Jean Bach, Jazz Documentarian and Fan, Dies at 94
ByDOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: May 28, 2013
- Jean Bach, a lifelong jazz zealot whose fascination with a photograph of the titans of jazz gathered in front of a Harlem brownstone in 1958 led her to make a prizewinning movie about that moment, “A Great Day in Harlem,” 36 years later, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.
Jean
Bach with her friend Bobby Short.
"Harlem 1958" courtesy Art Kane Archive
“A
Great Day in Harlem,” the famous jazz group portrait taken in
1958, inspired Ms. Bach to make her first film, about the photo,
released in 1994.
The
photographer Carol Friedman, a friend, announced the death.
A
print of that black-and-white photograph — one of the most famous
in jazz history — had for years hung in the office of Ms. Bach’s
husband, Bob, a television executive. Art Kane, a fashion and music
photographer on assignment for Esquire magazine, had taken it on Aug.
12, 1958, in front of 17 East 126th Street, off Fifth Avenue, having
assembled 57 jazz musicians for the group portrait at the ungodly
hour — for most of them — of 10 a.m.
On
the stoop or standing in front of it were Count Basie, Lester Young,
Gene Krupa, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Charles
Mingus, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Marian McPartland, Coleman
Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Mary Lou Williams and 44 other musicians
(along with children from the neighborhood). Esquire published the
photo in 1959.
After
her husband died in 1985, Ms. Bach, a radio producer, learned that
Milt Hinton, the bassist and jazz photographer, had a home movie of
the original 1958 shoot. Though she had no experience making movies,
Ms. Bach acquired it and decided to use it as the basis ofan
hourlong film,
complementing the footage with interviews with musicians who were in
the photo, clips of their performances, and narration by Quincy
Jones.
Released
in 1994,“A
Great Day in Harlem”won
the top award at the Chicago International Film Festival and was
nominated for an Academy Award.
The
jazz critic Whitney Balliett, writing in The New Yorker, called the
film “a brilliant, funny, moving, altogether miraculous
documentary.”
Ms.
Bach had not originally intended it to be a movie. She had envisioned
it as a series of recorded conversations that she would ultimately
donate to the Smithsonian Institution. “I even planned on what I
was going to wear to the ceremony,” she told The Chicago Tribune,
“which pearls I would select, and how I was going to be very
gracious about it all.”
For
years, Ms. Bach was a fixture in the New York jazz world, with
encyclopedic knowledge of the music, virtually unmatched connections
and a reputation for giving great parties at her home in Greenwich
Village. A gossip columnist once wrote that Frank Sinatra’s first
question on coming to town was, “What’s happening down at
Jean’s?”
After
Ms. Bach and the pianist and singerBobby
Shorthad
a party in 1981 to celebrate their 40 years of friendship, Mr. Short
described what drew him to her when they met in 1942 at the Sherman
Hotel in Chicago.
“I
was a baby just out of high school,” he told The New Yorker in
1983, “and what drew me to Jean was not only her love for Duke
Ellington but the fact that she could sing note for note Ben Webster
solos and Cootie Williams solos and Johnny Hodges solos. And — she
knew
my
idol, Ivie Anderson,” who sang with Ellington’s band.
Ms.
Bach, he said, was “by far the most elegant and beautiful and
sharply intelligent person I had ever met.”
Jean
Enzinger was born on Sept. 27, 1918, in Chicago and grew up there and
in Milwaukee. Her father worked in advertising, and her childhood
household was full of music and parties. As a teenager she knocked on
Duke Ellington’s door and established a lasting friendship.
Moving
east to attend Vassar College, a short train ride from Harlem, she
practically majored in trips to the Apollo Theater. In 1941, back in
Chicago, she was at the Three Deuces when she met the trumpeter
Shorty Sherock, then with Gene Krupa’s band. They married three
weeks later.
Mr.
Sherock later had his own band, which she managed. After they
divorced in 1947, Ms. Bach worked as a radio scriptwriter and then as
a press agent.
In
1948 she married Bob Bach, who was production coordinator for the
television show “What’s My Line?” One member of the show’s
celebrity panel was Arlene
Francis,
whose daily radio show on WOR she produced from 1960 to 1984.
Ms.
Francis’s show, originally broadcast from Sardi’s, the theater
district restaurant, became known for the guests Ms. Bach booked and
who ranged from Leopold Stokowski to Ellington to Carl Sandburg.
In
1997 Ms. Bach directed a second movie, using outtakes from “A Great
Day in Harlem.” In 20 minutes it solved one of the stranger riddles
in jazz history: Did Dizzy Gillespie, in 1941, actually shoot
spitballs onstage at his boss, the bandleader Cab Calloway, who
promptly fired him?
No,
Ms. Bach found. Interviewed for the film,“The
Spitball Story,”the
trumpeter Jonah Jones confessed to having done the deed. The short
won awards at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Newport
International Film Festival and the USA Film Festival.
In
her later years, Ms. Bach, who left no immediate survivors, worked on
a documentary about the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which is
unfinished. It was all part of her mission of finding and preserving
a world that seemed to be fading away in front of her.
Until
six months ago, she was out on the town listening to jazz.
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