Department of English and American Studies English Language And

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Pavel Smutný Black Jazz and the Silver Screen Master ’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey A. Vanderziel, B.A. 2008 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgements I would like to thank Peter Kramer, Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, for his extremely helpful tips concerning the secondary sources for my thesis, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr., for his willingness to lend me a significant number of titles on African-Americans and cinema from his personal collection, and last, but not least, my supervisor Jeffrey A. Vanderziel, B.A., for his valuable advice, kindly guidance and pleasant atmosphere during our discussions over the thesis. Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Acting Jazz ........................................................................................ 4 Chapter Two: Hollywood Histories of Jazz ......................................................... 22 Chapter Three: Sinful Syncopations..................................................................... 39 Chapter Four: Jazz Cartoons – The Jungle Rhythm & The Swingin’ City ..... 55 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 76 Bibliography: ........................................................................................................... 80 Introduction On October 23, 1927, Al Jolson in blackface appeared on the movie theater screen at Warners’ Strand in New York City, to sing a couple of sentimental songs. The film, Jazz Singer (Warner Bros.), as the first feature-length movie with synchronized sound sequences officially marked the end of the silent era in Hollywood. What is more, Jazz Singer symbolically embodies the policies applied to jazz and African-American jazz musicians by the film studio industry during its heyday: even though the skin of the jazz singer is (or seems) black, behind that image is a white man 1 and the performance is his interpretation of what it means to be a jazz singer, and what it means to have black skin. In a similar fashion, the films discussed in the present thesis are precisely that – the white interpretations of the African-American roots of jazz, of African-American jazz musicians, and of the African-American community as seen through the prism of music. Focusing on a roughly twenty year period of Hollywood cinema from 1927 to 1948, the thesis attempts to show how segregation, prejudice and racial stereotypes influenced the transformation of African-American jazz and its proponents onto the ‘silver screen,’ and how these phenomena helped determine the interactions between African-American jazz musicians and their white counterparts when performing and/or acting in a single film. This period represents an era when the Hollywood film studios (unrivaled by the television or other audiovisual media) controlled, by means of vertical integration and block booking, 2 the production, distribution, as well as the screening of movies and, therefore, had the most profound influence on the American public and its opinions on any topic, including jazz and racial relations in the USA. For the music 1 Al Jolson was, of course Jewish, but by contrasting himself against the African-Americans, he could become assimilated into the white American culture. 2 Block booking “enabled producers to extract agreement from exhibitors to take all their pictures in a total package, sight unseen, thus guaranteeing a screening for their product and making the exhibitor bear much of the risk for the film’s success or failure” (Turner, 17). 1 itself, the period marks the rise and peak of jazz’s worldwide popularity which by the late 1940s started to decline, as jazz was gradually becoming to be perceived less as a popular music and more as an art form. Since the Hollywood cinema had from its early days constructed the American “whiteness as the norm by which all ‘Others’ fail by comparison” (Bernardi, xiii), and during the studio era “systematized [its] popularization” (Bernardi, xv), ‘blackness’ in the Classical Hollywood movies is often constructed as the antithesis of ‘whiteness,’ played out in the ‘white – black’ opposites of ‘innocence – sin’ ‘beauty – ugliness’ ‘mind – body,’ etc. Jazz, as music with ‘black’ roots, naturally suffered from these binary opposites when it was given exposure on the silver screen. Not to become involved in this ‘white – black’ game, I decided to use mostly the term African- American in the thesis when referring to the musicians, however, when the emphasis on the color is important, black and white come into play as well. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of them discussing a group of Hollywood films (feature-length, short subjects or animated cartoons) linked together by a topic. The first chapter “Acting Jazz” deals with the special position that African- American jazz musicians as film actors held in the industry – since their popularity with audiences could increase the drawing power of Hollywood movies, the musicians appeared in a number of productions from the late 1920s to 1940s, yet in order to maintain segregation, barriers were drawn between the African-American and white performers, the African-American jazz performers were segregated into all-black cast short subjects or encapsulated in cameo performances with no reference to the story. The second chapter “Hollywood Histories of Jazz” analyses the five studios’ attempts to tell a history of jazz produced between 1930 and 1948, showing several 2 tendencies: the increasing importance of African-Americans in the narratives of these films, the selectivity of the narratives as to the ‘unpleasant’ parts of the history (e.g. playing down, if not altogether erasing it, the importance of slavery in the music’s development), and the open preference of the white band leaders over the African- American ones. The third chapter, called “Sinful Syncopations,” shows how African-American jazz music was used in several film narratives as an expression of sin, evil, and decadence within the African-American community, put in a musical contrast to the pious spirituals or folk songs. In other movies, jazz, because of its connection to the African-American culture, was used to ‘blacken’ the white female characters, rendering them immoral. The concluding part of the chapter pays attention to two productions which defy this definition of African-American jazz as sinful, and the reason behind such discrepancy. The final chapter “Jazz Cartoons – The Jungle Rhythm & the Swinging City” analyses a number of short animated cartoons made by the studios during the 1930s and 1940s in which African-American jazz performers (be it the musicians themselves, their caricatures or a group of nameless performers with obvious African-American features) have considerable parts, and where the white fantasies about the music and its champions are unbound from the constraints of the live action films, in a number of cases showing the stereotypes and myths surrounding the music in the extreme. These chapters will demonstrate that the cinematic representations of African- American jazz musicians defy a simple ‘black and white’ analysis – Hollywood was at once a stereotyping, denigrating, even racist institution and yet it provided African- American jazz performers with unique opportunities to spread their music to nation- wide audiences; opportunities otherwise denied to their fellow African-American artists. 3 Chapter One: Acting Jazz Even before the African-American jazz musicians made their first appearances on the film screen in the late 1920s, the sound of their performances could be already heard in the movie theaters – from the orchestra pit of the de facto segregated movie theaters in the North, as accompaniment to the silent movies; and as Louis Armstrong recalled his performances with Fats Waller in the Chicago’s Vendome theater in 1925, they “used to really romp” (Carbine, 25). Although the movie house orchestra usually had a score to follow during the course of the movies, the musicians did not always adhere to it, and Mary Carbine, basing her claim on the recollection of movie goers, suggested that “Race [i.e. African-American] orchestras might have gone beyond simply ignoring the narrative or the sheet music library to read the films against the grain, undermining ‘preferred readings’ with satirical interpretations” (31). By inserting for instance a hot number in the funeral scene, the African-American jazz musicians could ‘spoil’ the scenes they did not approve of, an opportunity that in many of their later sound film performances was lost because of the wide spread strategy of prerecorded performances, forcing the musicians to only ‘act jazz,’ not play it. Nonetheless, the sight of African-American jazz could earn the musicians much greater popularity than the mere sound of it, and therefore, the few African-American musicians that could ‘make it’ to the movies during the two decades following the arrival of ‘talkies,’ embraced the opportunity without hesitation. The advent of sound cinema in the late 1920s created a short-lived hope in the African-American community that a possibility for more acting

Load more