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An advertisement for the Original Creole Orchestra from the December 1917 issue of Variety magazine. ‘We stop ’em every show.’ (James Karst)
 
 
It was a century ago this year that a group of five white musicians cut the first jazz record, selling more than 1 million copies and making famous the musical genre born in New Orleans. As always, however, there’s more to that story, which was widely repeated last month on the centennial of the recording.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band certainly deserves credit for popularizing jazz. But by the time the musicians recorded on Feb. 26, 1917, the new music had already reached metropolises across the United States. The word jazz was already in the American lexicon. And there is considerable speculation that the new form of music had been recorded before, too.  
 
The spread of jazz outside south Louisiana before 1917 can be attributed in part to Freddie Keppard. A New Orleans native, Keppard joined the vaudeville circuit and traveled from coast to coast, including stops in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, and even visiting cities in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Alberta.  
 
He had begun playing society jobs around New Orleans before 1910. He was a highly regarded cornet player, although jazz historian Samuel Charters wrote that Keppard “made most of his tips imitating a horse on his cornet.” Some contemporaries referred to Keppard as “king” and considered him, along with Joe Oliver, to be a musical heir to Buddy Bolden, after Bolden’s musical career was cut short by mental illness.
 
Around the time Louis Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waifs Home in January 1913 for shooting off a pistol on New Year’s Eve, Keppard’s show was on the road as the Original Creole Orchestra: trombone player Eddie Vinson, clarinetist George Baquet, drummer Dink Johnson, guitarist Leon Williams and violin player Jimmy Palao, in addition to Keppard.
 
“Freddie, he had left New Orleans with his band, and he was traveling all over the country playing towns on the Orpheum Circuit,” clarinet player Sidney Bechet wrote in his 1960 autobiography “Treat it Gentle.”
 
“At that time, you know, that was something new, and Freddie kept sending back all these clippings from what all the newspapermen and critics and all was writing up about him, about his music, about his band. And all these clippings were asking the same thing: Where did it come from?”
. . . . . . .
In 1917, the Victor Talking Machine Co. decided to record the hot new music. Legend has it that the company offered a contract to Keppard but that he turned it down out of paranoia.
 
Keppard “had the chance to record,” bassist Pops Foster told historian Tom Stoddard in one representative account, “but passed it up because he was afraid other guys would steal his stuff.”
 
The story goes that Victor, after being spurned by Keppard, offered a contract to Nick LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The song that the white group recorded at a studio in New York, “Livery Stable Blues,” is marked by a passage during which the musicians made sounds that mimicked farm animals — just as Keppard supposedly had done for tips back in New Orleans.
 
The veracity of the tale about Keppard turning down the contract, because he feared his music would be plagiarized, is difficult to gauge today, but it’s clear that Keppard and LaRocca’s bands were in New York around the same time. In the New York Sun on March 4, 1917, less than a week after “Livery Stable Blues” had been recorded and several days before it was released, there is an advertisement for Reisenweber’s restaurant:
 
“An exceptional beefsteak dinner, $1.50,” says the ad. “Served from noon to 9 p.m. with elaborate entertainment. The Original Dixieland ‘Jazz’ Band.”
 

An advertisement for a New York supper club where Freddie Keppard’s Original Creole Orchestra performed. From the March 4, 1917, New York Sun.  
 
On the same page is an advertisement for the Montmartre supper club (“the most unique supper place, where exclusive New York meets”) promoting the appearance of Keppard and his bandmates, “the Original Creole Ragtime Band from New Orleans in ‘Jazz’ Music.”
 
. . . . . . .
 
There was widespread speculation in the national press at the time that jazz had originated in Chicago, a city through which both LaRocca and Keppard had passed before arriving in New York. Variety magazine sought to set the record straight in its November 1916 edition, in the process refuting LaRocca’s famous assertion decades later that he was the inventor of jazz.
 
“Chicago’s claim to originating ‘Jazz Bands’ and ‘Balling the Jack’ are as groundless, according to Variety’s New Orleans correspondent, as Frisco’s assuming to be the locale for the first ‘Todolo’ and ‘Turkey Trot’ dances. Little negro tots were ‘Ballin’ the Jack’ in New Orleans over ten years ago, and negro roustabouts were ‘Turkey Trotting’ and doing the ‘Todolo’ in New Orleans as far back as 1890, he says. ‘Jazz Bands’ have been popular there for over two years, and Chicago cabaret owners brought entertainers from that city to introduce the idea.”
. . . . . . .
 
Keppard died in relative obscurity in 1933, two years after Bolden, the man Keppard had succeeded as one of the kings of New Orleans jazz. Bolden is sometimes regarded as the progenitor of jazz himself, and he was undoubtedly its biggest early star, although his fame was limited to the New Orleans vicinity during his career and he stopped performing publicly long before the jazz name came into common use in reference to music. 
 
Baquet, the clarinet player with Keppard’s Original Creole Orchestra, described first hearing Bolden to jazz writer Nat Shapiro in a book published in 1955. “I was out celebrating with some of my friends when we went to a ball at the Odd Fellows’ Hall, where Buddy Bolden worked,” Baquet is quoted as saying in “Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya.” “I remember thinking it was a funny place, nobody took their hats off. It was plenty tough. You paid fifteen cents and walked in.
 
“When we came in, we saw the band, six of them, on a low stand. They had their hats on, too, and were resting — pretty sleepy.
 
“We stood behind a column. All of a sudden, Buddy stomps, knocks on the floor with his trumpet to give the beat, and they all sit up straight, wide awake. Buddy held up his cornet, paused to be sure of his embouchure, then they played ‘Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.’ Everybody got up quick, the whole place rose and yelled out, “Oh, Mr. Bolden, play it for us, Buddy, play it!”
. . . . . . .
Just what Bolden sounded like might never be known. But he is widely believed to have recorded, almost two decades before LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. And other early black jazz musicians — perhaps even Freddie Keppard — might also have recorded in New Orleans well before 1917.
But there’s a catch: Any recordings they made were not for commercial purposes, and they almost certainly no longer exist.
 
“Early cylinder phonographs could record as well as play, and most of the older musicians probably recorded for their own amusement at one time or another,” writes Charters in his “Jazz: New Orleans, 1885-1957.”
 
“Willie Cornish has recalled that the Bolden band made a cylinder, and George Baquet recalled recording in 1912. None of the early cylinders is known to survive.”
 
Bolden and his band, the story goes, were recorded sometime around the turn of the century by Oscar Zahn, who operated a grocery store and saloon near what’s now the intersection of Simon Bolivar Avenue and Jackson Avenue. Zahn, who had an Edison phonograph that could both play and record, stored his cylinders in a shed.
 
A small group of enthusiasts searched in vain for the Bolden cylinder, the Holy Grail of jazz, for decades. The shed was demolished in the 1960s, and the recording has never been found.
 
In his book “In Search of Buddy Bolden,” Don Marquis writes, “That the cylinder was made is quite believable; that it is gone forever is even more believable.”
 

 
 

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An advertisement for the Original Creole Orchestra from the December 1917 issue of Variety magazine. ‘We stop ’em every show.’ (James Karst)
 
 
It was a century ago this year that a group of five white musicians cut the first jazz record, selling more than 1 million copies and making famous the musical genre born in New Orleans. As always, however, there’s more to that story, which was widely repeated last month on the centennial of the recording.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band certainly deserves credit for popularizing jazz. But by the time the musicians recorded on Feb. 26, 1917, the new music had already reached metropolises across the United States. The word jazz was already in the American lexicon. And there is considerable speculation that the new form of music had been recorded before, too.  
 
