The Birth of Jazz

New Orleans 1947 United Artists (90 minutes) directed by Arthur Lubin, written by Elliot Paul and Dick Irving Hyland.

This movie, made in the early dawn of the civil rights era when swing music was evolving into bebop, does its darnedest to tell the story of the New Orleans origins of jazz. 

The main plot is hokey but earnest. Miralee Smith (Dorothy Patrick), a young Baltimore heiress with musical aspirations, comes to New Orleans in 1917 and falls in love with older, swarthy Latin casino owner Nick Duquesne, the ‘King of Basin Street’ (Arturo de Córdova), and the ‘rag time’ music she hears for the first time.

Dorothy Patrick and Arturo de Cordova with an illustrious background of jazz stars in New Orleans.

However, Mrs. Rutledge Smith (Irene Rich) wants her daughter to pursue a music career along Italian opera lines. She is opposed to her daughter’s interest in the gambler Duquesne, no less than to the awful ‘music’ the household help enjoy: ‘There’s more devil than angel in that music!’

It is a little mind-blowing when, right after you first enter Mrs. Smith’s palace, you think you hear someone upstairs playing Billie Holiday. This turns out to be Endie—Billie Holiday in a maid’s suit—accompanying herself on a piano because she thinks no one is around. Holiday reportedly was not happy about playing a maid and was difficult to work with; this was her only feature film appearance. She seems bizarrely out of place, a jazz legend singing in a maid’s get-up in a B picture surrounded by long-forgotten studio contract players.

Mrs. Rutledge Smith is one of those affluent philistines with a mawk-British accent, sashaying through silken luxury and the board-certified trappings of Western high culture which Hollywood used in its heyday to portray Eastern establishmentarians—the same kind with whom the Marx Brothers had so much fun.

As in the Marx Brothers’ movies, the fuddy-duddies do not stand a chance.

We’ll give Miralee the casino owner. But it is hard to imagine anyone not falling in love with the music, especially when the people playing it are Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman and their bands, and Holiday, among many others.

Lady Day does the theme.

Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Woody Herman in Arthur Lubin's 1947 New Orleans

The high Cs down on Basin Street leading into West End Blues could come from none other than Armstrong, who plays cornet at Duquesne’s Orpheum Cabaret. Herman and his band play the Monte Carlo Saloon. Both are fictitious saloons on Basin Street in the New Orleans district Storyville, notorious for prostitution, following the apocryphal legend that jazz was ‘born’ there.

Those interested in the origins of jazz should consult Terry Teachout’s well-researched account of Storyville’s (and Armstrong’s) role in his excellent 2009 Armstrong biography Pops.

In very short, Storyville was a small district adjacent to the French Quarter, which the New Orleans city council set up in 1897 for legalized—and segregated—prostitution. ‘The District,’ as musicians called it, was named for city councilman Sidney Story. Clubs that opened there provided some of the first regular gigs for jazz musicians. But the U.S. Navy prevailed upon the city to close the district during the war in 1917, which shuttered the clubs, put musicians out of work, and spread illegal, cut-rate prostitution throughout the city, according to Teachout.

In the movie, Armstrong introduces his band with a rap: Charlie Beal on piano, Kid Ory on slide trombone, Zutty Singleton on drums, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Bud Scott on rhythm guitar, and George ‘Red’ Callender on bass.

However, Armstrong, born in 1901 and raised in Negro Storyville, would have been just 16 or 17 when the authorities closed Storyville. He made his start with Kid Ory in 1918, then played riverboats, and migrated to Chicago in 1922, Teachout wrote.

Anachronisms aside, what makes this movie worth watching is seeing these classic jazz musicians going about their business in natural settings. The tone might seem patronizing to some viewers now, and Armstrong does the goggle-eyed clowning later disparaged by those who followed him.

In one scene, Armstrong, alone with European impresario Henri Ferber (Richard Hageman, a composer, musician and conductor in real life), noodles with something Ferber taps out on the piano.

‘Stop it, stop it: that note isn’t even in the diatonic scale!’ Ferber said.

‘Diatonic? Did I do something wrong?’ Armstrong asks, wide-eyed.

‘No, extraordinary. You are playing notes between a flat and a natural. It’s like discovering a secret scale just made for this type of music,’ Ferber replied.

‘Horn, did you hear what this gentleman is saying?’ Armstrong said.

My sense is that Armstrong knew very well what he was about. The real beauty comes when he puts his lips to his beloved cornet. The sound rings true and clear—which goes for the other musicians as well, white and black.

Anyway, as our tale is told, Storyville closes.

The music grows and spreads north to Chicago and the east and west coasts, and triumphs—though notably not in the Jim Crow South.

There is a fun scene in which Duquesne and Woody Herman make sport with a Chicago thug who demands that Duquesne give him Woody Herman for his club. Herman asks the thug to clap, then playfully accompanies the thug’s impatient clapping with his clarinet, but the thug has no idea who he is.

Old movie buffs should watch for a very young Shelley Winters as Miss Holmbright, Duquesne’s secretary in Chicago, who also uses his ticket to see Miralee perform at Symphony Hall.