Jazz on a Summer's Day, the Last Waltz and No Name

I just took a trip to the Museum of the Moving Image up in Queens. It featured a screening series on music. Last night, I saw Jazz on a Summer's Day. It's a leisurely, soft focus peek at the annual Newport Jazz Festival during the course of one sunny day in 1958. The camera's eye, guided by directors Bert Stern and Aram Avakian, takes us everywhere from the glistening shoreline to grass matted by beach chairs and meandering fans. Rhode Island's waters shimmy with the arrhythmic beats of such greats as Thelonious Monk and Sonny Stitt. The sounds saturate the area with a headiness that even the sea gulls up in that big, blue sky seem to sense the vibrations in the air. The music floats around boats and the bobbing heads of appreciative fans. Some melodies are served with such a dollop that you can almost capture a note in your hand.

The crowd boasted young and old, all converging on the sands of Newport with the common goal of celebrating the sometimes complex, even dissonant, beats of jazz. When you see some fans up close, closing their eyes and shaking their heads with a devotion that only a true aficionado can muster, it deepens any appreciation you yourself might have for this music.

Several well-known vocalists, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry and Anita O'Day for instance, are all in fine form, captured onstage in their heyday. You even get a rare glimpse of Louis Armstrong during a candid moment, bantering in his signature gravely rasp. But it is not until gospel great Mahalia Jackson performs do you get a sense of the full range of jazz. Her concert is but another facet to a musical form that is celebrated just once a year on what must no doubt be the most beautiful, hand-picked day that Newport has to offer.