Almost 40 years after a nervous first-time photographer gathered several of the great jazz musicians of the mid-century for a snapshot, a documentary tracing the lives and times of the picture's subjects is opening at the Carolina Theater.
In 1958, Art Kane decided to capture the jazz greats on the steps of a Harlem brownstone on film for Esquire magazine. No one thought the musicians would drag themselves out of bed, but the crowd grew larger and larger and he took the picture.
For years, Jean Bach, a film maker, writer, and jazz historian looked at the picture, which hung in her husband's office. But in 1989, when Charles Graham told her about a home video made while the picture was taken, she decided to produce her first documentary, "A Great Day in Harlem," which opens at the Carolina Theater on June 9.
The hour-long documentary focuses on the image of the photograph, interweaving archival performance footage, the home video's footage and rare interviews with the jazz masters present that day, including Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver and Art Farmer.
Bach, raised in the "gin and jazz age," has been surrounded by jazz her entire life, which made conducting the interviews easy, she said. "I knew everybody in that photograph, practically. They all came through Chicago in the late 30's, so I had a chance to meet all of them."
Bach, who now lives in New York City, said she grew up loving the big bands. While an undergraduate at Vassar, she became one of the first "jazz groupies," and never missed a weekend performance by Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and other jazz giants.
"I felt comfortable talking to them, I'd been around these musicians for a number of years," she said. "When it got difficult to get people I just pressed on because I knew they'd come around and trust me because they knew me."
The musicians weren't as easy to contact today as they were in 1958, she said. Back then they all lived either on the island of Manhattan, or within a half-hour subway ride. Now, they're scattered all over the globe.
"It was just a series of treasure hunts tracking these people down," she says. "Each one was a different problem."
Bach said she feels privileged to have interviewed musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blackey, Max Kaminski, Bud Freeman, and the photographer himself, Art Kane, before they died.
Kane committed suicide last year, less than a week after Bach was notified that the film was nominated for an Academy award."I'm sorry he's not around. It's a runaway success," she said.
The film won the Gold Hugo Award for Best Documentary in the most recent Chicago International Film Festival, and is showing in such places as St. Petersburg, Sydney, London, Rio, South Africa, Japan, and Scandinavia.
"I didn't think it'd get into a theater let alone all these exotic places," Bach said.
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