The spread of jazz outside south Louisiana before 1917 can be attributed in part to Freddie Keppard. A New Orleans native, Keppard joined the vaudeville circuit and traveled from coast to coast, including stops in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, and even visiting cities in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Alberta.  
 
He had begun playing society jobs around New Orleans before 1910. He was a highly regarded cornet player, although jazz historian Samuel Charters wrote that Keppard “made most of his tips imitating a horse on his cornet.” Some contemporaries referred to Keppard as “king” and considered him, along with Joe Oliver, to be a musical heir to Buddy Bolden, after Bolden’s musical career was cut short by mental illness.
 
Around the time Louis Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waifs Home in January 1913 for shooting off a pistol on New Year’s Eve, Keppard’s show was on the road as the Original Creole Orchestra: trombone player Eddie Vinson, clarinetist George Baquet, drummer Dink Johnson, guitarist Leon Williams and violin player Jimmy Palao, in addition to Keppard.
 
“Freddie, he had left New Orleans with his band, and he was traveling all over the country playing towns on the Orpheum Circuit,” clarinet player Sidney Bechet wrote in his 1960 autobiography “Treat it Gentle.”
 
“At that time, you know, that was something new, and Freddie kept sending back all these clippings from what all the newspapermen and critics and all was writing up about him, about his music, about his band. And all these clippings were asking the same thing: Where did it come from?”
. . . . . . .
In 1917, the Victor Talking Machine Co. decided to record the hot new music. Legend has it that the company offered a contract to Keppard but that he turned it down out of paranoia.
 
Keppard “had the chance to record,” bassist Pops Foster told historian Tom Stoddard in one representative account, “but passed it up because he was afraid other guys would steal his stuff.”
 
The story goes that Victor, after being spurned by Keppard, offered a contract to Nick LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The song that the white group recorded at a studio in New York, “Livery Stable Blues,” is marked by a passage during which the musicians made sounds that mimicked farm animals — just as Keppard supposedly had done for tips back in New Orleans.
 
The veracity of the tale about Keppard turning down the contract, because he feared his music would be plagiarized, is difficult to gauge today, but it’s clear that Keppard and LaRocca’s bands were in New York around the same time. In the New York Sun on March 4, 1917, less than a week after “Livery Stable Blues” had been recorded and several days before it was released, there is an advertisement for Reisenweber’s restaurant:
 
“An exceptional beefsteak dinner, $1.50,” says the ad. “Served from noon to 9 p.m. with elaborate entertainment. The Original Dixieland ‘Jazz’ Band.”
 

An advertisement for a New York supper club where Freddie Keppard’s Original Creole Orchestra performed. From the March 4, 1917, New York Sun.  
 
On the same page is an advertisement for the Montmartre supper club (“the most unique supper place, where exclusive New York meets”) promoting the appearance of Keppard and his bandmates, “the Original Creole Ragtime Band from New Orleans in ‘Jazz’ Music.”
 
. . . . . . .
 
There was widespread speculation in the national press at the time that jazz had originated in Chicago, a city through which both LaRocca and Keppard had passed before arriving in New York. Variety magazine sought to set the record straight in its November 1916 edition, in the process refuting LaRocca’s famous assertion decades later that he was the inventor of jazz.
 
“Chicago’s claim to originating ‘Jazz Bands’ and ‘Balling the Jack’ are as groundless, according to Variety’s New Orleans correspondent, as Frisco’s assuming to be the locale for the first ‘Todolo’ and ‘Turkey Trot’ dances. Little negro tots were ‘Ballin’ the Jack’ in New Orleans over ten years ago, and negro roustabouts were ‘Turkey Trotting’ and doing the ‘Todolo’ in New Orleans as far back as 1890, he says. ‘Jazz Bands’ have been popular there for over two years, and Chicago cabaret owners brought entertainers from that city to introduce the idea.”
. . . . . . .
 
Keppard died in relative obscurity in 1933, two years after Bolden, the man Keppard had succeeded as one of the kings of New Orleans jazz. Bolden is sometimes regarded as the progenitor of jazz himself, and he was undoubtedly its biggest early star, although his fame was limited to the New Orleans vicinity during his career and he stopped performing publicly long before the jazz name came into common use in reference to music. 
 
Baquet, the clarinet player with Keppard’s Original Creole Orchestra, described first hearing Bolden to jazz writer Nat Shapiro in a book published in 1955. “I was out celebrating with some of my friends when we went to a ball at the Odd Fellows’ Hall, where Buddy Bolden worked,” Baquet is quoted as saying in “Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya.” “I remember thinking it was a funny place, nobody took their hats off. It was plenty tough. You paid fifteen cents and walked in.
 
“When we came in, we saw the band, six of them, on a low stand. They had their hats on, too, and were resting — pretty sleepy.
 
“We stood behind a column. All of a sudden, Buddy stomps, knocks on the floor with his trumpet to give the beat, and they all sit up straight, wide awake. Buddy held up his cornet, paused to be sure of his embouchure, then they played ‘Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.’ Everybody got up quick, the whole place rose and yelled out, “Oh, Mr. Bolden, play it for us, Buddy, play it!”
. . . . . . .
Just what Bolden sounded like might never be known. But he is widely believed to have recorded, almost two decades before LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. And other early black jazz musicians — perhaps even Freddie Keppard — might also have recorded in New Orleans well before 1917.
But there’s a catch: Any recordings they made were not for commercial purposes, and they almost certainly no longer exist.
 
“Early cylinder phonographs could record as well as play, and most of the older musicians probably recorded for their own amusement at one time or another,” writes Charters in his “Jazz: New Orleans, 1885-1957.”
 
“Willie Cornish has recalled that the Bolden band made a cylinder, and George Baquet recalled recording in 1912. None of the early cylinders is known to survive.”
 
Bolden and his band, the story goes, were recorded sometime around the turn of the century by Oscar Zahn, who operated a grocery store and saloon near what’s now the intersection of Simon Bolivar Avenue and Jackson Avenue. Zahn, who had an Edison phonograph that could both play and record, stored his cylinders in a shed.
 
A small group of enthusiasts searched in vain for the Bolden cylinder, the Holy Grail of jazz, for decades. The shed was demolished in the 1960s, and the recording has never been found.
 
In his book “In Search of Buddy Bolden,” Don Marquis writes, “That the cylinder was made is quite believable; that it is gone forever is even more believable.”
 

 
 

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1967 Ads: The Village Theater
Selected Village Theater ads, illustrating its eclectic booking policy. Voice issue dates and other pertinent info in the captions.

3/16/67 issue: Ornette Coleman Trio and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet, March 17–see a Billboard review here.

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1967 Ads: The Village Theater
Selected Village Theater ads, illustrating its eclectic booking policy. Voice issue dates and other pertinent info in the captions.

3/16/67 issue: Ornette Coleman Trio and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet, March 17–see a Billboard review here.

