in "the cry of jazz," why does alex think that jazz is dead?
It begins at the meeting of a mixed race jazz appreciation club conversation explores what jazz in and if only blacks can create jazz music.
Bruce and Natalie again express confusion with the claim that Blacks see America differently than Whites. "Edward Bland’s 1959 documentary The Cry of Jazz is one of the most remarkable films I’ve ever seen.
The conversation becomes a soliloquy as Alex one of the black members explains what jazz is. which incorporates audio, video, news plus much more. It was.
Alex and Louis then assert that slavery and continued racism constitute an erasure of the past, present, and future of Black people in America, and that through music Black people have created a record of their history. When Bruce then asks how Whites fit into this story, Louis and Alex proclaim that what happens to Black people in America concerns Whites because it implicates their morality and humanity. Alex claims that therefore, because jazz cannot grow, it is dead. Jazz plays over shots of Black neighborhoods of Chicago, an attempt to demonstrate the affinity between jazz and Black life. So what we have here is kind of a mix film that doesn’t so much tell a story but explores a wider a reality. When Natalie then asks about the future of jazz, Alex claims that jazz is dead, startling all the characters. The Cry of Jazz is a 1959 documentary film by Ed Bland that connects jazz to African American history. The third segment — in which Alex Johnson shocks the members of the jazz club by saying that jazz is dead and, as he has done all movie, defending that point in a mean, hectoring style that basically says, “I’m right, and if you don’t agree with me 100 percent you’re an idiot and I don’t have to have anything to do with you” (not that different, come to think about it, from the way Right-wing talk radio hosts talk) — … There is another segment of conversation which leads to another soliloquy on why jazz is dead. The film uses footage of Chicago’s black neighborhoods and performances by Sun Ra and others to connect jazz to African American history. Alex, the film's main character, serves as narrator during these sections. And the film is from, I think 1958, is that right?
The spirit of jazz re-mains, but the body of jazz as we knew it is dead. It uses footage of Chicago's black neighborhoods and performances by Sun Ra, John Gilmore, and Julian Priester interspersed with scenes of musicians and intellectuals, both black and white, conversing at a jazz club.
From Alex and Louis's perspective, America must come to celebrate the story of joy and suffering told through jazz, as it is a story that transcends national and ethnic boundaries. As he talks the film shows images of black life and jazz men as they provide a musical background.
Sadly the response to the movie was not warm Bland himself described it this way. Bad music, bad thinking, bad acting, bad writing and bad photography.
The Cry of Jazz is a, controversial, 1959 documentary film by composer Ed Bland. It took several years for them to write the script, and several more to make the film itself. Alex continues to explain jazz as the "triumph of the Negro spirit" over the difficulties Black people face in a racist America.
He links the restrictive form and changes of jazz to this limitation and suffering, and improvisation to an expression of joy and freedom within a restrictive society. A discussion arises concerning what it would take to achieve racial equality in America. Together they formed KHTB Productions, which took its name from the first letter of each person’s last name.