The sky was as clear as a saint’s conscience. Below its sheer impossibility, awaft on a mercury sea, yachts rolled and turned, their sails convexing and concaving like living breathing creatures.
Arriving from ninety-three million miles away, blinding sunlight hit the water at 300,000 kilometres per second and shattered into a lacework of twinkling diamonds prettier than the night stars. (Forgive the figures; I am a reincarnated Rømer trying to convince that sceptic Cassini about Io.)
It was idyllic. But the sky was too blue, the sea too perfect, the yachts too three-dimensional, like languorous basking sharks. It wasn’t real: it was a piece of preserved transparent thermoplastic backlit into life by 60,000 lumens (figures again) of anti-darkness; a kind of reverse firing squad in which something dead is shot against a wall to make it live again; if only momentarily. A documentary film.
The boats were participants in the 1958 America’s Cup - a yacht race - but the real subject of the film was the 1958 Newport Jazz festival; and for all their beauty, the sea and the cinematically rolling boats were merely background, like the passers-by outside the bank in Dog Day Afternoon, or the horse carriages on the dusty, rutted road to Mount Macedon in Picnic at Hanging Rock.
In Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a ‘filmed record’ of the festival, there is mercifully no narration uttering idiocies such as ‘iconic’ or ‘legendary’; the only words spoken are by unseen venue announcer Willis Conover, whose echoing, disembodied voice invokes a haunting sense of elapsed time. When the camera turns its lens to land, cars, rolling and swaying like the yachts on the bay, arrive and rumble across a grassed improvised parking lot. (Glimpses of the boats can be occasionally seen, as if players in their own sub-film.) The camera eats beads of sweat on a face and a saxophone’s notes of pain. Anita O’Day is bathed on-stage in shards of 35mm lemon sunshine, and a quintet’s oozing notes are punctuated by a gentle slap of percussion, like a racing boat coming politely down off a swell. The intimate but gentle camera cuts to the crowd. Not applause, too cliché. Rather, a look, a frown, a smile, a bend to straighten a skirt; as if seen by someone in the next row. Random, and beautiful.
Suddenly it is late afternoon. Players appear, perform and leave in a dreamlike Chaucerian procession, or is that sensation induced by the melancholy passage of time? Thelonious Monk; Jack Teagarden; Dinah Washington pass by. Then night. Big Maybelle; Chico Hamilton; and at last Mahalia Jackson sings The Lord’s Prayer, if only to slake the anxious spirituality of parting - some kind of god has been present throughout - to close the festival.
*
Jazz on a Summer’s Day, 1959. Directed by Aram Avakian, photographed by Bert Stern, music direction by Georgia Avakian. (Jazz on a Summer’s Day played at Classic Cinema Elsternwick as part of its perpetual retrospective season.)
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