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The coffeehouse at 147 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Fred Weintraub, who left home, family and a baby-carriage business to become the Greenwich Village impresario who advanced the careers of dozens of fledgling singers and comedians at his Bitter End coffeehouse, died on Sunday in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Jackie.
After showcasing a panoply of virtually unknown performers in the 1960s — including Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Randy Newman, Nina Simone and Peter, Paul and Mary — Mr. Weintraub became a Hollywood producer.
He introduced Bruce Lee and the martial arts craze to American movie audiences and persuaded Warner Bros. to subsidize the last-minute cost of a three-day rock festival near Bethel, N.Y., in 1969. The investment resulted in the studio’s Oscar-winning documentary “Woodstock.”
The Bitter End’s signature stage backdrop — a bare 150-year-old brick wall — helped distinguish it from other popular bohemian hangouts like the Village Gate and the Village Vanguard.
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
A radio show hosted by the folk singer Theodore Bikel originated there. Mr. Weintraub later hosted a local television series called “From the Bitter End,” although it was actually taped at a studio. In the 1963-64 season, Mr. Weintraub was the talent coordinator for “Hootenanny,” a weekly folk music show on ABC-TV.
“This was the beginning of the social revolution that ended up being called the ’60s,” Harold Leventhal, a musicians’ manager, wrote in a reminiscence on Mr. Weintraub’s website.
“It wasn’t actually born there at the Bitter End; it was really born with the Weavers and in the protest movements and folk singers of much earlier times,” Mr. Leventhal continued. “But what’s important, and what’s so special about Freddie, is that it all surfaced at the Bitter End. It was nurtured there.”

 
Fred Weintraub, right, with Bruce Lee during the filming of “Enter the Dragon.”
The bearded, 6-foot-2 rebel who nurtured the neophytes was an improbable muse.
Fred Robert Weintraub was born on April 27, 1928, in the Bronx to Meier Weintraub, who owned a toy and baby-carriage business, and the former Anna Bogatz.
He studied for his bar mitzvah with the cantor Reuben Tucker, who later, as Richard Tucker, sang at the Metropolitan Opera. He attended William Howard Taft High School and graduated from the Fieldston School, both in the Bronx, and later the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
In addition to his fourth wife, the former Jackie Dubey, a film producer, he is survived by four children from his earlier marriages, Sandra, Barbara, Max and Zachary Weintraub, and four grandchildren.
Mr. Weintraub said he had expanded his father’s business, Darling Furniture and Toys, to dozens of stores and was living with his wife and daughters in Westchester County, N.Y., when, at 26, he was struck by the Fellini film “La Strada.” He immediately identified with the film’s itinerant strong man, Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn, whom he recalled “clawing at the sand in despair.”
He soon left his wife and daughters (this was the second time he left home; he had also run away at 12) for a freewheeling life, playing the piano in a bordello, operating a fishing boat in Cuba and roaming Europe before deciding that the Greenwich Village music scene was where he belonged.
He opened the Bitter End, at 147 Bleecker Street, in 1961. According to various accounts, the name was either suggested by its nocturnal appearance or recommended by his mentor, Tom Murray, who, for some reason, drew his inspiration from the nautical term for the rags that mark the last few feet of an anchor rope.
The club had no liquor license, but served coffee-and-ice-cream confections with names like Frosty Freud and Zen Sundae. It fancied itself so far out, according to the menu, that a customer who ordered espresso was considered square. Mr. Weintraub’s office was typically al fresco: out front, for example, his foot perched on a bumper of a parked car.
In 1965, Mr. Weintraub hired Paul Colby to manage the club. He fired Mr. Colby when he opened a bar next door called the Other End, and then sold the Bitter End to him in 1974. (Mr. Colby acquired the rights to the name a decade later. He died in 2014.)

 
Joni Mitchell performing at the Bitter End in 1968. PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images
Over the years, the Bitter End provided a stage to a parade of budding singers, including Harry Chapin, Neil Diamond, Bette Midler and Carly Simon, and young comedians, among them Dick Cavett, George Carlin, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin and Flip Wilson.
“Woodstock” was Mr. Weintraub’s first project after joining Warner Bros., where he later became a vice president for creative services. The critic Roger Ebert called it “the film that gave a generation a voice and made Woodstock a part of American myth.”
When the Woodstock festival began in chaos, with miles-long traffic jams and rain-soaked fields, Mr. Weintraub was a laughingstock at Warner Bros. But by the time the weekend had ended and Woodstock had made history, he was lionized. The documentary became the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1970.
“By Monday morning I was a bigger hero than Neil Armstrong,” Mr. Weintraub recalled in his autobiography, “Bruce Lee, Woodstock and Me: From the Man Behind a Half-Century of Music, Movies and Martial Arts” (2011, written with David Fields). “All he did was walk on the moon. I saved Warner Bros.” (The moon landing had occurred less than a month before the festival.)
The first film he produced through his own company was the Bruce Lee martial-arts hit “Enter the Dragon.” He produced or wrote about 50 more films. Most recently, he was developing a TV series about the Bitter End.
Mr. Weintraub was supposed to play himself in the 1993 film “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” but at the Hollywood premiere he was informed that his footage had been cut from the final version.
“You weren’t believable as Fred Weintraub,” he recalled the director, Rob Cohen, telling him.
Mr. Weintraub explained, on his website, “In my defense, I’ve never pretended to be an actor, and ‘Fred Weintraub’ is a mighty difficult role.”
“He’s passionate, unpredictable, lusty, mischievous, impatient, and larger than life,” Mr. Weintraub said of himself. “And his back story places him at the heart of more pop culture milestones than seems possible for any one man.
“He’s like Forrest Gump as played by Al Pacino,” he added. “I’ve acted the part my entire life, and I’m still amazed that a child born with incurable shpilkes (the clinical term for ‘ants in my pants’) could accomplish so much.”
Correction: March 10, 2017
An obituary in some editions on Wednesday and in some copies on Thursday about Fred Weintraub, the founder of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse the Bitter End, referred incorrectly to a television series he hosted. It was called “From the Bitter End,” not “Live at the Bitter End” — and, despite its name, it was taped at a television studio, not at his nightclub.
 

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The coffeehouse at 147 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Fred Weintraub, who left home, family and a baby-carriage business to become the Greenwich Village impresario who advanced the careers of dozens of fledgling singers and comedians at his Bitter End coffeehouse, died on Sunday in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Jackie.
After showcasing a panoply of virtually unknown performers in the 1960s — including Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Randy Newman, Nina Simone and Peter, Paul and Mary — Mr. Weintraub became a Hollywood producer.
He introduced Bruce Lee and the martial arts craze to American movie audiences and persuaded Warner Bros. to subsidize the last-minute cost of a three-day rock festival near Bethel, N.Y., in 1969. The investment resulted in the studio’s Oscar-winning documentary “Woodstock.”
The Bitter End’s signature stage backdrop — a bare 150-year-old brick wall — helped distinguish it from other popular bohemian hangouts like the Village Gate and the Village Vanguard.
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
A radio show hosted by the folk singer Theodore Bikel originated there. Mr. Weintraub later hosted a local television series called “From the Bitter End,” although it was actually taped at a studio. In the 1963-64 season, Mr. Weintraub was the talent coordinator for “Hootenanny,” a weekly folk music show on ABC-TV.
“This was the beginning of the social revolution that ended up being called the ’60s,” Harold Leventhal, a musicians’ manager, wrote in a reminiscence on Mr. Weintraub’s website.
“It wasn’t actually born there at the Bitter End; it was really born with the Weavers and in the protest movements and folk singers of much earlier times,” Mr. Leventhal continued. “But what’s important, and what’s so special about Freddie, is that it all surfaced at the Bitter End. It was nurtured there.”

