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April 14, 2004
TT: Time machine
I came home from Broadway a little while ago and was too wired to go to bed, so I turned on the TV, started channel-surfing, and suddenly found myself watching a snippet from The Sound of Jazz, the famous 1957 show still widely (and rightly) regarded as the finest jazz program ever telecast. Ben Webster was playing a slow blues in F, with Gerry Mulligan nodding in the background, and as the camera panned to Billie Holiday, I realized that the song was "Fine and Mellow" and that the next face I saw would be Lester Young, sick unto death. Sure enough, he stood up, raised his tenor saxophone to his lips and blew one heartbreaking chorus of the blues, spare and fragile and a little bit flat. As he played, the director switched back to Holiday, her face aglow with memories of a time when she and her musical soulmate were at the peak of their powers, long before life ground them under its unforgiving heel. The chorus ended, the screen faded to black, and all at once I was watching a commercial for a product I didn't want or need.How strange it is to watch TV in the information age, skipping from channel to channel in search of momentary diversion, mostly settling for dross but sometimes stumbling across a fleeting image so simple and true that it makes you catch your breath. I wonder how many people happened to see Lester and Billie at the same moment I did, and how many knew who and what they were seeing. Perhaps I was the only person in the world who saw that flickering black-and-white picture and knew it was a kinescope of The Sound of Jazz. Perhaps there were a dozen of us, or a hundred, or ten thousand. Perhaps one of my fellow viewers will visit "About Last Night" today and read these words, and know he wasn't alone.
UPDATE: Doug Ramsey writes:
In 1992, I toured in Germany and recently liberated Eastern European countries for the United States Information Service as part of its American Speakers program. I was assigned to speak in the afternoons about free press and first amendment issues and in the evenings about jazz. The USIS sent me to Hamburg, Bonn, Frankfurt, Prague, Brno and Bratislava. When, in several cities, the same people showed up for both talks, it struck me that they may have seen the freedom connection between the two subjects that many Americans do not.
My only supplement to the jazz talks was a tape of the kinescope of The Sound Of Jazz. One of my strongest impressions of the jazz evenings was that, in every case, when Lester Young played that almost unbearably beautiful blues chorus and the camera lingered close on Billie's face, I heard a collective sigh from the audience. CBS, the current incarnation of which probably doesn't know that it owns this monument to America, should show The Sound Of Jazz annually in prime time.
That'll be the day. On the other hand, I think the copyright to The Sound of Jazz has lapsed--the various DVD reissues appear to be in the public domain--so perhaps somebody else will do the honors.
POST-UPDATE: I just heard from a reader who was tuned in at the same time. What a wonderfully small world we blogospherites inhabit....
Posted April 14, 2004 12:49 PM
