Playboy Film Fest Offers a Bit of Something for Everyone

“From Bix to Bird” was Hugh Hefner’s chosen title for the Playboy Jazz Film Festival, and the programming for the three-day event precisely reflects that theme.

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With a total of 17 individual screenings at Laemmle’s Sunset-5 theaters in West Hollywood, the newly created film gala has a bit of something for almost every taste in mainstream jazz.

The highlight of the festival is “A Great Day in Harlem,” a documentary that chronicles a remarkable morning in 1958 when 60 jazz artists--including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, Count Basie and dozens of others--were gathered together for a photo session on the steps of a brownstone in Harlem.

Rather than descend into the too-familiar documentary-style recitation of names, dates and places, film-maker Jean Bach chose to go for the fun and the sheer singularity of the event. It was a wise decision. By combining an abundance of still photos and some priceless 8-millimeter film taken at the shoot with a group of retrospective interviews, she captured a series of extraordinary moments: the irrepressible joking and game playing that goes on between musicians (Dizzy Gillespie is sticking his tongue out at Roy Eldridge in the photo); the ways in which musicians positioned themselves (Monk chose to wear a light-colored jacket, anticipating others would wear dark suits; Count Basie elected to sit on the curb with a group of fascinated local children); the genuine, openly expressed awe with which many of the players regarded each other.

“It was like a family reunion,” recalls Horace Silver in a voice-over comment.

“Can you imagine,” adds Marion McPartland, “if they’d all had their instruments and were playing?”

Hefner’s current fascination with Bix Beiderbecke is confirmed by the presence of two films--one a documentary, the other a dramatized bio--devoted to the short-lived jazz trumpeter.

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The best is “Bix: Ain’t None of Them Played Like Him Yet,” Brigitte Berman’s examination of Beiderbecke’s shooting-star career--a masterful historical document, filled with data, that never loses touch with the elusive personality of one of jazz’s most legendary figures.

Lacking any film footage of her subject, Berman relied on still photos, vintage period film and interviews with Bix’s family members and musical associates. The process worked, in part because the assembled visuals are joined aurally by an underscore sparkling with the clarion call of Beiderbecke’s trumpet, a sound so unique that--even today--it more than justifies the Louis Armstrong phrase that is part of the picture’s title: “Ain’t None of Them Played Like Him Yet.”

Among the festival’s other important items are documentaries that explore the lives of four of the most preeminent performers in jazz: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. “A Duke Named Ellington” only begins to touch the great complexity of either Ellington or his music. “Alto Madness” takes a more penetrating look at Parker, but it, too, fails to unravel the intricacies of an enigmatic personality.

The Holiday and Armstrong documentaries are more revealing. The ups and downs of Holiday’s life--the brilliant musical successes, the humiliating encounters with racism and the drug-driven physical decline--are surveyed in considerable detail.

But, perhaps appropriately, the finest moments occur during her relatively rare performance segments: a chilling reading of “Strange Fruit” and a scratchy, but still moving version of “Don’t Explain.” Best of all is an exquisite Holiday blues in a segment from a mid-1950s television special. After her vocal, Lester Young, her closest musical companion during the prewar years, steps forward to play a characteristically epigrammatic chorus--like Holiday, jazz improvisation distilled to its barest essence. Halfway through his solo, the camera cuts to a smiling Holiday, completely in sync with Young, nodding agreement as he plays an especially pointed phrase.

Unlike the other documentaries, “A Batch of Satch” doesn’t suffer from a lack of performance material. More than any jazz artist, Armstrong was both entertainer and musician, and his career--from the earliest short subjects--has been highly visible in every imaginable media. Gary Giddins’ knowledgeable script takes a meticulously detailed chronological approach, intercut with a wealth of still photos, performance clips, commentary from musicians such as trumpeters Wynton Marsalis, Doc Cheatham, singer Tony Bennett and producer Milt Gabler, as well as some pithy interview material from Armstrong himself.

The range of Armstrong’s trumpet soloing is worth the price of admission. Less apparent, but equally notable, are his splendid vocals.

Two other film bios, “Let’s Get Lost” and “Time Is All You’ve Got” reflect, both in their pluses and their minuses, the uncommon qualities of their subjects--Chet Baker and Artie Shaw. The Baker picture is a deeply personal examination of yet another star-crossed jazz life, but filmmaker Bruce Weber is far too present for the full richness of Baker to emerge. The Academy Award-winning Shaw film, also by Brigitte Berman, is more well-rounded. Thorough to a fault, it still does not quite disclose the full complexity of jazz music’s most quixotic character.

The festival’s most visible theatrical films--Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” and Bernard Tavernier’s “Round Midnight”--are well- done, if darkly somber visions of the jazz world.

* The Playboy Jazz Film Festival: “From Bix to Bird,” Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Laemmle Sunset-5, West Hollywood Theatres, 8000 Sunset Blvd. Screenings in the Bird Theatre and the Bix Theatre at 3:30, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. General admission, $6. Seniors, students with ID and children, $4. Two screenings, $10; three screenings, $13. (310) 449-4070.