 
Fred Weintraub, right, with Bruce Lee during the filming of “Enter the Dragon.”
The bearded, 6-foot-2 rebel who nurtured the neophytes was an improbable muse.
Fred Robert Weintraub was born on April 27, 1928, in the Bronx to Meier Weintraub, who owned a toy and baby-carriage business, and the former Anna Bogatz.
He studied for his bar mitzvah with the cantor Reuben Tucker, who later, as Richard Tucker, sang at the Metropolitan Opera. He attended William Howard Taft High School and graduated from the Fieldston School, both in the Bronx, and later the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
In addition to his fourth wife, the former Jackie Dubey, a film producer, he is survived by four children from his earlier marriages, Sandra, Barbara, Max and Zachary Weintraub, and four grandchildren.
Mr. Weintraub said he had expanded his father’s business, Darling Furniture and Toys, to dozens of stores and was living with his wife and daughters in Westchester County, N.Y., when, at 26, he was struck by the Fellini film “La Strada.” He immediately identified with the film’s itinerant strong man, Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn, whom he recalled “clawing at the sand in despair.”
He soon left his wife and daughters (this was the second time he left home; he had also run away at 12) for a freewheeling life, playing the piano in a bordello, operating a fishing boat in Cuba and roaming Europe before deciding that the Greenwich Village music scene was where he belonged.
He opened the Bitter End, at 147 Bleecker Street, in 1961. According to various accounts, the name was either suggested by its nocturnal appearance or recommended by his mentor, Tom Murray, who, for some reason, drew his inspiration from the nautical term for the rags that mark the last few feet of an anchor rope.
The club had no liquor license, but served coffee-and-ice-cream confections with names like Frosty Freud and Zen Sundae. It fancied itself so far out, according to the menu, that a customer who ordered espresso was considered square. Mr. Weintraub’s office was typically al fresco: out front, for example, his foot perched on a bumper of a parked car.
In 1965, Mr. Weintraub hired Paul Colby to manage the club. He fired Mr. Colby when he opened a bar next door called the Other End, and then sold the Bitter End to him in 1974. (Mr. Colby acquired the rights to the name a decade later. He died in 2014.)

 
Joni Mitchell performing at the Bitter End in 1968. PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images
Over the years, the Bitter End provided a stage to a parade of budding singers, including Harry Chapin, Neil Diamond, Bette Midler and Carly Simon, and young comedians, among them Dick Cavett, George Carlin, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin and Flip Wilson.
“Woodstock” was Mr. Weintraub’s first project after joining Warner Bros., where he later became a vice president for creative services. The critic Roger Ebert called it “the film that gave a generation a voice and made Woodstock a part of American myth.”
When the Woodstock festival began in chaos, with miles-long traffic jams and rain-soaked fields, Mr. Weintraub was a laughingstock at Warner Bros. But by the time the weekend had ended and Woodstock had made history, he was lionized. The documentary became the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1970.
“By Monday morning I was a bigger hero than Neil Armstrong,” Mr. Weintraub recalled in his autobiography, “Bruce Lee, Woodstock and Me: From the Man Behind a Half-Century of Music, Movies and Martial Arts” (2011, written with David Fields). “All he did was walk on the moon. I saved Warner Bros.” (The moon landing had occurred less than a month before the festival.)
The first film he produced through his own company was the Bruce Lee martial-arts hit “Enter the Dragon.” He produced or wrote about 50 more films. Most recently, he was developing a TV series about the Bitter End.
Mr. Weintraub was supposed to play himself in the 1993 film “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” but at the Hollywood premiere he was informed that his footage had been cut from the final version.
“You weren’t believable as Fred Weintraub,” he recalled the director, Rob Cohen, telling him.
Mr. Weintraub explained, on his website, “In my defense, I’ve never pretended to be an actor, and ‘Fred Weintraub’ is a mighty difficult role.”
“He’s passionate, unpredictable, lusty, mischievous, impatient, and larger than life,” Mr. Weintraub said of himself. “And his back story places him at the heart of more pop culture milestones than seems possible for any one man.
“He’s like Forrest Gump as played by Al Pacino,” he added. “I’ve acted the part my entire life, and I’m still amazed that a child born with incurable shpilkes (the clinical term for ‘ants in my pants’) could accomplish so much.”
Correction: March 10, 2017
An obituary in some editions on Wednesday and in some copies on Thursday about Fred Weintraub, the founder of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse the Bitter End, referred incorrectly to a television series he hosted. It was called “From the Bitter End,” not “Live at the Bitter End” — and, despite its name, it was taped at a television studio, not at his nightclub.
 

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Dave Valentin performing at the Blue Note in New York City in 2000. Steve Berman
 
Dave Valentin, a Grammy Award-winning Latin jazz flutist who recorded dozens of albums and performed on six continents, died on Wednesday in the Bronx. He was 64.
 
The cause was complications of a stroke and Parkinson’s disease, said his manager, Richie Bonilla.
 
Born in the Bronx to parents who came from Puerto Rico, Mr. Valentin was playing conga and timbales professionally by the time he was 10. As a teenager, he became attracted to a girl who played the flute and, to better court her, switched instruments and taught himself to play. He went on to become one of the pre-eminent flutists in Latin jazz.
 
He won a Grammy for best Latin jazz album in 2003 for “The Gathering,” by the Caribbean Jazz Project, an album that also featured the vibraphonist Dave Samuels.
 
Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in a 1984 review that Mr. Valentin “plays with a sultry tone and dizzyingly agile technique, and his solos dart in and around his quintet’s Latin and funk rhythms.”
 
The percussionist and bandleader Bobby Sanabria said in an interview that Mr. Valentin was “a true son of the South Bronx wherever he went,” and that he “represented excellence as a musician through the flute in the world of jazz.”
 
David Joseph Valentin was born in the South Bronx on April 29, 1952, to parents who came to New York from a fishing village near Mayagüez, P.R. His mother was the former Sylvia Ramirez. His father, Jorge, a steward in the merchant marine, brought home bongos and congas from Brazil, which Dave began practicing on when he was 5. He took piano lessons when he was 9 and was playing percussion for $10 a gig when he was 10.
 
“At that time I was like a novelty playing with men,” he said in an interview with the Hamilton College Jazz Archive in 2000. “I was a little kid on timbales.”
 
His junior high school had a school band and a jazz band, an orchestra, a chorus and seven music teachers, one of whom, Stuart Soffer, recommended him to the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan).
 
After graduating, he studied under the acclaimed jazz flutist Hubert Laws, who became his mentor. He also studied at Bronx Community College before becoming a music teacher.
 
“I taught seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade music for three years in the South Bronx,” Mr. Valentin told The Times in 2014. “I had a jazz band and taught them how to play, so when they graduated they were ready.”
 
His first album as a leader, “Legends,” was released in 1979 on the GRP label, with which he had a long and fruitful relationship as both a leader and a sideman.
 
In addition to releasing numerous albums under his own name, he recorded with the singers Patti Austin, Chris Connor and Nnenna Freelon, the guitarist Lee Ritenour, the pianist McCoy Tyner’s Afro-Cuban All-Stars and many others. He also toured with the percussionist Tito Puente and was music director of his Golden Latin Jazz All-Stars.
 
After suffering a stroke in 2012, he convalesced in a rented bungalow in the Harding Park section of the Bronx, surviving without savings or health insurance and dependent largely on donations, many of them handled by the Jazz Foundation of America. He eventually moved to a nursing home.
 
