Given that this column has turned into a treatise on all the ways in which I’m a lowbrow man-boy struggling to raise his game, I’ll give you another tidbit: I don’t get jazz. I’ve listened, taken classes, read books, been to jazz clubs and gotten high with devotees. It just hasn’t cohered for me.
Well, okay. Once.
I teach in the summers at the California State Summer School for the Arts, an intensive training program for young artists held at the California Institute for the Arts. One of the best teachers and biggest personalities in a program full of great teachers and big personalities was Kenny Cox, a jazz musician from Detroit. Google him. He’s the real deal. The students loved him, the instructors adored him, and every year his concert was one of the highlights of the summer.
When he passed away a couple years ago his colleagues and family came to the Cal Arts to have a memorial. As you might imagine, that memorial included a concert.
As Ralph Jones and a jazz ensemble made up of Kenny’s colleagues and old students played their tunes, I felt something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It was as if through those melodies and improvisations and chord progressions they were trying to find the shape of the feeling we all had in our hearts.
I’d always thought of jazz as something that could only be understood intellectually, but because I felt what the musicians were feeling it was so obvious that the musical decisions they were making came not from a their heads, but from their hearts. The technique and musical knowledge was a tool to get at the spirit inside, and on that sad, beautiful, exuberant, joyful day our spirits were all of a piece.
And I hope Kenny forgives me when I admit that I was reminded of that day when I watched the release of the freshly remastered version of this week’s case in point: A bout de souffle (aka 'Breathless').
A lot’s been written about this movie – the sine qua non of a film school education – and I felt intimidated just walking into the theater. The movie famously is one of the few example of theory applied to art successfully, since Jean-Luc Goddard conceived it as the realizations of the ideas forged Cahiers du cinema. Frankly I expected the movie to be kind of boring. I saw it with my friend Rebecca Beluk, and she was just excited – but she’s an editor, so I chalked it up to that.
Man was I wrong. By turns, A bout de souffle is fun, joyous, annoying, exuberant, boring, confusing, beautiful, and confusing. Usually translated as Breathless, the title translates literally as “at breath’s end” – or more colloquially: out of breath. After the movie I turned to Rebecca, boggled, while she just grinned.
At one point in the movie male lead Jean-Paul Belmondo is driving the sublime Jean Seberg around in a stolen car. He really, really wants to sleep with her again, but she’s playing a complicated game of ambivalence. He cries “Woe is me -- I am in love with a girl who is…” and launches into a list of what’s pretty on this girl: neck, breasts, voice, wrists. The camera’s on Seberg from behind, catching her and the beauty of Paris rolling by, but every line Belmondo speaks is punctuated by these jump cuts: edits that take out ten seconds here, thirty seconds there -- sudden jerks in space and time. But the poetry of his words coheres the sequence and brings everything home on his final line: “But she’s chicken.”
The feeling I got from A bout de souffle reminded me of that jazz performance: an artist using the techniques of his medium to trace the contours of the feeling surging through him. The experience of watching A bout souffle isn’t one of theoretical distance; it is one of jazzy immersive exuberance, connecting us with improvisations made over fifty years ago by a man desperate to capture the spirit of his time.
Next week: honestly, who knows?