Jazz on a Summer's Day

An exhilarating bullseye of music and spirit and a masterwork in aesthetics and observation.

Absolutely not a minute is wasted. Every decision of whether to show the performers, the audience, or the moments where it cuts to different scenes around the neighborhood (which could each function as a perfect short film on their own) all feels cohesively motivated in serving as a perfect testament to universal human joy and enthusiasm for creative spirits. The eye for capturing people in unguarded, emblematic moments serves as a fantastic precursor to Monterey Pop and Woodstock (as well as Neil Young's Weld but people aren't ready for that conversation yet) and its spirit was later taken to great effect by Jonathan Demme.

I get the sense that a great deal could be written about the larger cultural contexts that contributed to an object this pure and awesome being preserved, but for me its most inspiring as a testament to sensitive and committed people being on their absolute A-game for every aspect of production. This includes the people behind the camera having an acute sense for the perfect moments and angles to capture (and the showcase of lighting perfection from shot to shot, especially in such a free-form documentary setting, is absolute insanity), to the people responsible for the preservation of the film itself being so rich and beautiful, to the editors having an exacting sense of rhythm and kineticism (and making consistently creative and surprising choices among what must have been an intimidating amount of fantastic footage to curate), to the performers who each and every one of them manage at least one spellbinding and memorable moment (Anita O'Day being a total BEAST of a performer, Chuck Berry using a clarinet player to stunning effect, and Satchmo ascending to god form and winning music are just some of my favorites and I'm sure you'll have your own because every performance serves as a unique, full expression).

I cannot overstate what a revelation this film is, from the performances themselves to the cutaways to the life surrounding the festival, these are transcendent moments that form this fusion of music and image that feel like all of human existence was made in order to converge to this place and time, which is now available immaculately forever.

Partly a jazz concert and partly a time capsule to a long ago era, "Jazz On A Summer's Day" records highlights of the four-day, 1958 festival held in Newport, Rhode Island. The film gets off to a slow start, with interviews of arriving audience, shots of Newport, and cutaways to the America's Cup yacht race, taking place concurrently.

About nine minutes into the film, the real program begins. The brilliant Thelonious Monk plays "Blue Monk" on the keys. From here on, most of the audio and visuals focus on the festival itself, except for brief visual cuts to the sailing event and impromptu shots of people enjoying themselves in presumably nearby locales. Although the film title says "day", about two-thirds of the film is shot at night.

Different styles of jazz provide ample variety, and run the gamut from an apparently unrelated boarding house jam session to the rockin', soul-stirring gospel music of Mahalia Jackson, who forcefully belts out three numbers at the end. Louis Armstrong and rarely filmed trombone legend Jack Teagarden perform a casual, seemingly improv vocal of "Old Rocking Chair". Dinah Washington singing "All Of Me", and the unusual percussion sounds of the Chico Hamilton Quintet are also quite good. But my personal favorite was Chuck Berry and band with a slowed down, beat thumpin' rendition of "Sweet Little Sixteen".

My only serious complaint is the film's editing, which includes the sailing event and quite a few extraneous visuals, and a too-brief overall runtime. A three-hour total jazz event would have been ideal.

The overall mood of the concert is upbeat, almost carnivalesque. The camera jumps back and forth between on-stage performers and audience reaction. Everyone seems to be having a good time. Glad to see this film recognized by the National Film Registry, to preserve an account of a unique event, held at a crucial moment in American history.

This film really stuck with me, and so I feel compelled to say a few things about it.

It's one of the earliest concert films I've ever seen, and honestly maybe one of the better ones. I say that as someone who likes some jazz sometimes but wouldn't count it among my personal favourite music genres. That being said, the performances here are largely great, and it does a fantastic job of showing why jazz means so much to so many people. It conveys how fun jazz can be, how entertaining its musicians can be, the technical prowess involved, and also how it can be surprisingly moving.

Only a handful of names were familiar to me, but all proved entertaining to watch. Chuck Berry stood out in a slightly jarring way, being more of a rock artist than a jazz artist, but he ended up fitting in well. There's a nice flow to all the performers, I liked how it included the MC introducing them, and I loved the concert's progression from day to night.

In general, the visuals are what elevate this from being a good concert film with entertaining music and performances to a great concert film/ documentary. My favourite part might of been the montage of life in Newport on that day, about halfway through the film- of course it could have been filmed on a different day, but it's such great, hypnotic filmmaking that you don't think about it at the time. Seeing these people dancing, drinking, smoking, especially the people on the roof... it was surprisingly beautiful and moving.

I was born almost 40 years after this concert even took place, but somehow, it still managed to evoke a strong sense of nostalgia. I don't doubt that life was still complicated back then, and there were hardships and tribulations in the same way to how those things exist nowadays. Yet for 80-something minutes, you don't think about that. You're transported into a town that for one summer's day, in 1958, allowed all its citizens to have the time of their lives, and there's something incredibly and unexpectedly beautiful about that, even for a 25-year-old, very casual jazz fan like myself.

