Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema

by Krin Gabbard

Overview

American cinema has long been fascinated by jazz and jazz musicians. Yet most jazz films aren't really about jazz. Rather, as Krin Gabbard shows, they create images of racial and sexual identity, many of which have become inseparable from popular notions of the music itself. In Jammin' at the Margins, Gabbard scrutinizes these films, exploring the fundamental obsessions that American culture has brought to jazz in the cinema.

Gabbard's close look at jazz film biographies, from The Jazz Singer to Bird, reveals Hollywood's reluctance to acknowledge black subjectivity. Black and even white jazz artists have become vehicles for familiar Hollywood conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. Even Scorsese's New York, New York and Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues have failed to disentangle themselves from entrenched stereotypes and conventions.

Gabbard also examines Hollywood's confrontation with jazz as an elite art form, and the role of the jazz trumpet as a crucial signifier of masculinity. Finally, he considers the acting careers of Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Hoagy Carmichael; Duke Ellington's extraordinary work in films from 1929 until the late 1960s; and the forgotten career of Kay Kyser, star of nine Hollywood films and leader of a popular swing band.

This insightful look at the marriage of jazz and film is a major contribution to film, jazz, and cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226277899
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/15/1996
Edition description:	1
Pages:	357
Sales rank:	937,773
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Krin Gabbard is professor of comparative literature and English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an amateur trumpet player.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction : Whose Jazz, Whose Cinema?
1: The Ethnic Oedipus: The Jazz Singer and Its Remakes
2: Black and Tan Fantasies: The Jazz Biopic
3: Jazz Becomes Art
4: Signifyin(g) the Phallus: Representations of the Jazz Trumpet
5: Duke's Place: Visualizing a Jazz Composer
6: "Actor and Musician": Louis Armstrong and His Films
7: Nat King Cole, Hoagy Carmichael, and the Fate of the Jazz Actor
Conclusion: New York, New York and Short Cuts
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Jazz, one of the few uniquely American musical forms, is thoroughly analyzed in this absorbing and thought-provoking work. Gabbard (comparative literature, SUNY, Stony Brook) examines the treatment of jazz music and musicians in the American cinema, with emphasis on Hollywood's appalling annexation of jazz-related trappings and resultant perpetuation of racial and sexual stereotypes. His thesis points out the intriguing contradiction between pure jazz and the requirements of the silver screen, concluding that the solitary, intense nature of jazz precludes any accurate visual narrative. Gabbard clearly knows his topic and continually provides fresh insights and fascinating bits of minutiae. Painstakingly researched and liberally illustrated, this book is an invaluable addition to a topic about which too little has been written. Recommended for academic and larger public collections.Cynthia Ward Cooper, Carrollton Libs., Tex.

Library Journal

A postmodern, thematic, critical study of the relationship between jazz and the American cinema. Gabbard eschews the linear, comprehensive approach and chooses the dialectic path touching on more interesting subject matter than the run of the mill historical saga e.g. the art versus commerce dichotomy in Jazz during the 1940s, the problematic interactions between white and black musicians, and the performance of gender roles. These issues riff through studies of movie classics from The Jazz Singer and The Glenn Miller Story to Clint Eastwood's Bird and Scorcese's New York, New York. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews