Tag Archives: Langston Hughes

JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY

Yes, as Richard Brody and others have pointed out, JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY—photographer Bert Stern’s indelible documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival—could have been a different kind of film. Sonny Rollins, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Max Roach, and Miles Davis—with John Coltrane in his sextet—were also in Newport that year, but their performances didn’t make the final cut.

Yet the film remains one of the greatest jazz documentaries ever made, a picture of the art form at its peak just as rock and roll was about to replace it as the country’s most popular musical genre.

The performances of Dinah Washington and Anita O’Day alone are worth the price of admission, and Stern’s camera also captures the playing of Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Stitt, Chico Hamilton, Jimmy Guiffre, and Chuck Berry. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson closes the film.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY is screening now on Kino Lorber’s Kino Marquee. See link below for details.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY

Laemmle, Los Angeles

Bert Stern, Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959), from top: Dinah Washington singing “All of Me”; Anita O’Day; Jack Teagarden (left) and Louis Armstrong; Thelonious Monk; Ralph Ellison (left), Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival; poster courtesy and © Kino Lorber; program from the first Newport Jazz Festival, 1954; Miles Davis at the 1958 festival.

MOVED BY THE MOTION — SUDDEN RISE

SUDDEN RISE—co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten—is the New York City performance debut of the ensemble Moved by the Motion.

This “collage” of text, film, movement, and sound is complemented by the words of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, W.E.B. Du Bois and Jimi Hendrix.

MOVED BY THE MOTION—SUDDEN RISE

Friday, April 26, at 8 pm.

Saturday April 27, at 4 pm and 8 pm.

Whitney Museum of American Art

99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.

Moved by the MotionSudden Rise, photographs by Paula Court/EMPAC. Images courtesy of Moved by the Motion and the photographer.

ON ROY DECARAVA

To celebrate the reissue of The Sweet Flypaper of Life—text by Langston Hughes, photographs by Roy DeCaravaThelma Golden will moderate a panel on the work and Harlem milieu of the late photographer.

Participants include writer A.D. Coleman, filmmaker Radiclani Clytus, professors Leslie Hewitt and John Stauffer, and photographer Hope Wurmfeld.

A RADICAL VISION

ROY DECARAVA’S THE SWEET FLYPAPER OF LIFE panel

Monday, October 29, from 6:30 pm to 8 pm.

Great Hall, Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, New York City.

Above: Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

Below: Roy DeCarava, Woman walking above, New York, 1950.  © The Estate of Roy DeCarava, 2018. All rights reserved.

Images courtesy David Zwirner.