Following is a first-person account by Rebecca D. Clear, an LC Junior Fellow who worked at the Library this summer on a research project in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.
Increased researcher interest in jazz on film and video, combined with a lack of easy access by subject and performer to those materials in the Library's collections, led to my summer research project as a Junior Fellow in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.
My assignment was to produce a research guide to the division's holdings of this material. To accomplish this, I culled information from a wide array of sources in the division's Motion Picture and Television Reading Room, including arrearage files, copyright files, card files, vertical files, computer files, reference books, film and television reviews, periodicals and the brains of several staff members. Since I could locate no information at all about some of the works I uncovered, I viewed them to extract the necessary information.
The result is an annotated guide, Jazz on Film and Video in the Library of Congress, describing more than 600 works, including documentaries, television shows, concert performances, theatrical features and short subjects, commercials, music videos and compilations of all types, many of which were produced in recent years for the home video market. This rich collection ranges over a period of 70 years of sound film, from a 1923 short with Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle -- produced in Lee DeForest's early Phonofilm system and predating "The Jazz Singer" (not included) by four years -- to a televised tribute to Miles Davis in 1993.
The idea was to document jazz performances, which I decided meant that at least one musical number had to be performed on- screen by at least one jazz artist. Thus, for feature films, titles were excluded in which an actor plays the role of a jazz musician (as does Kirk Douglas in "Young Man with a Horn," 1949), unless accompanied by a genuine jazz musician performing at least one number on-screen (as does Louis Armstrong in "Paris Blues," 1961). In the same vein, I excluded titles featuring jazz on the sound track only (as in the morning ride on New York's Third Avenue "El" scored with the Duke Ellington title song in D.A. Pennebaker's "Daybreak Express," 1953).
That essential reference work, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1988), served as my final arbiter on whether to include an unfamiliar or debatable jazz musician. However, David Meeker's Jazz in the Movies (1981) proved to be the most valuable resource of all, providing key information about many of the titles.
Duke Ellington is especially well-represented in this guide. In 1991 the Library acquired more than 15,000 Ellington sound recordings (published and unpublished) from noted Ellington collector and authority Jerry Valburn. The Valburn/Ellington Collection includes more than 80 video and 16mm film copies of Ellington performances filmed throughout his career. Klaus Stratemann's extremely comprehensive reference work, Duke Ellington Day by Day and Film by Film (1992), helped me identify many unclear titles and provided a wealth of information for describing them.
Throughout the guide are many references to "Soundies" and, less frequently, "Snader Telescriptions." Soundies, I discovered, were an interesting phenomenon from the early 1940s and precursors of today's music videos. They were cheaply made, three-minute musical films for use in coin-operated viewing machines (trade name "Panoram") that were somewhat analogous to jukeboxes for 78rpm records. More than 2,000 were produced from 1940 to 1946, though only a relatively small percentage featured jazz artists. Despite their often poor visual quality, they are important because they may embody the only visual record of some jazz artists.
Snader Telescriptions (often "Snaders") were 3 1/2-minute music shorts produced for sale to television stations by the Snader Telescriptions Corp. from 1950 to 1952. Numbering around 750, they could be used by the stations individually as fillers or grouped together in longer formats. In 1952 the Snaders were sold to Studio Films Inc., which also produced its own music shorts from in 1952-54. Like the Soundies, they were cheaply made and only a relatively small percentage were jazz titles. All told, more than 1,100 Telescriptions were produced from 1950 to 1954. Both the Soundies and the Telescriptions have been frequently recycled in recent years in various guises for cable television and home video.
Subject access (or the lack thereof) was the impetus for this project, and subject access ends this project. A complete performer index (excluding production credits) has been added to the guide. In addition, as a result of my research, the Library is currently making viewing copies of a number of works that exist only in inaccessible formats.
Because this guide was compiled in the course of my summer fellowship at the Library, there was not enough time to produce a complete list of all jazz-related titles in the collections. This first pass through the Library's immense collections nevertheless represents a very substantial percentage of those titles. It is hoped that future updates will uncover titles I missed, as well as add titles newly acquired.
The films and videocassettes in the Library's research collections are not available for loan but may be viewed at the Library by researchers with an appointment.
For a free copy of Jazz on Film and Video in the Library of Congress, contact the Reference Librarian; Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress; Washington, DC 20540-4805; Telephone: (202) 707-8572; fax: (202) 707-2371.
For more information on the Junior Fellows Program and future projects that may be available, write to Michele Ostrow, Junior Fellows Program Coordinator, PSCM I, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 20540.
Rebecca D. Clear is completing her bachelor of arts in both film and comparative literature at Cornell University this coming year.