He is survived by a brother, George.
 
Mr. Valentin delighted in recounting how he became a flutist.
 
“I started out as a percussionist in school. But I wanted to meet this girl, Irene, who was a flutist,” he recalled in 2011. “She showed me a scale, and I played it immediately. Do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. Without knowing nothing! So, I borrowed a flute, bought a Herbie Mann record and learned ‘Comin’ Home Baby.’
 
“Three weeks later, I went to her and played it,” he continued. “I knew I had her! She said, ‘I’ve been taking lessons for three years and you come in here in three weeks and play like that? Don’t ever talk to me again!’
“I lost the girl, but kept the flute.”

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Dave Valentin performing at the Blue Note in New York City in 2000. Steve Berman
 
Dave Valentin, a Grammy Award-winning Latin jazz flutist who recorded dozens of albums and performed on six continents, died on Wednesday in the Bronx. He was 64.
 
The cause was complications of a stroke and Parkinson’s disease, said his manager, Richie Bonilla.
 
Born in the Bronx to parents who came from Puerto Rico, Mr. Valentin was playing conga and timbales professionally by the time he was 10. As a teenager, he became attracted to a girl who played the flute and, to better court her, switched instruments and taught himself to play. He went on to become one of the pre-eminent flutists in Latin jazz.
 
He won a Grammy for best Latin jazz album in 2003 for “The Gathering,” by the Caribbean Jazz Project, an album that also featured the vibraphonist Dave Samuels.
 
Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in a 1984 review that Mr. Valentin “plays with a sultry tone and dizzyingly agile technique, and his solos dart in and around his quintet’s Latin and funk rhythms.”
 
The percussionist and bandleader Bobby Sanabria said in an interview that Mr. Valentin was “a true son of the South Bronx wherever he went,” and that he “represented excellence as a musician through the flute in the world of jazz.”
 
David Joseph Valentin was born in the South Bronx on April 29, 1952, to parents who came to New York from a fishing village near Mayagüez, P.R. His mother was the former Sylvia Ramirez. His father, Jorge, a steward in the merchant marine, brought home bongos and congas from Brazil, which Dave began practicing on when he was 5. He took piano lessons when he was 9 and was playing percussion for $10 a gig when he was 10.
 
“At that time I was like a novelty playing with men,” he said in an interview with the Hamilton College Jazz Archive in 2000. “I was a little kid on timbales.”
 
His junior high school had a school band and a jazz band, an orchestra, a chorus and seven music teachers, one of whom, Stuart Soffer, recommended him to the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan).
 
After graduating, he studied under the acclaimed jazz flutist Hubert Laws, who became his mentor. He also studied at Bronx Community College before becoming a music teacher.
 
“I taught seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade music for three years in the South Bronx,” Mr. Valentin told The Times in 2014. “I had a jazz band and taught them how to play, so when they graduated they were ready.”
 
His first album as a leader, “Legends,” was released in 1979 on the GRP label, with which he had a long and fruitful relationship as both a leader and a sideman.
 
In addition to releasing numerous albums under his own name, he recorded with the singers Patti Austin, Chris Connor and Nnenna Freelon, the guitarist Lee Ritenour, the pianist McCoy Tyner’s Afro-Cuban All-Stars and many others. He also toured with the percussionist Tito Puente and was music director of his Golden Latin Jazz All-Stars.
 
After suffering a stroke in 2012, he convalesced in a rented bungalow in the Harding Park section of the Bronx, surviving without savings or health insurance and dependent largely on donations, many of them handled by the Jazz Foundation of America. He eventually moved to a nursing home.
 
He is survived by a brother, George.
 
Mr. Valentin delighted in recounting how he became a flutist.
 
“I started out as a percussionist in school. But I wanted to meet this girl, Irene, who was a flutist,” he recalled in 2011. “She showed me a scale, and I played it immediately. Do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. Without knowing nothing! So, I borrowed a flute, bought a Herbie Mann record and learned ‘Comin’ Home Baby.’
 
“Three weeks later, I went to her and played it,” he continued. “I knew I had her! She said, ‘I’ve been taking lessons for three years and you come in here in three weeks and play like that? Don’t ever talk to me again!’
“I lost the girl, but kept the flute.”

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Two of the great living eclectics of American music are being celebrated in concert this week.
Between the two of them, they’ve done amazing work in virtually every known genre of music that there is: one has spent his whole career writing for the Broadway stage, the other is best known for his movie soundtrack scores.
On Thursday, Highlights in Jazz honors David Amram at Tribeca Performing Arts Center.
Produced by Jack Kleinsinger, this is, by a considerable margin, the longest-running jazz concert series in New York. Kudos to Kleinsinger for mounting this tribute, but the larger truth is that a jazz organization isn’t the only one that could celebrate the career of David Amram—he could also be honored by a classical academy or roots music groups.
Featuring re-arranged songbook standards and original compositions for a highly unusual quartet of French horn (played by Amram himself), tenor saxophone, bass, and drums, Amram recorded his first album as a bandleader, Jazz Studio No. 6, in New York in 1957.
His most recent success is Diner in the Sky, produced by Amram for The Amigos, an ensemble of young musicians mostly associated with Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jonathan Batiste Stay Human band.
The Amigos (who, more recently, changed their group name to “Silver City Bound”) are an exceptional live band playing folk music, blues, Americana, country, and various permutations of Pan-American “roots” music.
On the album, Amram took what was a perfect sound for a club or honky tonk (are there any of those in Manhattan?) and made it into a perfect sound for a recording, polished but not slick, bringing out the virtues of the band but without changing them into something fundamentally different from what they were.
From making experimental jazz in 1957 to recording bluegrass in 2014 may seem like a stretch, but that’s only the beginning of what Amram has achieved.
The majority of his work is most easily described as contemporary classical music, and his No. 1 outlet has been scores for dramatic films, most famously the classic 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (a novel and film whose concepts have entered the cultural bloodstream—the 2016 Captain America: Civil War was full of references to it).
The diversity of his music is captured in the boxed set, David Amram’s Classic American Film Scores, 1956-2016, produced last year in England and now being released in the USA in conjunction with the concert. (All 81 tracks and five hours of music are also available via Apple Music and iTunes.)
The set starts with a jazz variation on the Manchurian Candidate main theme (the “straight” main title recording is also heard) that sounds for all the world like a mash-up of Aaron Copland and bebop trombonist J. J. Johnson.
 
