HOME ENTERTAINMENT : ‘Swing’ Set: From Exquisite to Embarrassing

Watching “Swing, Swing, Swing” ($100), MGM/UA Home Video’s monumental, five-disc trip into the popular music of the ‘30s and ‘40s, mesmerizes, fascinates and may infuriate. But, ultimately, you can’t help but be grateful that the vaults of Warner Bros. and Vitaphone were combed so carefully by producers George Feltenstein and Will Friedwald to preserve on laser disc historic moments of pop music, jazz and vaudeville that would otherwise be lost.

The prism of the 1990s focuses these 50- and 60-year-old images under rather harsh contemporary lights. What emerges in a musical potpourri--including jazz and pop music artists and radio, vaudeville and nightclub entertainers--are clear pictures of inventive artistry, cornball routines and a view of how racism pushed musicians onto separate, rarely intersecting tracks before essentially segregated audiences.

On the nine sides, the entertainment ranges from the historic and exquisite “Jammin’ the Blues” to low-down, embarrassingly awful musical skits. In between you will find such swing giants as Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, Jimmy Dorsey and Woody Herman.

What becomes clear is that the white musicians are generally treated with respect, but no black band can escape the humiliation of being treated as racist stereotypes, such as mammies, porters, cooks and ignorant farm boys.

To see the young, vital composer Eubie Blake and his band with vocalist Nina Mae Kinney playing their hearts out on such classics as “Memories of You” and “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” surrounded by a plot involving blackbirds inside a pie is to see how far we have come in the last six decades. In another short, black dancers in a Harlem nightclub, acting a bit too much like white New Yorkers, suddenly dissolve into a pack of gyrating, half-naked African natives familiar only to American movie audiences of the era.

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But “Jammin’ the Blues,” a 1944 short, makes up for all of this. It offers irreplaceable images of some of the greatest jazz artists America has ever produced: Lester Young, Sweets Edison, Jo Jones, Barney Kessel, Illinois Jacquet. It is a dazzling tour-de-force directed and photographed by Gjon Mili. The numbers “Improvisation” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” are shot with such dramatic invention and lighting that each freeze-frame has the feel of a classic photograph. For once, the picture matches the artistry of the music.

The short alone makes the set a must for anyone with the slightest interest in, or curiosity about, jazz and the key players who helped shape it.

The album notes by Friedwald help put this and much of the other shorts into historical perspective. Clear chapter stops delineating everything found on all nine sides are invaluable. Credits for each of the 45 short films would have been welcome, but no doubt would have made the cost prohibitive. You can freeze-frame the title shots to get a glimpse of the featured players’ names.

As it was, the set, which involved much restoration, took 2 1/2 years to put together. One hopes the second volume will emerge more quickly.

One of the most interesting shorts features a young, lovely Ethel Waters and a very young Sammy Davis (before he added the Jr.) in “Rufus Jones for President.” The miniature Davis, a delight to watch, turns “King for a Day” into his own talent showcase. Waters, before she was reduced to playing “Beulah” and other maids, shows why she was a singer who could bring the house down when she sings a very tender “Am I Blue.”

Most of the musical shorts are just plain silly, bringing in extraneous plot material to frame musical numbers that range from first-rate to terrible. But no matter how ridiculous the white musicians such as Ozzie Nelson, Eddy Duchin or Red Nichols and his Five Pennies may appear in these overproduced dramatic contexts, they are never made to resemble the kind of racial stereotypes that the far superior black musicians are forced to endure.

Many of the numbers were lifted directly from the kind of black entertainment made for the audiences of the era. “An All-Colored Vaudeville Show,” “The Black Network,” “Pie, Pie Blackbird,” “Smash Your Baggage” (look for a very young Roy Eldridge, one of the greatest trumpet players in jazz history, in one of his earliest appearances) and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson in “King for a Day” document an era of segregated entertainment that lasted well into the 1950s. And look for the young Nicholas Brothers showing talent to spare throughout.

What makes all of this endurable is seeing the dancing, the singing, the playing of these African American musicians. Their immense talent rises well above ridiculous costumes, ludicrous speech patterns and racial slurs.

And if you can still find it, search out MCA Home Video’s two laser volumes on “Swing” (I and II), issued in 1988, which offer far more valuable jazz spotlighting Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Harry James, Gene Krupa, Nat King Cole and much more.