Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny.

Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.

Björn Heile is Reader in Music since 1900 and Head of Music at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Music of Mauricio Kagel (2006) and editor of The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music (2009).

Peter Elsdon is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Hull. He is the author of Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert (2013), and he has also published work on jazz recordings, and gesture in music.

Jenny Doctor is Associate Professor in the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.