 
Theme From The Manchurian Candidate – David Amram’s Classic American Film Scores 1956 – 2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Like David Amram, John Kander is an American composer of tremendous range and variety, who has worked in a wide spectrum of different styles, although almost exclusivity for one specific medium, the musical theater.
He has composed original stage music that compares with the best of Kurt Weill and Weimar-era Germany (Cabaret, 1966), Grecian rebetiko folkloric music (in the under-appreciated Zorba, 1968), American jazz standards (Chicago, 1976), and South American boleros and musica romantica (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1993).
To the hundreds of millennial jazz musicians it’s almost inconceivable that “All That Jazz” and “Razzle-Dazzle” (from Chicago) weren’t actually composed in the Roaring Twenties during the first Jazz Age. Likewise, “Life Is” from Zorba resounds like authentically Athenian pop hit no less than Manos Hadjidakis’ “Never on Sunday” or Mikis Theodorakis’ equally successful instrumental theme from the 1964 film Zorba.
Friday’s concert celebrates the music of Kander and his late professional partner, the gifted lyricist Fred Ebb, on the occasion of the composer’s 90th birthday.
Joining the New York Pops Orchestra (conducted by Steven Reineke) will be two first-rate theater singers, Tony Yazbeck (the lead in the marvelous 2014 revival of On the Town) and Caissie Levy (part of the current cast of the still-developing Broadway version of the Disney property Frozen).
In their work, both David Amram (born 1930) and John Kander (born 1927) offer copious evidence that the strength of American music—no less than other aspects of our cultural and political lives—is in its unique combination of consistency and diversity.
Highlights in Jazz presents All-Star Salute to David Amram at Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Thursday, March 9
The New York Pops: Life is a Cabaret – The Songs of Kander and Ebb at Carnegie Hall, Isaac Stern Auditorium on Friday, March 10
 

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Two of the great living eclectics of American music are being celebrated in concert this week.
Between the two of them, they’ve done amazing work in virtually every known genre of music that there is: one has spent his whole career writing for the Broadway stage, the other is best known for his movie soundtrack scores.
On Thursday, Highlights in Jazz honors David Amram at Tribeca Performing Arts Center.
Produced by Jack Kleinsinger, this is, by a considerable margin, the longest-running jazz concert series in New York. Kudos to Kleinsinger for mounting this tribute, but the larger truth is that a jazz organization isn’t the only one that could celebrate the career of David Amram—he could also be honored by a classical academy or roots music groups.
Featuring re-arranged songbook standards and original compositions for a highly unusual quartet of French horn (played by Amram himself), tenor saxophone, bass, and drums, Amram recorded his first album as a bandleader, Jazz Studio No. 6, in New York in 1957.
His most recent success is Diner in the Sky, produced by Amram for The Amigos, an ensemble of young musicians mostly associated with Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jonathan Batiste Stay Human band.
The Amigos (who, more recently, changed their group name to “Silver City Bound”) are an exceptional live band playing folk music, blues, Americana, country, and various permutations of Pan-American “roots” music.
On the album, Amram took what was a perfect sound for a club or honky tonk (are there any of those in Manhattan?) and made it into a perfect sound for a recording, polished but not slick, bringing out the virtues of the band but without changing them into something fundamentally different from what they were.
From making experimental jazz in 1957 to recording bluegrass in 2014 may seem like a stretch, but that’s only the beginning of what Amram has achieved.
The majority of his work is most easily described as contemporary classical music, and his No. 1 outlet has been scores for dramatic films, most famously the classic 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (a novel and film whose concepts have entered the cultural bloodstream—the 2016 Captain America: Civil War was full of references to it).
The diversity of his music is captured in the boxed set, David Amram’s Classic American Film Scores, 1956-2016, produced last year in England and now being released in the USA in conjunction with the concert. (All 81 tracks and five hours of music are also available via Apple Music and iTunes.)
The set starts with a jazz variation on the Manchurian Candidate main theme (the “straight” main title recording is also heard) that sounds for all the world like a mash-up of Aaron Copland and bebop trombonist J. J. Johnson.
 
 
Theme From The Manchurian Candidate – David Amram’s Classic American Film Scores 1956 – 2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oa98cpw_JY” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
Like David Amram, John Kander is an American composer of tremendous range and variety, who has worked in a wide spectrum of different styles, although almost exclusivity for one specific medium, the musical theater.
He has composed original stage music that compares with the best of Kurt Weill and Weimar-era Germany (Cabaret, 1966), Grecian rebetiko folkloric music (in the under-appreciated Zorba, 1968), American jazz standards (Chicago, 1976), and South American boleros and musica romantica (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1993).
To the hundreds of millennial jazz musicians it’s almost inconceivable that “All That Jazz” and “Razzle-Dazzle” (from Chicago) weren’t actually composed in the Roaring Twenties during the first Jazz Age. Likewise, “Life Is” from Zorba resounds like authentically Athenian pop hit no less than Manos Hadjidakis’ “Never on Sunday” or Mikis Theodorakis’ equally successful instrumental theme from the 1964 film Zorba.
Friday’s concert celebrates the music of Kander and his late professional partner, the gifted lyricist Fred Ebb, on the occasion of the composer’s 90th birthday.
Joining the New York Pops Orchestra (conducted by Steven Reineke) will be two first-rate theater singers, Tony Yazbeck (the lead in the marvelous 2014 revival of On the Town) and Caissie Levy (part of the current cast of the still-developing Broadway version of the Disney property Frozen).
In their work, both David Amram (born 1930) and John Kander (born 1927) offer copious evidence that the strength of American music—no less than other aspects of our cultural and political lives—is in its unique combination of consistency and diversity.
Highlights in Jazz presents All-Star Salute to David Amram at Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Thursday, March 9
The New York Pops: Life is a Cabaret – The Songs of Kander and Ebb at Carnegie Hall, Isaac Stern Auditorium on Friday, March 10
 

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It’s one thing to have been part of a one-hit wonder band, to have made your mark on the record charts and then quietly disappeared into the music history books. But if that one hit was as ubiquitous as “Wipe Out,” the #2 surf music classic recorded by The Surfaris in 1963, and you played the lead guitar on that record, you’re probably more important than those history books let on.
 
Jim Fuller, that guitarist, died March 3 at age 69 in Monrovia, Calif. The cause of death has not been reported, but Fuller’s passing was confirmed on Facebook by his former bandmate Bob Berryhill and by Fuller’s son, Jay.
 
Jim Fuller, born on June 27, 1947, is often called “The Godfather of Surf Guitar.” He was an original member of the Surfaris along with Ron Wilson (drums, vocals), Berryhill (rhythm guitar) and Pat Connolly (bass). The band formed in Glendora, Calif., in 1962 as the surf music craze was just emerging and “Wipe Out” was written that winter. A saxophonist, Jim Pash, joined the band after “Wipe Out” was recorded.
 
Originally released on the small DFS label, it was then picked up by another indie label, Princess Records, before finally finding national distribution with the larger Dot Records. “Wipe Out” was originally intended to be the B-side of the single, with the vocal track “Surfer Joe,” credited to Wilson, as the A-side. But there was simply no way “Wipe Out” was going to be ignored. Cut at Powell Studios in Cucamonga, the record begins with a cracking sound, meant to be a surfboard breaking in half (Berryhill’s dad did the honors). It’s immediately followed by a crazed laugh (that was the band’s manager, Dale Smallin) and a falsetto voice: “ha ha ha ha ha, wipe out,” before Wilson’s trademark drum solo—imitated by countless drummers and, to the chagrin of many high school teachers, students banging it out on their desks—and Fuller’s guitar lead kick in.
 

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It’s one thing to have been part of a one-hit wonder band, to have made your mark on the record charts and then quietly disappeared into the music history books. But if that one hit was as ubiquitous as “Wipe Out,” the #2 surf music classic recorded by The Surfaris in 1963, and you played the lead guitar on that record, you’re probably more important than those history books let on.
 
Jim Fuller, that guitarist, died March 3 at age 69 in Monrovia, Calif. The cause of death has not been reported, but Fuller’s passing was confirmed on Facebook by his former bandmate Bob Berryhill and by Fuller’s son, Jay.
 
