JAZZ MECCAS
PILOT EPISODE
DOCUMENTARY SERIES IN DEVELOPMENT
Written by Kwyn Bader
CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCATING PLANNING GRANT
1994
While still in his early years of film making, Kwyn joined a series project on the growth of America’s classical music with highly regarded documentary film producer, jazz scholar and Ohio U. professor Arthur Cromwell. As writer and associate producer, Kwyn interviewed jazz legends like drummer Max Roach, did extensive research on the likes of Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday before writing the series pilot.
FROM THE PILOT SCREENPLAY:
BIRTH OF "THE NEW MUSIC" by Kwyn Bader
INTRODUCTION
Before the camera: the expressive face of jazz musician Vaughn Freeman
VAUGHN FREEMAN:
This is the funniest music. You go to Africa, man, and they can't play jazz. It's weird. Cat black as your shoe, but he can't play jazz. The American black man...he is jazz. That's what the creator gave us. ...jazz. Not the blues. Everybody got the blues. All over the world people got it. Everybody cry alike, moan alike. But this jazz music, I've asked people, used to ask my father. A lot of people say it comes from church, but I know a whole lot of church people that can't play jazz. This music is wierd. ...that seems to be our gift. Oh man. Listen. I've seen great jazz musicians play....It's almost like seeing the Creator, if it's possible.
Sequence #1: "The Street"
We dissolve to a mid-town music shop on the west side of Manhattan. Don Baltimore's. Trumpets and saxaphones sit in glass cases or hang from ceiling hooks. A section of folding chairs is filled with a motley collection of adults looking up from their sheet music. These are not great musicians. A young man at a piano sings a line--"I'm a fool to love you"-- to a progression of jazz chords. Over the upright stands Barry Harris, one of the great jazz pianists who emerged from Detroit in the 50's. Harris tells his piano player that if he's going to play it right, he should know the lyrics so he can know where the feeling of his improvisation will come from.
The vocal session ends as horn players, guitarists and violinists take the still warm seats. Harris begins singing out arpeggios, which are played back to him. He castigates a dreadlocked violinist for missing a half note, as trumpeter Tommy Turrentine, who has straggled in, indignantly hums out to a young trumpeter how to play it right.
Outside a glass door at the back, several older black men stand in a stairwell sharing some smokes. One is dancer-drummer, Scoby Stroman, a lifelong Brooklynite who's performed with or knows just about everyone connected with jazz since the days he started dancing for different acts in the 40's.
We then find Scoby outside, walking a half a block east to Sixth Avenue. We cut to him standing on this Avenue of the Americas under a sign that reads 52nd Street. Towering above him are the gigantic buildings of the mid-town business district, Time-Life, Pain Webber. It's early evening and only a few suits idle out of their skyscrapers.
SCOBY STROMAN:
We used to own all of this. This was ours." He points at building fronts. "Right there was the Three Deuces, and that was the Downbeat Club, and Monroe's after it moved, and that's where Birdland was, and down that street, over there, was this place we used to go and eat.