THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170031
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARVIN LEON LAKE
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
COUNT BASIE, tired of standing, sat on the curb and was quickly joined by a dozen youngsters.
Dizzy Gillespie called to Roy Eldridge, and when he turned, stuck out his tonque.
Mose Allison and Charlie Rouse showed up too late, while Willie ``The Lion'' Smith, bored with waiting in the hot sun, wandered off, leaving a noticeable gap next to Luckey Roberts. . . .
It was a precious moment in history, and it's all captured in ``A Great Day in Harlem.'' This Oscar-nominated, hourlong documentary is about the taking of a legendary photograph of 57 jazz greats assembled on a mid-August day in 1958 in front of a Harlem brownstone.
The film, says its producer, 77-year-old Jean Bach, ``is not so much about jazz music as about the people.''
``A Great Day in Harlem'' plays Wednesday and Thursday at the Naro Expanded Cinema in Norfolk.
In 1958, Robert Benton, then Esquire magazine's art director, wanted to include new photographs of jazz musicians for the planned January 1959 issue commemorating the golden age of jazz.
That would be nice, said Art Kane, a brash free-lance art director. Better yet, he suggested, would be a group shot. And though he had very little photography experience, Kane offered to take the picture himself.
Kane spread word of the planned photo but feared that only a handful of musicians would show; the shoot was scheduled for 10 a.m., an ungodly hour for any jazz musician. But show they did. Heavyweights like Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, and Gene Krupa; up-and-coming stars like Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey. Fifty-seven in all, including two singers - Maxine Sullivan and Jimmy Rushing.
The photo appeared as a two-page spread in Esquire and became something of an historical document that has since been hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
So you can imagine Bach's astonishment when she got vague responses when questioning folks about the photograph.
``I started asking musicians I'd run into who were in the picture how it had come about, and I'd get these hazy, gee-I-can't-remember-man answers,'' Bach said via telephone from New York.
``The whole thing had kind of slipped into history. None of them had thought to save the magazine. Nobody could remember the day it was taken, including the photographer, who was flustered at the time. And the folks at Esquire had no record of the photograph's being taken.''
Realizing that a great number of the pictured jazz greats had died, Bach wanted to interview the survivors and record their responses for history.
Bach refers to herself as ``one of the first jazz groupies,'' and with good reason. She had reviewed jazz as a Chicago Times columnist. She was once married to the late jazz trumpeter Shorty Sherock and spent seven years traveling with his group. She has written liner notes for countless jazz albums and calls Bobby Short her closest friend.
Bach had filmed about 60 hours of interviews with folks such as Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, Gerry Mulligan and Art Freeman. But it wasn't until she learned in 1989 that Mona Hinton, the wife of bassist Milt Hilton, had filmed the commotion surrounding the taking of the 1958 photo that she thought of combining still shots with the film footage into a movie.
``I didn't know beans about making movies when I first started. I just thought you got a camera crew and went out and shot people.''
The film, Bach's first, was finished in the spring of 1994, with help from film producer Matthew Seig and editor Susan Peehl (``Lady Day: The Many Faces of of Billie Holiday'').
If Bach had had her way, they might still have been laboring over it.
``I wanted it longer,'' she confessed. ``I just wanted more stuff covered. I wanted long studies of the people in it. It would have made `Hoop Dreams' seem like an eye-wink.''
But Seig convinced her that an hour was the perfect length. The film, which has been shown in London, played for nine weeks in New York, recalls Bach.
So after devoting five years to the ``Great Day in Harlem,'' what does Bach do for an encore?
``An encore? I'm still working on this darn movie,'' declared Bach, adding that the film will be out on home video in time for Christmas. She's also considering doing something on CD-ROM with the leftover footage. by CNB