Powerful musical moments are undercut by exasperating blandness in this rerelease of Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport jazz festival
This rerelease of Bert Stern’s filmed record of the 1958 Newport jazz festival happens to arrive in the
UK just after Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem cultural festival, known then as the “Black Woodstock”. Both events and both movies feature the gospel
Singer Mahalia Jackson – but there the comparison ends. Where Summer of Soul is amazingly vibrant and passionate, Jazz on a Summer’s Day is exasperatingly sedate and restrained and often just bloodless and dull, despite some occasionally intriguing musical offerings from musicians such as Thelonious Monk, George Shearing and Gerry Mulligan; Chuck Berry is there, on his bland best behaviour, and finally we get some powerfully charismatic appearances from Louis Armstrong and Jackson herself.
During the daytime, the movie bizarrely intercuts shots of the musicians on stage with bland B-roll footage of the America’s Cup yachting races taking place nearby – but the wealthy folk’s sport of sailing is about as uncool and unjazzy as it gets, and the juxtaposition is completely baffling. And so are the cutaway shots of the people in the crowd, who very often seem to be an America’s Cup crowd, sedately nodding along or maybe nodding off, or simply looking bored or talking among themselves.