Houston's MFAH Jazz on Film series showcases rare gems

Texas Tenor: The Illinois Jacquet Story is one of the film featured in the MFAH's Jazz on Film series.

Peter Lucas began curating the Jazz on Film series at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2013. Ever since, the Houston native has tried to avoid the obvious. Yes, there are some fine documentaries and biopics about jazz. But there is also much, much more, befitting a music that has always pushed forward into different shapes and sounds.

"It has proven to be a really rich and diverse exploration, looking at the intersections of jazz and cinema in all kinds of ways," Lucas said on the eve of this year's program, which runs throughout June. "It's got all this stuff about music and film, but also society, art and culture, all the good and bad and ugly of the world over the past century."

It also has films that you’ll have a hard time seeing anywhere else. Among the rare titles unavailable to stream is The Cool World, Shirley Clarke's gritty, experimental 1963 New York street film about a Harlem teen (Rony Clanton) caught up in Harlem gang life as he tries to procure his first gun. The film has a strong identity as a groundbreaking independent film even without the jazz element, but the soundtrack, composed by pianist Mal Waldron and performed by a quintet led by trumpet giant Dizzy Gillespie, makes it a snug fit for the series. The film will be shown in a new 35 mm restoration for this 60th-anniversary screening.

"It's this interesting mix of independent narrative movie and documentary," Lucas says. "In 1963, some of the film's statements and reflections about race and this country were not really hitting mainstream movie theaters. It was extremely bold in so many ways."

Local flavor comes in the form of Texas Tenor: The Illinois Jacquet Story, a 1992 documentary about the Louisiana-born, Houston-bred Saxophonist whose solo on Lionel Hampton's 1942 "Flying Home" helped create the modern tenor sound. Not as famous as many of his peers, Jacquet emerges here as a vital part of jazz history.

Poster for Imagine the Sound, part of the MFAH's Jazz on Film Series.

Poster for The Cool World, part of the MFAH's Jazz on Film Series.

"His sound was unusual in the intonation of the instrument," Lucas says. "It could be argued that he created the rock-and-roll, rhythm-and-blues saxophone sound, and It certainly affected jazz in a lot of ways over the coming decades."

The one new film in the series is a keeper. Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes follows the mercurial drummer, who died in 2007, through an ever-evolving career that began in the early days of bebop with the likes of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. The film chronicles Roach's collaborations with trumpeter Clifford Brown, whose 1956 death in a car accident left Roach despondent, and singer Abbey Lincoln, with whom he recorded the fiery 1960 protest album We Insist! (and to whom he was married from 1962 to 1970).

The directors, Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro, began working on the film when Roach was still alive, and The Drum Also Waltzes features original interviews with Roach, his family, and artists including Sonny Rollins (still going strong at 92) and Randy Weston (who died in 2018).

"People know his name, but they don't always celebrate him as a real innovator," Lucas says. "He's overshadowed by Charlie Parker and people who he was playing with. But he really helped invent the rhythms of the bebop sound."

The biggest star in the series is probably Sammy Davis Jr., who plays an alcoholic musician in the 1966 film A Man Called Adam. Directed by Leo Penn (Sean's father) and co-starring Ossie Davis and Cicely Tyson, with a score composed by Benny Carter (and Nat Adderley playing Davis’ coronet parts), Adam, shown here in a new 35 mm print, also features performances by Louis Armstrong and Mel Tormé.

"I think it's Davis’ best film performance by far," Lucas says. "He is playing a really troubled, struggling musician, dealing with his past and his addiction. It is also really unique in that it actually acknowledges some of the civil rights struggles of the time."

And if that sounds too mainstream, you can always go free. The 1981 documentary Imagine the Sound is an appropriately eccentric exploration of free jazz, featuring original performances by pioneers including Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Paul Bley and Bill Dixon, playing in-studio and exclusively for the camera and waxing philosophic on free jazz, its principles and its history.

"Even people who wouldn't necessarily identify as free jazz or avant-garde jazz fans can find themselves pretty intrigued and involved in the film," Lucas says.

All told, the series showcases the eclecticism and enduring vitality of jazz, and the many ways in which film has tapped into the music's artistry and energy. That never really goes out of style.

Jazz on Film runs June 9-11, June 16-17 and June 23 at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Brown Auditorium Theater, 1001 Bissonnet Street. For more information and tickets, visit the MFAH website.

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