I'd recommend this to all fans of concert films and documentaries, or maybe just films in general. I'm happy to see a high score on here, but the low number of ratings is a little saddening. This deserves to be considered at least a minor classic, but even if that never happens, I'm glad I watched it, and am thankful to my grandfather for recommending it; without him, I may have never even heard of it.

This is a wonderful document of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and archetype for the concert film, with captivating interludes of visual poetry. As close as one can get to traveling back through time, watching the audience is as much fun here as watching the performers. You can recognize this film as a source of inspiration, perhaps, for the pretensions behind projects like "The Last Waltz," and one certainly gets a sense, given the caliber of the performers gathered onto a single stage, of the magnitude of this event without it ever being forced. The intimacy remains intact. And in contrast with the somber beat of "The Last Waltz," the sun shines on everything here. A joy.

I think you can enjoy this film on a few levels.

First, it's a great chronicle of mid-century music. Although nominally a jazz festival, producer George Wein put Berry, a rock 'n roll star, and Jackson, the leading gospel singer of her day, on the roster, probably to attract a larger crowd.

The images are superb. If you're over 50, you probably recall Bert Stern's photography. It was a pinnacle of mid-century advertising (the Smirnoff ad shot in the Egyptian desert with the pyramid, inverted, in a refreshingly cool vodka martini glass with a twist). It was his stills of Sue Lyons in Stanley Kubrick's version of Lolita that everyone remembers. Almost everyone has seen his iconic nude photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe ("The Last Sitting").

Here you have the still photographer's sensibility brought to a documentary. You can see the same thing in Ken Burns' earlier works for the same reason. The tight shots of the performers using very long lenses (something that was not yet common in film but was emerging on TV at the time). The long, languid, at times voyeuristic shots of the audience. The Festival was taking place at the same time as the America's Cup trials. Stern shot some of this from a Piper Cub (inexpensive to rent and almost as slow as a helicopter), and there are some long cutaways to this footage. At times, the images on the screen resemble the LP covers of the era – the original "Miles Ahead" cover, for example, featuring the beautiful (white) model on a sailboat (which Davis despised).

The mono sound is surprisingly good given the circumstances, probably because the audio track was engineered and recorded by Columbia Records, which was there to record its artists. They used then-state-of-the-art studio microphones rather than the more durable lower quality ones you'd typically see in a concert setting in those days. Yes, sound recording technology is better today.

Second, you can appreciate the back story of making the film. Today, people in their 20s and 30s making documentaries probably have no appreciation of how tough it was to pull off this project. Today, high definition video cameras and tape can be had for a tiny fraction of what film cameras, 35MM stock and processing cost in those days. Sound synchronization is a given. Today, for a fraction of the cost of a Moviola you can assemble your A and B rolls and soundtrack on a computer, without having to pay extras for optical effects or sound processing. You no longer have to assemble and keep track of miles of film and mag stripe audio reels, as well as handle the negative with loving care. It's all there on your hard drive and you get unlimited do-overs. Aram Avakian, the editor (also a photographer and filmmaker), was at it night and day for months and months largely by himself. (Woodstock, by contrast, had a large team of editors and assistants.) Avakian, as much as Stern, is responsible for the film (the two share the director's credit). Also, trying to sync up the images from all those different cameras with the soundtrack had to be challenging and I'm guessing it must have required a lot of work and inspired work-arounds to get it looking as good as it did.

Not to mention just how audacious it was for Stern to put the money up for shooting it himself and how he managed to get a large number of professional cameramen to help out. Since he didn't have enough money to shoot (or even light) everything, Stern used George Avakian, a legendary producer at Columbia Records and Aram's brother, to cue the film crew to turn on the lights and start rolling when he thought a number would be worth shooting.

After scouting the location, Stern was so unimpressed by the Festival's cruddy venue (the local high school athletic field) he decided not to make the film, only to have his mind changed by the person sitting next to him on his flight back to New York. He originally planned to create a story line around the festival. Luckily, it proved impossible to film the hokey stuff they had written.

Third, it's an authentic look at mid-century America. When I was growing up in the 60s, I used to look at back issues of Life magazines of the 30s and 40s. At first to "goof on" at the earnestness and corniness of the ads and the stories. But then to appreciate the nuances of living everyday life in the decades before I was born, which you could glean from leafing through those pages. "Anonymous history" is infused in the film. The kid holding several empty soda bottles is probably there at the festival because sneaking into an event like this and picking up empties was an easy way to earn some money. In those days, the deposit you paid on bottles was much larger in real terms than today.

Shows like "Mad Men" do a decent enough job of picking up some of the atmospherics of this time (usually by showing people smoking cigarettes like madmen), but this is the real thing. The clothes, especially, but also in the gestures and the way people move. And then there's the White/Negro thing in this film. There wasn't the kind of overt racism in Newport, Rhode Island that you would find in the south but there was definitely separateness. Remember, in 1958 Amos 'n Andy was still being shown on TV, and only white people were in TV ads. The two groups are integrated in the movie, but this wasn't typical. Stern was told that he probably couldn't distribute the movie in the south because of this.

In all, a real gem for anyone who loves jazz. A must-see for anyone who likes, makes or wants to make documentary films.