The Cry of Jazz, death and the diaspora.

(left) Richard Dreyfuss and Jack Warden in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and (right) white and black jazz fans argue its history in “The Cry of Jazz”.

In 1959, Mordechai Richler wrote a scathing novel that explored the coming of age and mercenary ambitions of a Jewish teenager in 1950’s Montreal. In 1974, “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” was adapted for the screen, with Richard Dreyfuss in the title role. A great novel and a very good movie, one scene in particular stands out to us. Duddy, with his get-rich-at-any-cost ethos, is described by his uncle as a “Jewboy on the make”. To this end, Duddy decides to start a business that films bar mitzvahs, although he has no knowledge of cameras, film or any other aspect of putting projects like this together. To handle these details, he hires an out-of-work Hollywood director who has been blacklisted for his Communist sympathies.

While experienced and fairly creative, the director is more than a little bit crazy, and their first project together is a disaster. The filming of the bar mitzvah goes well enough, but it’s in editing the footage and trying to create a simple 16 mm keepsake for the boy’s family that things go terribly wrong. The director insists on creating an epic movie depicting the entire Jewish diaspora, replete with images of the Holocaust and Nazi troops marching across the screen, only occasionally interrupted by snippets of the boy’s parents—who are footing the bill—and the ceremony itself. In one darkly funny scene, the finished project is finally shown to the confused and appalled family. The boy’s old—and quite Old World—grandfather, completely confounded by a scene showing the destruction of Warsaw by dive-bombing Stuka aircraft, exclaims with a thick, Yiddish accent, “I don’t remember any of this at shul.”

Grab a copy of the movie here: Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz, or grab a copy of the book here: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

What reminded us of this movie, in the most convoluted of ways, was reading of the death yesterday of Edward Bland. Bland was an African-American composer who will be remembered at least a little for his modernist chamber works that were performed by several major ensembles, and for his scores, which included 1984’s “A Soldier’s Story”. What makes him more memorable, however, is his one foray into film making, 1959’s “The Cry of Jazz”. Produced on a shoestring, it’s an unquestionably amateurish effort, with the most rudimentary acting, cinematography and editing. What sets it apart, and what earned it a place in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, is its pointed and ambitious attempt to describe racism in America and its impact on the creation and evolution of jazz.

With music by Sun Ra’s orchestra, the film pulls no punches in describing how white America has appropriated black culture, especially jazz, while continuing to discriminate against African-Americans in the most profound ways. 1959, of course, was a period of relative calm before the storm of the 1960’s civil rights movement, and Bland’s views and rhetoric were at what white Americans would have considered the most radical fringe of that movement. Indeed, the film even now elicits cries of reverse racism for its stereotyped portrayals of white intellectuals as dilettantes and misguided bigots. Check out the movie, and especially the comments below it, on You Tube for proof that it still has sting.

Bland spends a fair portion of the film stating jazz history in anthropological as well as musical terms, and it’s difficult to argue with his conclusions except in the most arcane and specific ways. A point to which he keeps returning is that in 1959, white musicians and musicologists have so insinuated themselves into the process of making and selling jazz that they no longer see the intimate connection between the music and the African-American diaspora. This was a real argument in that era, and one that brought out quite a bit of venom on both sides of the issue. Stan Kenton famously understated and denigrated the contributions of black musicians, and many critics of that era followed suit. The rise of “cool” jazz, which was a mostly-white and commercially viable form of the music, only perpetuated the resentment on both sides. As a whole, this film is in many ways a direct response to that argument, but it goes deeper into issues of racism than any white critic ever could have, then or now.

Some of the film’s contentions border on hyperbole, and serve to obfuscate, rather than illuminate the angry reality of his thesis, but even at their most outrageous they have an element of truth to them. An example is Bland’s assertion that jazz operates in a contradictory duality, between restraint and freedom. Not a bad theme in general, but he goes on to define this restraint in terms of a jazz improviser’s typical adherence to the 32-measure chorus structure of most existing jazz material, and that the creative boundaries this creates are not unlike the chains of a slave. Overripe hyperbole? Probably. Strained metaphor? Almost certainly, but a historical point with at least some merit when one considers the fact that anger over issues of political and social freedom were not without effect on the creation of the avant garde, the “free” jazz movement of the 1960’s that attempted to discard European musical conventions like thematic structure and bar lines.

To be sure, the era and Bland’s budget allow for things in the film that are at times unintentionally humorous, out-of-touch and clumsy by any standard, but especially those of today. To say the film has a certain pretentiousness and sense of grandiose importance, especially given its modest means and execution, is not unfair. Conversely, Bland makes any number of contentions that are pointed and surprising even today, especially in an era when white writers—including ourselves—and white documentarians like Ken Burns are still being assigned the task of telling jazz history and providing analysis of the music more often than African-Americans. “The Cry of Jazz” offers observations that still make both jazz historians and white folks in general at least a little uncomfortable, and in that, it presaged Malcolm X by more than a few years. As for jazz history, the accepted view of its evolution has only fairly recently aligned with Bland’s, and there are still apologists for the commonly held views of his day.

So, what relationship does “The Cry of Jazz” have to “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”? It simply reminded us of a conversation we had while first viewing the latter film back in 1975. A wise acquaintance whispered to us during the bar mitzvah scene that the resulting film-within-a-film reminded him of “The Cry of Jazz”, a film we’d both recently seen for the first time. His opinion of Bland’s film mirrored that of many critics over the years: that it was an amateur effort which attempted to tell the story of an entire people, and tell it badly, rather than trying to focus on the task at hand. “The Cry of Jazz” certainly has ambitions beyond the typical jazz history documentary, and tackles the story of African-Americans on a broad scale that rivals that of the fictitious filmmaker in “Duddy Kravitz”. After watching it again today, however, we’re fairly sure that we don’t really agree with our friend’s assessment any more. Bland’s movie is deeper and more timely than we remembered, and one only has to experience the anger it still generates to sense its importance. Unlike Duddy Kravitz, Bland was anything but a “black guy on the make”, and we recommend this film for anyone interested in jazz, civil rights or even the history of independent film.

Finally, it’s not a coincidence that we at Dead Like Jazz are interested in “The Cry of Jazz” because it’s based on Bland’s apparently unpublished book “The Fruits of the Death of Jazz”. Bland’s New York Times obit is here.