are spaced so you look through the gap between the people sitting in front of you, rather than at the back of their heads.

It's a welcome thing, all these theaters opening up in Washington. There had been such a steady decline in theaters during my time here. A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about how old movie theaters, which have mostly been torn down or converted into furniture stores and the like, were turning into performing arts centers and cafes in a lot of smaller cities. The only way you couldn't make money with a movie theater, it seems, was to show movies. (The story is at the bottom of this link: http://www.governing.com/archive/2001/jun/glimpses.txt)

We went last night to the Avalon, an old movie theater near Chevy Chase Circle that the Loew's chain had closed a couple of years ago but was salvaged by local residents and businesses who put up a lot of dough to reopen it. The place looks spiffier than it did when it closed, that's for sure, and the new seats have good lumbar support, if armrests too high to facilitate handholding.

We saw "L'Auberge Espagnole," a year in the life movie about a French student living with a disparate group of Europeans in Barcelona. The movie really has no plot but is a charming slice of life among the young and certainly makes you want to go to Europe.

I had been at the Avalon the night it closed, my friend Will Heyniger being interviewed on our way out by some radio reporter, talking about how he had ridden his bike to that theater as a 9-year-old and whatnot to go to the movies. I remember looking up at the sky-blue ceiling painting and thinking I would never see it again. It was great to see it. P.S. As long as I'm offering links to things I've written elsewhere, here are some picks of upcoming jazz and blues shows: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/entertainment/new_features/music/June03jazz.htm