Watching Jazz. Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen by Björn Heile et al. (eds.) (2016)

The idea that jazz has existed mostly as audio recordings (or audio only) was the basis for the classical jazz discography, standard jazz reception and the reason why jazz became so popular. When recording technology in the 1940s made it possible to capture jazz musicians on film in good quality, in a performance, a session, a short clip, a motion picture or a documentary, even more details and properties of the performer, the audiences and the way the music was received were available.

What the editors of the Watching Jazz researched by approaching all kinds of “jazz on screen” is amazing, since it puts the focus of the media on a number of facets; some that were unnoticed or even non-existent in jazz audio recordings before. The international team of contributors consists of some very familiar names and a few new ones and features Jonathan De Souza, Jenny Doctor, Peter Elsdon, Krin Gabbard, Nicholas Gebhardt, Björn Heile, Kristin McGee, Paul McIntyre, Emile Wennekes, and Tony Whyton.

The main intention of the volume is the creation of a discourse concerning the nature and form of a large part of audiovisual jazz from the last eight decades or so. This material, instead of being mere recordings of a jazz performer during a show, turns out to be mostly heavily mediatized material (particularly the TV productions), altered according to the point of view of the director or producer; thus ending up as a piece of engineered media and being the very opposite of a “true” or “realistic” recording. Naturally, the analysis of the jazz biopics, jazz musicals, semi-documentaries and variations or blends of those genres is another topic. Since the history (and the perception) of jazz simply was heavily informed by audio recordings, new data derived from audiovisual documents will probably not change that history.

But this collection of texts still is a valuable contribution to the study of recorded jazz as such, simply because the historical perception of jazz may have been a slightly different one, considering all the extra information a video of a performance can offer. In the ten texts, much of that supplementary data is inspected: the countless arrangements of a jazz-as-audiovisual-experience with emphasis either on the performer or the audience, the nature of a performance for the screen, diegetic/non-diegetic music and its usage, the introduction of live jazz montage in Hollywood and the music video and lots of other jazz specific audiovisual phenomena.

There are three individual sections that deal with (1) Shaping Screen Media, (2) Gesture and Mediatization and (3) Ontologies of Media, which in my view is the most interesting part, for it deals with myths about jazz spontaneity and the alleged superiority of live performances over recordings of the same tunes.

As the editors suggest, the volume “…. offers an alternative approach to jazz premised on the simple proposition that watching jazz tells us something new about it: audiovisual sources provide additional information about the music; about the people who produced it and consumed it, and the ways in which they did so; about the economic structures supporting it; and about the cultural discourses (not least visual discourses) through which jazz was encountered and understood, which may be obscured on audio recordings.”

The book‘s chapters are supported by 50+ illustrations/photo stills. Additional information and media are compiled on a companion website.

I cannot recall another volume dealing with that topic in detail; except for author Krin Gabbard’s Jammin’ at the Margins (1996), who is also among the contributors here.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2016

Björn Heile, Peter Elsdon, Jenny Doctor (eds.) Watching Jazz. Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen. Oxford University Press, 2016, 312 p.