WFCR Jazz Film Series

With WFCR Jazz à la mode host Tom Reney
Enjoy Jazz greats on the big screen with local host of WFCR's legendary Jazz à la mode Program, Tom Reney.  Enjoy 20 minutes of LIVE jazz before each performance, and stick around to discuss the history, the personalities and the music after each show.

THE SERIES: This fall, WFCR, in collaboration with the Amherst Cinema, presents the first WFCR Jazz à la Mode Film Series. For Tom Reney, host of Jazz à la Mode on WFCR, jazz and cinema are a natural pairing. “Both emerged as the major new art forms of the 20th Century, and the very first motion picture with sound was the 1927 Al Jolson classic, The Jazz Singer,” says Reney.  “As it happened, The Jazz Singer was also the first of many films to appropriate the name but little of the actual substance of jazz, and over the years Hollywood has produced numerous jazz-themed movies that trade mostly in stereotypes and sensation.  But jazz has fared much better in the documentary realm.  Directors with a sympathetic view have often found the music, its players, and their stories compelling subject matter.”  The WFCR Jazz à la Mode Series includes a tightly curated selection of films that seeks to celebrate and illuminate the jazz life, and the musicians who made it theirs. Tom Reney will introduce the films, and lead a question and answer after each screening.

We kick things off on September 1 with Antia O’Day: Life of a Jazz Singer, a film as gutsy and driven as its subject. One of the greatest jazz singers of all time, O’Day was highly esteemed by musicians as well as the public, with a style epitomized by her album entitled, Cool Heat.  She is widely recognized as the only white jazz singer on a par with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.  O’Day left an indelible impression on an earlier landmark of documentary cinema, Jazz on a Summer's Day, as she sang a smoldering "Sweet Georgia Brown" at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.  That scene, and an amazing array of clips from O'Day's performances in studios and on stages, is interspersed with interviews of the singer and her colleagues in this engrossing and admiring documentary.  O'Day brought a vigorous, no-nonsense approach to jazz singing, and she's equally blunt in her recollections of life on the road, negotiating the ever-challenging world of show biz, her battles with drug and alcohol addiction, and living under the constant surveillance of narcotics detectives. O'Day also recalls the controversy that ensued when she and trumpeter Roy Eldridge were featured together on Gene Krupa's 1941 recording of "Let Me off Uptown," the first instance in American popular music of a white woman and a black man engaging in a suggestive back-and-forth on record.  O'Day brings a survivor's grit and grace to the telling of these and other episodes of her tumultuous career, all of which is recounted with a no-regrets sense of triumph.

ANITA O'DAY: THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER
at Amherst Cinema
Tuesday September 1   7:00 only!
Special Admission: $10.00

"How was this careless, self-destructive human rhythm machine able to outlast almost all her peers? Maybe the vitality of the jazz she made kept her alive. She was one tough lady." - Stephen Holden, The New York Times

This career-spanning portrait, directed by her former manager Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden, is of a woman who always lived by her own rules. Her total disregard for convention applied as much to singing as to a spectacularly messy life that included several marriages, drug arrests and a heroin addiction lasting more than 15 years. O'Day brings a survivor's grit and grace to the telling of these and other episodes of her tumultuous career, all of which is recounted with a no-regrets sense of triumph.
Directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden. 92 mins, NR.  DVD projection.
Live performance by guitarist Jay Messer begins at 6:40pm!

THELONIUS MONK: Straight No Chaser
at Amherst Cinema
Tuesday October 6   7:00pm
Special Admission: $10.00
The core of Charlotte Zwerin's exciting 1989 documentary about the great jazz pianist and composer—brought to us courtesy of Clint Eastwood, executive producer—is drawn from 14 hours of footage of Monk, in performance and offstage, shot by Michael and Christian Blackwood over six months in 1968. The musical value of this footage is so powerful, and only enhanced by the offstage footage of Monk and the accounts by friends and family of the mental illness that plagued his final years. Director Charlotte Zwerin. 89 min, NR

LAST OF THE BLUE DEVILS
at Amherst Cinema
Tuesday November 3   7:00pm
Special Admission: $10.00
A first-rate 1979 documentary by Bruce Ricker about Kansas City jazz and its most famous musicians, with particular attention devoted to Count Basie and the players who worked for him. Much of it was shot over a five-year period at the Mutual Musicians Foundation and other Kansas City locations.  Ricker skilfully interlaces the proceedings with archive footage of Basie, McShann, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins and many others, in eloquent illustration of the extraordinary influence these Kansas City men were to bring to bear. Simply one of the best musical documentaries ever made. Bruce Ricker.  90mins, NR