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This movie was praised by Krim Gabbard in his JAMMIN'AT THE MARGINS, (1996, University of Chicago Press) as a movie trying to have improvisation help a more elaborate form of art. I had taped it on a K7 with a tired VCR, long ago, and forgot about it until Gilles Mouëllic, a teacher of jazz and cinema at the University of Rennes (France), selected it as one of the best achieved examples of interface between the two arts. So I gave it a chance this morning, and was disappointed. The racial aspect, revolutionary 40 years ago, was irrelevant today. The references to the French "new wave", although visible, were not convincing either. This was due especially to the impression of seeing a 16mm feature blown up to 35. The main disappointment was the music: Charlie Mingus didn't have the time to finish his "non-original" score before the film was edited, so Cassavetes brought in Mingus' former tenor sax Shafi Hadi, for a few minutes. In his controversial essay, Mouëllic concludes that the two forms of art cannot coexist, because one of them is improvisation and the other is the result of an equally collective, but more complicated effort.For Jazz and Cinema, better try SUN VALLEY SERENADE, with the immortal Glenn Miller band, Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers. For John Cassavetes, try HUSBANDS, FACES or one of those he made with Gena Rowlands. That was a perfect marriage. henry caraso, paris.
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