GWEN ANSELL took some top SA jazzmen to watch Kansas City
THE first jazz shot in Robert Altman’s Kansas City is of James Carter, natty in a sharp suit, legs crossed insouciantly, sax gleaming, wreathed in cigarette smoke, looking for all the world like a Herman Leonard photograph come to life.
Visually, the whole movie is full of those film noir conventions: it’s mostly night- time or dawn and, on the rainswept streets of 1934 Kansas, puddles throw back the fractured reflections of neon lights, while in the smoke-filled gambling dens and party machine headquarters, the bellows-man works overtime.
Altman’s intention was to create a mirror- box of a movie. Gangster’s moll Blondie O’Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kidnaps a laudanum-swigging socialite (Miranda Richardson) to buy the freedom of her husband, held by the black gambling syndicate he tried to rob. She takes her paradigm from her movie heroines, Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford – and inside the box of the movie, we see the brief, flickering reflection of a period cinema show.
But Kansas City also exists inside that paradigm. Altman says he deliberately took “a melodramatic story and put it together with the jazz … in other words, the drama of the period with the music of the period”. He was also crafting a homage to a great era of jazz.
For the South African jazzmen previewing the movie last week, that post-modern prism didn’t entirely work. “The music was stunning,” said pianist Sean Fourie, “but the jazz was just a backdrop for a slow- moving collection of clichs.”
Was the irony of the cinematic references apparent? “You’re telling me he was trying to make an old-style movie?” says veteran trumpeter Dennis Mpale. “Maybe. The problem is, we’ve all seen so many movies since then that it just came across as corny.”
Musicians were uncomfortable with what some saw as stereotyping – and others as straight racism – in the depiction of black gangland. “No, not racism,” says trombonist Jasper Cook. “It was just that the director couldn’t escape from the clichs and myths about the era. It all came out of some glossy picture-book – like the way they turned cutting contests into gladiatorial combats.” McCoy Mrubata felt more strongly: “Harry Belafonte [as gangland boss Seldom Seen] was probably the best actor in the movie, but those lines they gave him were terrible. They had nothing to do with jazz, which we know was one of the more open parts of American society, even in those days.”
Saxophonist Zim Ngqawana was the one dissenting voice: “I think you had to make an effort to get inside the plot; to live those days.” And the stereotypes? “If it’s the historical truth I have no problem with it. It needs to be seen and understood. But still, what stood out for me was the music; to see the combination of young and old players. They weren’t recreating historical sounds mechanically, but they’d all done their homework – a player like Lester Young is an aural textbook for every sax player – and when they played, the history came out of their horns.”
And that, perhaps, is where the problem with the movie lies. The music transcends the stereotypes: the players put everything they’d ever heard into their sound, creating aural overlays of bebop and modernism on the blues – and riff-based band styles of the mid-1930s.
The result is a free-flowing, questioning creativity that genuinely captures the spirit of the Kansas scene even when the honking gets a bit ahistorical.
The plot and the images, on the other hand, remain stuck in their time-warp. Historians are now producing a much more nuanced picture of black history in the 1930s to displace Kansas City’s stark light and shade – and, yes, old movies, even presented with post-modern irony, do look corny.
Kansas City opens nationwide on June 27