Jazz on a Summer's Day/A Summer's Day With Bert Stern
by Bert Stern, Aram Avakian
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DVD details
Actor: Chico Hamilton, Chuck Berry, Gerry Mulligan, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia JacksonDirector: Aram Avakian, Bert Stern
Cinematographer: Bert Stern
Cinematographer: Courtney Hesfela
Producer: George Wein
Producer: Harvey Kahn
Writer: Albert D'Annibale
Writer: Arnold Perl
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: Academy Ratio, 1.33:1
Running Time: 85 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-03-14
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Yorker Video
DVD Reviews of Jazz on a Summer's Day/A Summer's Day With Bert Stern
DVD Review: jazz and history
Summary: 4 Stars
While I watched this, I became acutely aware of how much of a documentary it actually is, and of how many surprises are in it. Of course, there's the music, and the performers -- and yes, Anita O'Day is remarkable...dinah is too underrated today and we need more of her in jazz recordings. The concert flies by all too soon. Late fifties' dress, hair styles...most acutely, this is an integrated audience! In 1958 America, there were centers of integration (NY,NO, LA) but most of it was ghetto: Jewish, Italian, WASP, Black. In the midwest(where I'm from) it was clear: 'Grosse Pointe' may have been named for its locale, but you had to fill out a questionnaire to buy, and if you didn't score the points you didn't get it--'ethnics' lost points for background, blacks lost all points from the start. So the film is more remarkable in that it shows a segment of American society far more open and sophisticated than the rest, more likely than not united by a singular love of the music. That said, because it is an amateur's film, there are sections poorly lit, or cut abruptly...but I bought a copy for myself and one for each of my jazz-loving godchildren, and I'd do it again in a snap.DVD Review: NOT SO GOOD TRANSFER
Summary: 3 Stars
I like Bert Stern images
very 50's cool people wearing
sunglasses. Maybe the original
movie has deteriorated.
Music CD is nice.
Opening track w Jimmy Giuffre
is the best.
DVD Review: Best jazz movie ever!
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent transfer of a great concert film. Seller was accurate in all aspects. I would certainly do business, with him again.DVD Review: Best Jazz Film Ever Made
Summary: 5 Stars
See title of review.Also considered a landmark in documentary fil making in and of itself.
Chazz
DVD Review: A 50's Idyll
Summary: 5 Stars
Ahh, you Boomers can take your Woodstock and your Monterrey and most definitely your Altamont (*shudder*) - THIS is the music festival I'D loved to have been at: The Newport Jazz Festival of 1958. It's something of a sour old Gen-Xer's solace to think that it's unlikely the real event could have borne much resemblance to this utterly gorgeous film made by the great photographer Bert Stern, all cherry-red and sea-blue and glowing with an unreal light. Stern (most famous for the "last session" with Marilyn Monroe) makes everyone an icon, the audience as well as the performers. These seem the very hip/squarest cats in the world at the right place at exactly the right time -- black guys in crisp suits and white guys in t-shirts and pompadours, girls in hats and scarves and boy's slacks, women in crinolines and multi-strand pearls and blue-tinted sunglasses, men in horn-rims and skinny ties -- all of them sitting together and bopping and smiling and smoking and occasionally getting up to jitterbug ecstatically in the angelic light of Bert Stern's awesome camera. You know it's a good show when Thelonious Monk is one of the opening acts, folks. Anita O'Day gets the party started, Chico Hamilton makes it mellow, Dinah Washington burns it up, Chuck Berry gets the kids rockin' and rollin', Louis Armstrong sends everyone into conniptions of rapture, and Mahalia Jackson absolutely steals the entire show at the end with The Lord's Prayer, a beautiful moment which truly seems to herald the breaking of a new kind of dawn. A must-see.
Description of Jazz on a Summer's Day/A Summer's Day With Bert Stern
Part concert documentary, part pop-cultural time capsule, Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day chronicles the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with an approach as deceptively relaxed, even impulsive, as the music itself. Still photographer Stern sidesteps more formal documentary conventions such as narrative voiceovers to wander purposefully from festival stage to boarding-house jam sessions, taking in the parallel color and motion of the America's Cup preparations when he isn't capturing rich color footage of the performances and the celebratory mood of the concertgoers. In the process, he documents American jazz at a notably golden moment in its development--diverse, adventurous, and still broadly popular, this was jazz not yet under the shadow of rock and youth culture, played by an integrated artistic community a few short years away from social and political turmoil that would boil divisively to the surface during the '60s. To say Stern was rolling film in a jazz Camelot is overstatement, but only slightly so.Stern's circular approach and wonderful eye achieve a breezy languor at the expense of more comprehensive coverage of the festival's bumper crop of strong jazz, blues, and gospel musicians. Perhaps inevitably, the camera lingers on Louis Armstrong, Anita O'Day, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and George Shearing. Avid fans of later styles may be frustrated by the fleeting glimpses of other musicians such as Eric Dolphy and Art Farmer, or the honor roll of classic jazz stylists whose Newport sets weren't included in the film, but such omissions seem forgivable, if not necessary, to Stern's serendipitous design. --Sam Sutherland
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