Jim Fuller, born on June 27, 1947, is often called “The Godfather of Surf Guitar.” He was an original member of the Surfaris along with Ron Wilson (drums, vocals), Berryhill (rhythm guitar) and Pat Connolly (bass). The band formed in Glendora, Calif., in 1962 as the surf music craze was just emerging and “Wipe Out” was written that winter. A saxophonist, Jim Pash, joined the band after “Wipe Out” was recorded.
 
Originally released on the small DFS label, it was then picked up by another indie label, Princess Records, before finally finding national distribution with the larger Dot Records. “Wipe Out” was originally intended to be the B-side of the single, with the vocal track “Surfer Joe,” credited to Wilson, as the A-side. But there was simply no way “Wipe Out” was going to be ignored. Cut at Powell Studios in Cucamonga, the record begins with a cracking sound, meant to be a surfboard breaking in half (Berryhill’s dad did the honors). It’s immediately followed by a crazed laugh (that was the band’s manager, Dale Smallin) and a falsetto voice: “ha ha ha ha ha, wipe out,” before Wilson’s trademark drum solo—imitated by countless drummers and, to the chagrin of many high school teachers, students banging it out on their desks—and Fuller’s guitar lead kick in.
 

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From: Noel Wollman <noelguitar@optimum.net>
Date: Sunday, March 5, 2017 at 4:56 PM
To: Jazz Promo Services <jim@jazzpromoservices.com>
Subject: gone
 
well jim, we jusr lost another one
 

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From: Noel Wollman <noelguitar@optimum.net>
Date: Sunday, March 5, 2017 at 4:56 PM
To: Jazz Promo Services <jim@jazzpromoservices.com>
Subject: gone
 
well jim, we jusr lost another one
 

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Courtesy of Roger Arpajou
Article Timestamp Subhead
This loose, intermittently compelling biopic of jazz great Django Reinhardt offers a much-deserved spotlight role for French actor Reda Kateb.
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In Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” Sean Penn boasts, “I’m considered the best guitar player maybe that ever lived, certainly in this country. There’s this gypsy in France, and he’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard.” The only guitarist superior to Penn’s fictional Emmet Ray? Django Reinhardt, a Belgian-born hot-jazz strummer whose talent saved him during World War II.
As a historical-fiction account of this wartime chapter in the jazz legend’s life, “Django” delivers a showcase role for gifted actor Reda Kateb, who’s had small parts in “A Prophet” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” but is otherwise rarely seen outside of France. It also marks a rather poignant choice to open the 2017 Berlinale, since the film — while not an especially compelling or well-told biopic unto itself — shines much-needed attention on the plight of the Roma people at the hands of German (and French) officials.
The timing of the Gallic-backed project is all the more significant when one considers that François Hollande only recently became the first French president to acknowledge the “broad responsibility” the Vichy regime played in rounding up Roma during the war. Still, much of the blame rightfully falls on Nazi officials, who not only harassed, interned, and executed so many of Reinhardt’s brethren, but also had the gall to dictate aesthetic limits on what Hitler deemed “degenerate music.”
As conceived, the film serves up Reinhardt as synecdoche for the entire Roma experience in WWII, when in truth, he was perhaps its most notable exception, protected as he was by his supreme talent. And though the similarities between this “Django” and Quentin Tarantino’s unchained abolition fantasy end with the characters’ names, there are moments when it could pass for a beigey, low-key “Inglourious Basterds” — at least inasmuch as it rather fancifully imagines Reinhardt’s concerts slyly providing cover for Resistance fighters, who slink around while the Nazis are distracted.
Steering oh-so-loosely by Alexis Salatko’s already-fictionalized historical novel, “Django” helmer Étienne Comar soft-pedals much of the well-documented cruelty and violence visited upon Roma at the time — apart from a clumsy early scene, in which an old gypsy guitarist is shot in the head by German soldiers. That general strategy of trusting audiences to fill in the threat themselves may serve the film well in European release, but it makes for a strangely tension-free drama (since Americans have a far greater appetite for watching Nazi-perpetrated violence on screen, whereas subtle suggestion is considered the “classy” choice in countries where such atrocities actually happened).
In lieu of conflict, Comar focuses on the music, interrupting the oddly meandering narrative for minutes at a time as Kateb’s Reinhardt and his circle treat the audience to mini-concerts that showcase his talent, or else center on the gypsy folk-stylings that directly influenced it. These are by far the most engaging sequences in the biopic, beginning with a seven-minute medley near the beginning in which Reinhardt must be dragged from fishing in the Seine to headline a sold-out show.
At first, Kateb’s portrayal seems almost farcical, the broad caricature of a drunken musician ambivalent about his day job. But once on stage, he disappears effortlessly into the music, casting a spell on the audience. Technically, it’s Gypsy jazz guitarist Stochelo Rosenberg’s playing that we hear, though it’s Kateb’s pantomime that mesmerizes most, based less on 1938’s “Jazz ‘Hot’” single-reel doc short (the best surviving visual record of Reinhardt’s style) than the way lost-in-feeling acoustic guitarists perform today. Because contemporary viewers don’t have a fixed image of Reinhardt, Kateb is free to invent him. Still, the film remains historically true to Reinhardt’s moustache and deformed left hand (two fingers were left paralyzed when he was severely burned at age 18).
At the time, a significant part of Reinhardt’s paradoxical appeal was his outsider status, an exotic “savage” quality that cultured fans found transgressive — much as white kids gravitate to gangsta rap today. Still, in the age of Lady Gaga Super Bowl halftime shows, it’s hard to identify with an era in which cultural values were threatened by the very notion of jazz or swing music. Reinhardt found himself on the avant garde of that dynamic: an artist who wasn’t compelled to conform, but brought an improvisatory passion to whatever he played. As far as the authorities were concerned, such an attitude made him dangerous and potentially difficult to control, both on stage and in his private life, and so they sought to co-opt him to their cause.
Though it never feels as if he’s overtly taking a stand against the regime, the film shows Reinhardt defying the Germans in his own way. Like a celebrity declining to play at President Trump’s inauguration, he slips away into hiding instead of agreeing to perform the propaganda concerts expected of him (whereas Edith Piaf totally sold out). And yet, the movie struggles to make Reinhardt’s banal private moments feel as exciting as those in which he performed live.
It’s as if Comar (an accomplished producer of films such as “Of Gods and Men” and “Timbuktu,” here making his directorial debut) doesn’t quite understand how to tell this story, assembling instead a collection of wispy, wandering vignettes in which Reinhardt and his mistress (Cécile de France) crack each other up with Hollywood movie-star impersonations, or else walk wordlessly along the banks of a scenic French lake. Such scenes are neither realistic nor dramatic, and barely qualify as poetic — assuming that’s what the film is going for.
Comar’s thesis seems to be that great music transcends the conflict of the times, and while that may be true to some degree — not only did Reinhardt’s work provide emotional escape to its listeners, but much of his music outlived the regime that sought to suppress and control it — the movie barely makes the weighty conflict feel real. One key composition that did not survive the war was Reinhardt’s lost “Requiem for Gypsy Brothers,” which opens the door for the film to speculate as to how this organ-centric mass might have sounded, even as it finds fresh resonance today.
Berlin Film Review: ‘Django’
Reviewed at Dick Clark Screening Room, Santa Monica, Feb. 3, 2017. Running time: 115 MIN.
Production
(France) A Pathé (in France) release of an Arches Films, Curiosa Films, Moana Films, Pathé, France 2 Cinéma, Auvergne Rhône Alpes Cinéma production, with the participation of Canal Plus, Ciné Plus, France Télévisions, the Auvergne Rhône Alpes Region, CNC. (International sales: Pathé, Paris.) Producers: Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier. Co-producers: Romain Le Grand, Vivien Aslanian.
Crew
Director: Étienne Comar. Screenplay: Comar, Alexis Salatko, based on the novel “Folles de Django” by Alexis Salatko. Camera (color, widescreen): Christophe Beaucarne. Editor: Monica Coleman.
With
Reda Kateb, Cécile de France, Beata Balya, BimBam Merstein, Gabriel Mirété, Vincent Frade, Johnny Montreuil, Raphaël Dever, Patrick Mille, Xavier Beauvois, Doctor Jazz. (French, German, English, Romani dialogue)
 

