“Beginning in 1985 and concluding in August, 1988, award-winning filmmaker Richard Broadman … recorded live performances and in-depth interviews”
Whether you have or haven’t already seen A Place for Jazz, the 1992 doc about the 1369 Jazz Club in Cambridge, this is a great rare opportunity.
(Note: you probably haven’t seen it, we know, but you get what we’re saying.)
On August 12 at ZuZu, the evening will “open with a set by today’s marvelous Boston jazz musicians continuing the improvised tradition” including two players—Charlie Kohlhase (multi-saxophones) and John Lockwood (bass)—who “performed in that original 1369 club!”
They’ll be joined by Luther Gray on drums and Ellwood Epps on trumpet.
And then, the Creative Music Series (CMS) will show the “historic documentary about the 1369 Jazz Club, circa 1980s.”
More from a media release below:
1369 Jazz Club closed in August, 1988, existing between 1984 and 1988.
Featuring an unlikely combination of epoch jazz artists (e.g. Johnny Griffin, Joe Lovano, Branford Marsalis, Archie Shepp, Ricky Ford, John Medesky, and Henry Threadgill), a cult rock band (The Shy Five), poetry nights, and a lines-around-the-corner Sunday blues jam session, the 1369 drew audiences as unlikely in their diversity as the music they came to hear. Seated among the faithful might be professional athletes (Bill Walton), musicians ( Hubert Sumlin, Gunther Schuller, Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey, Pat Metheny, George Thorogood) bikers, comedians (Stephen Wright, Jimmy Tingle, Lenny Clarke, Steve Sweeney), dancers (Jimmy Slyde), corporate leaders, academics, and movie stars (Diane Keaton, Liam Neeson, Leonard Nimoy).
“A Place for Jazz” was filmed over the course of three years. Beginning in 1985 and concluding in August, 1988, award-winning filmmaker Richard Broadman, cameraman / assistant producer, John Bishop, and Harvard University Jazz Program director Michael Haggerty, recorded live performances and in-depth interviews with local musicians, club staff, audience members, and some of the most important Jazz artists of the time. Among those interviewed and performing live are Joe Lovanno, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Henry Threadgill, Mel Lewis, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Andrew Cyrille, Kenny Werner, Ricky Ford, and Fred Hopkins.
Following a premiere in Cambridge at the Brattle Theater in the spring of 1991, A Place for Jazz played to favorable reviews at Canada’s Montreal Jazz Festival, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Festival. While the movie demonstrated it’s artistic, historical, and commercial promise, owing to filmmaker Richard Broadman’s untimely passing, distribution and licensing agreements were never completed and/or eventually lapsed.
Over the 21 years since its original theatrical release, the message of the movie – that there needs to be a place for America’s classical music, seems both prescient and timely. It is the hope and objective of the producers of the film, the friends and family of filmmaker Richard Broadman.
Dig Staff means this article was a collaborative effort. Teamwork, as we like to call it.
