The godfather of jazz on film was not a performer or a producer but a collector and archivist named David Chertok. Decades before YouTube, DVDs, or even videotapes, Chertok (1922-88) offered 16 mm footage of jazz's canonical figures in a long-running series of concert-like shows at the New School and, eventually, all over the world. From clips of Louis Armstrong displaying his radiance in 1930s Hollywood features to Charlie Parker receiving an award from Earl Wilson to Thelonious Monk doing his dancing bear act, Chertok gave us an amazing way to absorb jazz. He was showing us what we never thought we'd see, making jazz more “real" to us than any record ever could. (Chertok once bequeathed to me a piece of footage so rare — of the great British jazz and pop singer Al Bowlly — that when Hugh Hefner heard about it, I was summoned to the Playboy Mansion. But that's another story.)
Chertok couldn't imagine a world in which jazz video is as accessible as vinyl used to be, where all one has to do is pop a disc into a player or type a name into a search engine. Not that there's anything wrong with good old studio albums, which offer a kind of perfection you won't get in a TV appearance, particularly if you want a carefully conceived concept collection. But live performances, snippets and segments of which constitute most of the action on the new eight-disc collection “Jazz Icons: Series 3" (Reelin' in the Years, jazzicons.com), have a raw energy and spontaneity that no studio session can match. Even when it's a regular touring group, playing the same set night after night, the players get something back from the audience that they don't get anywhere else.
Then there's the proof factor. I have played Rahsaan Roland Kirk for younger listeners and tried to explain to them that the three saxophones they're hearing are, in fact, one man playing all three instruments simultaneously, without overdubs. But here is the proof, in the form of footage of a 1967 show in Norway: The blind miracle man you see whipping those horns around, resting his flute in his tenor sax when he's not playing it, is a one-man reed section.
Chertok couldn't imagine a world in which jazz video is as accessible as vinyl used to be, where all one has to do is pop a disc into a player or type a name into a search engine. Not that there's anything wrong with good old studio albums, which offer a kind of perfection you won't get in a TV appearance, particularly if you want a carefully conceived concept collection. But live performances, snippets and segments of which constitute most of the action on the new eight-disc collection “Jazz Icons: Series 3" (Reelin' in the Years, jazzicons.com), have a raw energy and spontaneity that no studio session can match. Even when it's a regular touring group, playing the same set night after night, the players get something back from the audience that they don't get anywhere else.
Then there's the proof factor. I have played Rahsaan Roland Kirk for younger listeners and tried to explain to them that the three saxophones they're hearing are, in fact, one man playing all three instruments simultaneously, without overdubs. But here is the proof, in the form of footage of a 1967 show in Norway: The blind miracle man you see whipping those horns around, resting his flute in his tenor sax when he's not playing it, is a one-man reed section.
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