Some discussion of the very interesting late 50's jazz/race semi-documentary film
Cry of Jazz.
I thought I had posted something about it here late last year.
Maybe in the Knicks forum.
The film features a good deal of Sun Ra's Arkestra, both the music and various members (often shot in very dark conditions).
Cry of Jazz is available on Youtube in 6 parts.
It's only 33 minutes long in total and a very provocative document of the era.
The Cry of Jazz premiered on April 3, 1959. It ran for a week, two showings a night, at the Lincoln Center (700 East Oakwood Boulevard). A single private showing followed on April 28, at the Union Nations Building in New York City. Another showing took place at the Sherman Hotel during a party for the Playboy Jazz Festival in July; still another at Gerri's Palm Tavern (446 East 47th Street) on August 23.
For an obscure, low-budget short film, The Cry got a lot of attention from the Defender--substantially more than Saturn Records could ever manage. Some of this was a function of the project's novelty. The South Side of Chicago had no tradition of independent film making, and the Defender's usual coverage of African American involvement in cinema focused almost exclusively on appearances in Hollywood movies by Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Eartha Kitt, and a few other nationally prominent performers.
What did audience think of Ed Bland's message that jazz was already dead, fatally roped in by the White man's harmonic structures? Were they persudaded that repeated chord sequences stood for the "futureless future" that slavery and Jim Crow had imposed on Black Americans? Or that when Black people escaped the savagery with which they had been treated and could look forward to a productive and fulfilling future, they would no longer need jazz? Whatever its intended impact, the film would eventually become a legend among Ra fans. And despite their disagreements over the possibilities in store for jazz, Ra would benefit, during his New York years, from recording opportunities that Ed Bland steered his way.
The Cry of Jazz was not a documentary about the Arkestra, though the narrator refers to the "The Sun Ra" as an innovator in jazz, and "A Call for All Demons" is presented as an example of his music. Rather, the Arkestra's function is to illustrate the stylistic evolution of jazz. Members of the band are shown on screen performing a Dixieland number (title uncertain), Swing (Bland stretched a little by choosing "Urnack" as an example), bop ("Super Blonde"), Cool (another unidentified title), and "The Sun Ra." A quintet is shown playing "Blues at Midnight" (as an illustration of improvising over chord changes), and Sunny appears at the piano thrashing the same passage over and over (to illustrate the lack of growth potential in jazz). During part of this scene the trombonist from the "Dixieland" band is also present, barely discernible in the murk. The film then shows flames about to consume slum tenements while a distorted fragment of the Dixieland music shrills on the soundtrack. The Arkestra can be heard but not seen during another segment (playing "Demon's Lullaby") and is probably responsible for the movie's theme music as well.
The style of filming during the musical sequences--most of it dramatically dark--was chosen to obscure the fact that the same musicians were pretending to play all of the music. With the exception of John Gilmore and Ronnie Boykins during "Blues at Midnight," the musicians' entire faces are never on camera for long. Pat Patrick has already appeared as a Dixieland clarinetist, so when he takes a baritone sax solo on "Super Blonde" the audience gets to see just his fingers on the keys and his body from the chest down. (He does pop up with his baritone sax in another scene, but it is all over so quickly that casual viewers would never spot him.) Sunny is viewed from behind in every scene but one so he can't be identified as a regular participant. Because the soundtrack music was prerecorded and heavily edited, shots done on different nights with different personnel were rapidly intercut, though much of this trickeration would pass unnoticed by the audience. During most of a scene in which a quartet drawn from the Arkestra performs a Cool number (which the narrator has firmly defined as the White man's take on jazz--the same piece has already accompanied scenes of commuter trains and poodle grooming) the musicians are reduced to silhouettes.
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/sunra.html
