Jazz: The Intimate Art

1968, 54 mins

Credits

Robert Drew

Producer

Mike Jackson

Producer

Harry Moses

Associate Producer

Dave Blumgart

Sound

Stan Agol

Sound

Donald Voorhees

Musical Director

Abbot Mills

Photographer

Juliana Wang

Photographer

Ralph Weisinger

Photographer

Bill Hanson

Assistant

Naomi Mankowitz

Editor

Don Morrow

Narrator

Jean Swain

Production Coordinator

Louis Armstrong

Himself - Trumpeter

Dave Brubeck

Himself - Pianist

Dizzy Gillespie

Himself - Trumpeter

Charles Lloyd

Himself - Saxophonist

Awards

1969 Cine Golden Eagle

1969 Emmy Nomination

1969 Intl. Film Festival Selection, Prague

169 XIVth Intl. Short Film Festival

Reviews/Media

"The excellent hour probed deep into the personalities of the musicians to illustrate what in their makeups gave their music such recognizable stamps of individualism."

Kay Gardella, Daily News

"A bubbling bell-ringing hour of jazz"

Kay Gardella, Daily News

Jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Lloyd are seen candidly at their homes, as well as in rehearsals and performances. This hour-long film showcases the personalities of the creators as they discuss their distinctive musical styles.

Armstrong talks about growing up in New Orleans and joining a band in Chicago. He is seen at a recording session and performance.

 

At the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, Gillespie reveals his mercurial personality. As one of the founders of bop, he helped to introduce not only a new approach to jazz but also the bop vocabulary and way of dressing.

jazz_dizzy_wide

The pianist-conductor-composer Dave Brubeck is shown at the final concert of the Brubeck Quartet in December 1967 in Pittsburgh and at another performance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

jazz_brubeck_piano

Charles Lloyd, one of the jazz world’s newest stars at the time, puts into his music all of the personal rapport he feels with the younger generation. At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Lloyd and his Lloyd Quartet communicate with his youthful following with his music and words.

jazz_lloyd_cu

The film was made for Henry Jaffe Enterprises for broadcast on the April 26, 1968 “Bell Telephone Hour” on NBC.

In later years, critics were divided about the film. “This American TV documentary follows the fatal course of rarely letting the music speak for itself for more than a few bars at a time, while encouraging each of the four musicians to pontificate at length about his life and art,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in a scathing review in the Feb. 1977 Monthly Film Bulletin.

Blogger Ricky Riccardi wrote in 2013 more appreciative of the film’s cross-cutting between the artists’ words and their music in the film, focusing specifically on Armstrong: “The Bell Telephone Hour did a heroic job in illustrating how hard Louis was still working to entertain his fans, 55 years after getting sent to the Colored Waif’s Home.”

The Library of Congress lists the songs featured in the film and also all the performers involved. Click here to view.

Filmography
Sort Films
By Alphabet
By Year
Filter by
See A Film You Like?

Films currently available for consumer purchase can be found here:

To request rights for public screenings or clip licensing of Drew Associates films, email films@drewassociates.com.

All of our original film prints are on deposit at the Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Not all films currently exist in digital form. If you are interested in a digital copy of a film, email films@drewassociates.com.

Learn more

© Drew Associates 2016

Designed by Visually Dynamic