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TV / FILM June 23, 2020

Stan Getz: The Movies and TV

By the mid-1950s, tenor saxophonist Stan Getz had become a sensation as a soloist and started to be featured in films. A few years later, Getz's horn could be heard in European films and then American films upon his return to the U.S. in 1960. From the 1960s until his death in 1991, Getz was heard regularly on TV shows such as Ironside and The Courtship of Eddie's Father as well as in movies. Here are 13 clips of Getz ...
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TV / FILM June 12, 2020

Doc: Toronto Jazz (1963)

In 1963, Toronto was a bustling jazz center akin to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The city's jazz establishments flourished after Ontario's Liquor Licensing Board changed its dining lounge rules in 1946 to permit live venues to sell alcohol. Toronto became a destination for Canadian musicians and for touring American artists. Clubs ranged from the posh Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel to the House of Hambourg, George’s Spaghetti House, the Colonial and Bourbon Street, to name just ...
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TV / FILM May 22, 2020

Pete Rugolo and the Beaver

The death of Ken Osmond last week came as a shock to anyone who grew up watching TV's Leave It to Beaver in the early 1960s. The shock for me wasn't that Osmond had died but that he had been alive all this time. The word on the playground in the late 1960s and early '70s was that the guy who played Eddie Haskell had died in Vietnam. Everyone believed it, and why not? Obviously, that wasn't the case, but ...
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TV / FILM May 8, 2020

Documentary: Grant Green

At his peak in the early 1960s, Grant Green was one of the most soulful, swinging jazz guitarists recording. Unfortunately, many of his albums weren't released until after his death in 1979. The business reasoning remains puzzling but the decision by Blue Note clearly had nothing to do with his playing. Green appeared on many albums as a sideman, and I suppose the label didn't want to saturate the market. In addition, tastes were shifting to soul-jazz and boogaloo. In ...
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TV / FILM April 24, 2020

Doc: Velvet Underground, 2006

One of the most influential rock albums of the 1960s was The Velvet Underground & Nico. Recorded in 1966 and released in March 1967—three months before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper—the album broke new ground and set the tone for multiple rock movements of the late 1960s and early '70s. Unlike the Beatles, who came out of the Liverpool poetry and music hall traditions, the Velvets surfaced as part of the New York pop art and trans-national avant-garde music scenes. The ...
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TV / FILM April 12, 2020

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: A jazz film mini-festival (shutdown edition)

With live music still shut down for the foreseeable future, this week we revisit an idea used in this space occasionally during the slow weeks of summer, and offer up a mini-festival of six feature-length films about jazz. The first film, embedded up above, is 1959, The Year That Changed Jazz, a 2009 documentary originally aired on the BBC. It uses archival performances and interviews to look at developments in jazz as reflected in four historically significant albums released that ...
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TV / FILM January 25, 2020

The Young Rochefort Girls

One of my favorite movies is The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), written and directed by Jacques Demy with music by Michel Legrand. I love the film more than Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which also was directed by Demy with music by Legrand. It's overwhelmingly uplifting a with sensational score and explosive color. France in the '60s was magical. The music in Rochefort is more glorious and spectacular that Umbrellas, the modern-dance choreography is marvelous and the pastel colors are ...
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TV / FILM January 11, 2020

Doc: Jack Sheldon, 2008

Who was Jack Sheldon and why does he matter? Part of the answer can be found in Trying to Get Good: the Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon, a documentary released in 2008. Produced by Doug McIntyre and Penny Peyser, the film is part biography, part confessional and part intervention as Sheldon and his music colleagues shed light on the West Coast jazz scene in the 1950s and Sheldon's playing gifts and puckish personality. Jimi Mentis sent along links to the ...
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