The presence of jazz in the cinema goes back a long way. Before the seventh art spoke, it was already present in projection rooms and during the silent film years, a pianist used to accompany the film images live with music, often jazz.
In an exhibition at the Girona House of Culture that can be seen until December 23, the popularizer and jazz critic Jaume Tauler reviews the parallels and the relationship between these two artistic expressions that are so representative of the 20th century through his extensive collection of photographs, original posters, shows, magazines, movies and record releases of the most successful soundtracks.
“The relationship between cinema and jazz has been constant, a true love story”, emphasizes the curator, who in the exhibition reels off some curiosities about this musical style born in New Orleans. "It is not by chance" -he underlines- that the first sound film was The Jazz singer (The jazz singer). He explains that the first voice heard on the screen was that of Al Jolson, an American singer of Russian origin and Jewish ethnicity who in the film -based on his biography- appeared with his face painted black.
"It was a relatively common practice, quite widespread among white singers and musicians who interpreted black repertoires," says Tauler, who also recalls that when cinema incorporated jazz, in the 1920s and 1930s, in full racial segregation, there were white bands and black bands, which rarely mixed. The first to do so, he adds, was the clarinetist and jazz director Benny Goodman, who included black musicians in his white orchestra.
Another detail unknown to the general public and reflected in the exhibition is that Romano Mussolini, one of the sons of the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, the Duce, was a jazz pianist. "The fascist regime considered jazz as music for inferior races." Romano went so far as to say that his father used to listen to this type of music at home, it is explained in the sample. It is also probable that few know that the voice of the 'king of jazz', the American trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, has appeared in two of the films of the James Bond saga: he sang the central theme, 'We have all the time in the world', in the one starring Australian actor George Lazenby in 1969, and the song has been recovered for the last film in the series, 'It's not time to die'.
Anecdotes aside, the exhibition is divided into two large areas: classic and modern jazz. The first ranges from the birth of jazz, in the second decade of the 20th century, until the end of the Second World War. “Classic jazz is danceable, playful music, that of the great orchestras where the directors were true stars; the cinema took advantage of that”, explains Tauler. The names of Louis Armstrong stand out, who appeared in around thirty films, or that of one of the greatest composers in the history of jazz and music in general, the also American Duke Ellington, who did so in a dozen films. and composed the soundtrack for four others.
Modern jazz arose in 1945 as a result of several phenomena, according to Tauler. On the one hand, the change in public tastes that made orchestras go out of fashion and the little room for improvisation that big bands left soloists, who often met in small clubs to give free rein to their creativity. . "From there arose bebop and all the variants we know: cool-jazz, hard-bop, soul-jazz, jazz-rock, jazz fusion... Jazz went from dance halls to concert halls." Big modern jazz stars like Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson or Herbie Hancock also created soundtracks. In the collective imagination, one of the most popular themes is that of The Pink Panther, composed by Henry Mancini and played on sax by Plas Johnson.
The exhibition dedicates a chapter to biopics, films based on the biography of real people from the world of jazz such as The Glenn Miller Story, released in Spain as Música y lágrimas, and also film noir in Franco's Catalonia, with seventy titles produced in Barcelona between 1950 and 1963.
The exhibition highlights, among others, the figures of Josep Maria Castellví (Barcelona 1900-1944), pioneer of sound and musical cinema in Spain, author of hits such as Mercedes (1932) and ¡Abajo los hombres!, a Hollywood-style musical comedy that included, among others, the Montoliu Jazz Orchestra, and Juli Coll Claramunt (Camprodon 1919-Madrid 1993), who directed fifteen titles, and who is considered to introduce jazz into Catalan cinema in 1958 with the film Un vaso de whisky, whose central theme was commissioned by the musician Josep Solà.
