A Great Day in Harlem Reviews

A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM is an engaging hour-long documentary recalling a 1950s photo session which assembled and immortalized some great names in jazz. One summer morning in 1958, magazine art director Art Kane invited several dozen legendary musical friends to pose for a group photograph on a sidewalk in Harlem. Among those present were Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Marian McPartland, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, all of whom are seen in this affectionate documentary created by producers Jean Bach and Matthew Seig, and editor Susan Peehl. The film reminisces about that 10 a.m. photo shoot (Kane's assistant notes that, previously, some of the night-owl musicians "didn't realize there were two 10 o'clocks in the same day"), juxtaposing 8mm movie footage taken by bassist Milt Hinton and his wife Mona with recent interviews of those who were on hand for that historic occasion. For Gillespie, Blakey, Bud Freeman, Buck Clayton and Max Kaminsky, all of whom died soon after the interviews, these were reportedly their last on-camera appearances. A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM is least effective when it explores behind-the-scenes aspects of the shoot, with commentary by Kane, his aides and various music business observers. The real story here is not the photograph or how it got taken, but the warmth and humor of the jazz artists, both in the Hintons' footage and in newly-shot recollections. What Kane's camera captured that long-ago July morning was not a bunch of musicians standing in front of a building, but a community of artists to rival the Symbolist authors or the Impressionist painters. Imagine a filmed record of Monet, Cezanne and Renoir trading stories about their exploits. Such a record might not be too different from this movie's visit with Sonny Rollins, who observes that saxophonist Lester Young came from another planet and "was here just for a short visit;" or Bud Freeman paying tribute to Count Basie, who "never said a disparaging word about anyone." A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM will resonate most with dedicated jazz buffs, but even casual fans should appreciate the film's genuine admiration for these great artists, whose lives were interwoven with their creativity and who changed the face of 20th-century music.