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Courtesy of Roger Arpajou
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This loose, intermittently compelling biopic of jazz great Django Reinhardt offers a much-deserved spotlight role for French actor Reda Kateb.
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In Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” Sean Penn boasts, “I’m considered the best guitar player maybe that ever lived, certainly in this country. There’s this gypsy in France, and he’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard.” The only guitarist superior to Penn’s fictional Emmet Ray? Django Reinhardt, a Belgian-born hot-jazz strummer whose talent saved him during World War II.
As a historical-fiction account of this wartime chapter in the jazz legend’s life, “Django” delivers a showcase role for gifted actor Reda Kateb, who’s had small parts in “A Prophet” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” but is otherwise rarely seen outside of France. It also marks a rather poignant choice to open the 2017 Berlinale, since the film — while not an especially compelling or well-told biopic unto itself — shines much-needed attention on the plight of the Roma people at the hands of German (and French) officials.
The timing of the Gallic-backed project is all the more significant when one considers that François Hollande only recently became the first French president to acknowledge the “broad responsibility” the Vichy regime played in rounding up Roma during the war. Still, much of the blame rightfully falls on Nazi officials, who not only harassed, interned, and executed so many of Reinhardt’s brethren, but also had the gall to dictate aesthetic limits on what Hitler deemed “degenerate music.”
As conceived, the film serves up Reinhardt as synecdoche for the entire Roma experience in WWII, when in truth, he was perhaps its most notable exception, protected as he was by his supreme talent. And though the similarities between this “Django” and Quentin Tarantino’s unchained abolition fantasy end with the characters’ names, there are moments when it could pass for a beigey, low-key “Inglourious Basterds” — at least inasmuch as it rather fancifully imagines Reinhardt’s concerts slyly providing cover for Resistance fighters, who slink around while the Nazis are distracted.
Steering oh-so-loosely by Alexis Salatko’s already-fictionalized historical novel, “Django” helmer Étienne Comar soft-pedals much of the well-documented cruelty and violence visited upon Roma at the time — apart from a clumsy early scene, in which an old gypsy guitarist is shot in the head by German soldiers. That general strategy of trusting audiences to fill in the threat themselves may serve the film well in European release, but it makes for a strangely tension-free drama (since Americans have a far greater appetite for watching Nazi-perpetrated violence on screen, whereas subtle suggestion is considered the “classy” choice in countries where such atrocities actually happened).
In lieu of conflict, Comar focuses on the music, interrupting the oddly meandering narrative for minutes at a time as Kateb’s Reinhardt and his circle treat the audience to mini-concerts that showcase his talent, or else center on the gypsy folk-stylings that directly influenced it. These are by far the most engaging sequences in the biopic, beginning with a seven-minute medley near the beginning in which Reinhardt must be dragged from fishing in the Seine to headline a sold-out show.
At first, Kateb’s portrayal seems almost farcical, the broad caricature of a drunken musician ambivalent about his day job. But once on stage, he disappears effortlessly into the music, casting a spell on the audience. Technically, it’s Gypsy jazz guitarist Stochelo Rosenberg’s playing that we hear, though it’s Kateb’s pantomime that mesmerizes most, based less on 1938’s “Jazz ‘Hot’” single-reel doc short (the best surviving visual record of Reinhardt’s style) than the way lost-in-feeling acoustic guitarists perform today. Because contemporary viewers don’t have a fixed image of Reinhardt, Kateb is free to invent him. Still, the film remains historically true to Reinhardt’s moustache and deformed left hand (two fingers were left paralyzed when he was severely burned at age 18).
At the time, a significant part of Reinhardt’s paradoxical appeal was his outsider status, an exotic “savage” quality that cultured fans found transgressive — much as white kids gravitate to gangsta rap today. Still, in the age of Lady Gaga Super Bowl halftime shows, it’s hard to identify with an era in which cultural values were threatened by the very notion of jazz or swing music. Reinhardt found himself on the avant garde of that dynamic: an artist who wasn’t compelled to conform, but brought an improvisatory passion to whatever he played. As far as the authorities were concerned, such an attitude made him dangerous and potentially difficult to control, both on stage and in his private life, and so they sought to co-opt him to their cause.
Though it never feels as if he’s overtly taking a stand against the regime, the film shows Reinhardt defying the Germans in his own way. Like a celebrity declining to play at President Trump’s inauguration, he slips away into hiding instead of agreeing to perform the propaganda concerts expected of him (whereas Edith Piaf totally sold out). And yet, the movie struggles to make Reinhardt’s banal private moments feel as exciting as those in which he performed live.
It’s as if Comar (an accomplished producer of films such as “Of Gods and Men” and “Timbuktu,” here making his directorial debut) doesn’t quite understand how to tell this story, assembling instead a collection of wispy, wandering vignettes in which Reinhardt and his mistress (Cécile de France) crack each other up with Hollywood movie-star impersonations, or else walk wordlessly along the banks of a scenic French lake. Such scenes are neither realistic nor dramatic, and barely qualify as poetic — assuming that’s what the film is going for.
Comar’s thesis seems to be that great music transcends the conflict of the times, and while that may be true to some degree — not only did Reinhardt’s work provide emotional escape to its listeners, but much of his music outlived the regime that sought to suppress and control it — the movie barely makes the weighty conflict feel real. One key composition that did not survive the war was Reinhardt’s lost “Requiem for Gypsy Brothers,” which opens the door for the film to speculate as to how this organ-centric mass might have sounded, even as it finds fresh resonance today.
Berlin Film Review: ‘Django’
Reviewed at Dick Clark Screening Room, Santa Monica, Feb. 3, 2017. Running time: 115 MIN.
Production
(France) A Pathé (in France) release of an Arches Films, Curiosa Films, Moana Films, Pathé, France 2 Cinéma, Auvergne Rhône Alpes Cinéma production, with the participation of Canal Plus, Ciné Plus, France Télévisions, the Auvergne Rhône Alpes Region, CNC. (International sales: Pathé, Paris.) Producers: Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier. Co-producers: Romain Le Grand, Vivien Aslanian.
Crew
Director: Étienne Comar. Screenplay: Comar, Alexis Salatko, based on the novel “Folles de Django” by Alexis Salatko. Camera (color, widescreen): Christophe Beaucarne. Editor: Monica Coleman.
With
Reda Kateb, Cécile de France, Beata Balya, BimBam Merstein, Gabriel Mirété, Vincent Frade, Johnny Montreuil, Raphaël Dever, Patrick Mille, Xavier Beauvois, Doctor Jazz. (French, German, English, Romani dialogue)
 

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO