New, Offbeat Film Clips Set for Playboy Festival Screening

Jazz archivist Mark Cantor’s annual film presentations may not be the highest visibility elements of the Playboy Jazz Festival season, but their appeal is irresistible. On Thursday night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater, Cantor will return with yet another collection of compelling jazz clips.

“We’re going to be eclectic as always,” says Cantor, “with a strong effort to include things that haven’t been seen in Los Angeles before. One of the more interesting items is a set of pianists, including Hazel Scott, a fine pianist who unfortunately seems to be mentioned only in reference to the fact that she was married to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. We’ll also have something with Marian McPartland, as well as the world premiere of some newly discovered Art Tatum.”

In addition, Cantor’s program--as eclectic as he has promised--will include a never-before-seen John Coltrane film clip, a segment featuring the ‘30s scat singer Leo Watson, and a vocal set with June Christy, Sarah Vaughan and Abby Lincoln.

All this material isn’t easy to uncover and Cantor has been searching for years, far more as a labor of love than as a potential for profit.

“I’m just constantly at it,” he says, “looking to find and hopefully preserve. I maintain contacts with other collectors, other archivists and so forth. But a lot of it is just plain old detective work. You take a clue from one printed source, run it down, sift through the information and find out what’s germane and what’s just rumor. And often the result is something pretty exciting.”

Many of the discoveries found their way into Ken Burns’ massive jazz documentary, and Cantor regularly shows up at film festivals around the country to display rare clips featuring famous figures such as Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, as well as the almost forgotten Hazel Scott and Leo Watson. But he is vividly aware that an enormous amount of valuable material may never be retrieved.

“All sorts of gems are out there, hidden in archives and storage vaults,” he says. “And there’s not a great tendency for corporations that control those vaults to spend any time looking for jazz items, because they’re not going to make them a lot of money. But there’s another problem, too, and that’s the fact that for every film I show, there’s a large handful of films that I can’t share because of rights problems.”

What Cantor does manage to share in his annual Playboy Jazz Festival screenings is always entertaining, however. Especially when he comes up with such offbeat items as a performance by the Joe Mooney Quartet on “What’s My Line,” or a really unexpected appearance by Clifford Brown on “The Soupy Sales Show.” And Cantor promises that Thursday’s presentation will include a few other, similarly intriguing musical surprises.

Playboy Jazz on Film with Mark Cantor. The Bing Theater in the L.A. County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursday, June 13 at 7:30. Free admission, but tickets are required and will be available from noon on June 13 at the Bing Theater box office. Playboy Jazz Festival information: (310) 449-4070.

Jazz Man in Need. Next week, a concert benefiting guitarist Barney Kessel will take place in New York City with some of the jazz world’s finest guitarists expected to attend. One of the renowned figures of the post-World War II jazz era, Kessel is ill with terminal brain cancer. Surgery and radiation reportedly have slowed the growth of his aggressive, inoperable tumor, but his condition requires 24-hour-a-day home care and therapy. He has no life insurance and must use his Social Security payments to cover his rent. His wife, Phyllis, works full time, with her entire salary allocated to Kessel’s care.

Donations can be made directly to Kessel by sending checks or money orders to Mrs. Phyllis Kessel, 445 North Ave., San Diego, CA 92116-3940.

On Record. The much anticipated second set of Weather Report recordings from Columbia Legacy has arrived. The release consists of three original albums--”Mysterious Traveller,” “Tale Spinnin’” and “Black Market”--from 1974, 1975 and 1976.

An additional CD, “The Best of Weather Report,” includes a new collection of 11 tracks representing the band’s output between 1973 and 1980.

It was a transitional period for this vital band in its seminal establishment of many of the basic parameters of post-bop electronic jazz. The most notable aspect is the growing presence of Josef Zawinul’s compositional ideas and the core importance of the complex musical relationship between Zawinul and saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter.

The notion of soloing as an intrinsic element in the writing--a reflection of Zawinul’s “We always solo, we never solo” hypothesis--surfaces everywhere. Equally fascinating are the many duet works between Zawinul and Shorter, especially “Blackthorn Rose,” “Scarlet Woman” and “Five Short Stories.”

It’s also intriguing to hear the impact produced by some of the personnel changes, with bassist Miroslav Vitous replaced by Alphonso Johnson on “Mysterious Traveller” and Johnson, in turn, being succeeded by Jaco Pastorius on “Black Market.”

* This month, Columbia Legacy is also issuing the second set of seven CDs drawn from the CTI jazz catalog. Like the overall CTI catalog, it’s a mixed bag of items reflecting the company’s eclectic view of jazz.

The pick of the bunch is Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay,” an album that the sometimes erratic trumpet player has identified as his best, and with good reason. Performing superbly with a band that included saxophonist Joe Henderson, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Lenny White--all at the peak of their powers--the results are marvelous, a defining example of what world-class jazz was like in 1971. Columbia has added a previously unreleased live version of the title track, recorded with an entirely different band.

Guitarists George Benson (“Bad Benson”), Kenny Burrell (“God Bless the Child”) and Grant Green (“The Main Attraction”) are featured on albums that are not vital entries in any of their discographies, in part because in each case their natural skills have been too deeply sublimated to overly busy production.

Hank Crawford, whose impact upon the smooth jazz/funk saxophonists of recent decades has generally been overlooked, fares better with “Wildflower,” largely due to Bob James’ compatible arrangements and the solid backing of a group of New York City’s finest studio players of the ‘70s.

Esther Phillips’ “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” should have been better than it is. Her stirring, soul-drenched style deserved a better fate than having to survive a cluttered instrumental track with a heavy emphasis upon disco dance rhythms.

And Deodato’s “Deodato 2” is only recommended to those capable of enduring pop/rock versions of items such as “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Nights in White Satin.”

* Klezmer music has often been described as “Jewish Blues” and even as “Yiddish Dixieland.” It’s actually neither, although it isn’t hard to understand the suggested associations. It’s a music in which improvisation--often collective--plays a large role, in which dancing rhythms are important, and which uses minor scales similar to those commonly heard in the blues.

Three recent Columbia Legacy recordings chronicle the early stages of klezmer as it made its way from Europe to the New World.

Violinist-bandleader Abe Schwartz played a vital role in that transition, adding new instruments (the saxophone among them), and mixing traditional tunes with updated social commentary. “The Klezmer King” includes 25 tunes recorded from the late teens to the mid ‘30s, gradually illustrating the transformation of a traditional-sounding music into an updated sound filled with sophisticated lyrical and musical references.

Dave Tarras, a masterful klezmer clarinetist, was known as the “Jewish Benny Goodman,” largely because of his remarkable virtuosity rather than as a reflection of a similarity in style. But he made “Tanz!”--a brilliant blending of klezmer and swing rhythms--in the mid-’50s, at a time when Elvis Presley was far more appealing to most Jewish youngsters than the holdover music from the Old World. Too bad, because the album is a delight, in part because of Tarras’ fleet playing, in part because of the finely crafted arrangements of Sammy Musiker (another fine klezmer clarinetist).

American popular music would not have been the same without the enormous creative contributions of the writers of the Great American Songbook, many of whom--think George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, etc.--were Jews who were only a generation away from European immigration.

The two-CD set “From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish & American Popular Songs From 1914-1950” is an enticing survey of how that music found its way into American popular culture. Among the tracks are performances by Molly Picon, Menashe Skulnik, Emery Deutsch, Fannie Brice, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Mildred Bailey, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and, yes, Cab Calloway.