We were at a private concert in Encino yesterday -- one in which Jesse Sharps, Roberto Miranda, Kamasi Washington, Kamau Daaood, Dwight Trible, Nate Morgan and Karon Harrison rocked the literal house -- and we heard an interesting bit of trivia concerning the Michael Mann thriller Collateral (2004), where taxi driver Jamie Foxx drives white-haired hitman Tom Cruise around Los Angeles while Cruise -- in his last great performance before becoming terminally annoying -- offs witnesses in a federal drug case.
One of those scenes (pictured above) takes place inside a Leimert Park jazz club (which was actually filmed inside of the Quon Bros. jazz club in Chinatown), and there is a brief but tre cool performance clip featuring local stalwarts Donald Dean and Trevor Ware kicking out some turgid Bitches Brew-esque jams. (The actual song they played was a note-for-note "Spanish Key.") The club is owned by a aging jazz musician (played by the great Barry Shabakla-Henley) who engages in a duel of wits with Cruise over a bit of Miles Davis trivia. Well, as it turns out, if our sources are correct, the original choice for the jazz club owner was bassist Henry Grimes (pictured below), who was just on the cusp of his great comeback a few years back. Of course it never happened, but man, what an entirely different scene that would have made.
Kamau Daaood clued us into a terrific new book coming out in the U.S. on Sept. 10. Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats collects a cornucopia of personal photographs from the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter (a.k.a., "Nica"), the jazz-loving heiress to the House of Rothschild who is most famous as Thelonius Monk's patron-slash-squeeze.
The book itself is a stunning record of an amazing life amidst one's musical heroes (how many of us can claim that?); the photos themselves aren't the crystalline black and white photos one associates with classic jazz photography (a la William Claxton) but are often grainy, blurry and in washed-out colors. But therein lies their power. I don't think I've ever seen a photo record of jazz musicians that is so intimate and present-in-the-moment. I love the usual iconic perfomance photos of Monk, sweating and pounding his piano keys, but there's something even more magical of shots of him lying in his underwear taking a nap, or caught on a New York patio looking out at the skyline. The book is filthy with these priceless unrehearsed moments.
We've been reading the blogs lately and came across a nice review of Jeff Gauthier's House of Return from Jazz and Music Reviews.
Also, our pen pal in blogitude Greg Burk is on a brief haitus from his invaluable MetalJazz site, but some unidentified soul is putting up some of the best of the last year or so of Greg's posts. Check 'em out!
