A Great Day in Harlem: the best of jazz in a photo

The first photo Art Kane took influenced his career as a photographer forever. On behalf of Esquire magazine, he gathered together the greatest names in jazz in the 1960s for a shot which has since passed into legend. Forty years later, director Jean Bach would shoot A Great Day In Harlem (1994), a documentary dedicated to this collector’s photograph.

That day in 1958, Art Kane’s lens captured forever a historic moment int he music world. Fifty-seven of jazz’s greatest stars caught in a single photograph, in front of a Harlem tenement block.

The task was far from easy. Faced with these night birds Art Kane had to manage a group whose excitement was no less great than their presence. Everyone knew each other: it was an unruly crowd, laughing and singing. Curious onlookers flocked to the scene, attracted by the joyous disorder of that summer morning. It took the young Art Kane an hour to get everyone into line for his photograph.

A true jazz fan, Jean Bach revisited that exceptional day and met the photograph’s protagonists. The director also recovered other images taken that day, the background to the little games being played in the photo. And all that to the sound of the era’s best riffs, scats and swings, A Great Day In Harlem revisits the golden age of jazz.

The film screens Friday 25 May at 8.30 pm, Salle Buñuel, preceded by the short films Jammin’ the Blues by Gjon Mili and An All Colored Vaudeville Show by Roy Mack.