Every so often a person who neither plays an instrument nor sings, neither composes nor leads a band, makes an impact on the jazz world that captures the music’s essence and enhances its meaning. Jean Bach’s 1994 film, “A Great Day in Harlem,” transformed a classic photograph of jazz heroes into an enduring story. As Douglas Martin reported in the New York Times, Bach died at 94 on Monday at her Manhattan home. In that obituary, Martin wrote that she was “out on the town listening to jazz” until her final months. That shouldn’t come as a surprise.
I’ll never forget Bach, sitting on the living room couch of that quaint Greenwich Village home a decade ago, looking as if superimposed onto Art Kane’s 1958 Esquire magazine photo of jazz musicians in front of a Harlem brownstone. By then, in a way, she was. She’d invited me in for a jazz magazine story, but the experience felt less like an interview than a window into a long-gone world of wit, warmth, and unhurried civility.
The huge photo enlargement on Bach’s living room wall was made for an appearance on “Good Morning, America,” after the release of “A Great Day in Harlem.” That film, centered around Kane’s photo, earned an Academy Award nomination and a popular audience — both of which, Bach said, came as surprises.
“Listen, I didn’t know beans about making a movie,” she said. “But I figured somebody should record these things. In my case it was just a matter of getting something down for posterity. I was mainly thinking it was kind of a scholarly piece about getting these people who were really the crème de la crème of the jazz world and finding out as much about them as I could before they all slipped away.”
Bach, then in her 80s, knew many of jazz’s crème de la crème long before she set a lens on them. She befriended Duke Ellington and many other musicians while in her teens. Her first husband was the big-band trumpeter Shorty Sherock. She was media savvy, too. Her second husband, Bob Bach, was a television producer whose credits included the 1949 CBS series “Adventures in Jazz.” For 24 years, Bach herself was the producer of “The Arlene Francis Show,” a popular radio program whose guests included Ellington, Leopold Stokowksi, and Salvador Dali.
She and her husband threw legendary parties; it wasn’t unusual to find Lena Horne in a corner and Billy Strayhorn sharing the piano bench with Ellington for a version of “Tonk.” In a 1983 New Yorker profile, Whitney Balliett wrote: “She is a Boswell, for, not widely known herself, she spends much of her time cosseting and studying the great and near-great, the famous and almost famous.”
Hers was a documentary based on a document that froze a moment in time, bringing to life perhaps the most famous photograph in jazz — itself an unlikely story.
Around 10:00 one sunny, warm morning in the summer of 1958 — there is general disagreement over the date — 57 jazz musicians gathered on 126th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, in Harlem. The invitation came from Art Kane, a young freelance art director doing his first professional shoot. The assembled included stars of the day such as Count Basie and Lester Young, then up-and-comers Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, among others, and journeymen like Chubby Jackson.
In the early 1980s, Bach thought of doing some interviews with surviving members of the photo’s cast. “It all began to click,” Bach said, “when I heard Milt Hinton talking about that day.” She thought Hinton might have had some photos, as he was known to love photography. But as she recalled, “Milt told me, ‘I can do even better: I brought my movie camera.’”
Over the next four years and with the help of an experienced co-producer, Matthew Seig, and an editor, Susan Pehl, Bach wove a tale around the photo. She intertwined Hinton’s footage with additional photos, snippets from the 1950s television series “Sound of Jazz,” and most importantly, her interviews (nearly all of which were conducted in her living room).
In 1997 Bach used outtakes from “A Great Day in Harlem” to create a second film, “The Spitball Story.” It asked a fascinating if less-than-pressing question: Did Dizzy Gillespie, in 1941, actually shoot spitballs onstage at his boss, the bandleader Cab Calloway, leading to his dismissal from the Calloway band?
No, she determined. In “The Spitball Story,” trumpeter Jonah Jones confessed to having done it. The short won awards at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Newport International Film Festival, and the USA Film Festival.
The 2005 DVD release of “A Great Day in Harlem” presented additional material that places yet another frame around Kane’s celebrated photo. Bach and her collaborators discussed their creative process, including an attitude toward the use of still photos that is a marked departure from the Ken Burns model. Bach recounted her dogged pursuit of the story behind the photo — placing an ad New York’s Amsterdam News with the headline “Remember This Picture?” and following Dizzy Gillespie to a dentist appointment to secure an interview. There’s some hilarious footage of Art Blakey and others recalling details of the photo shoot, and then being called out for getting nearly everything wrong.
Blakey can be forgiven — Bach was after more than just facts. Her sense of humor as much as her sense of history, her winning way as much as her dogged research, made her work singular. Every picture may tell story, but some more than others. Jean Bach knew all that and more. One gets the sense that if you stuck around her, there were more great days than not.