Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema

by Krin Gabbard

American cinema has long been fascinated by jazz and jazz musicians. Yet most jazz films aren't really about jazz. Rather, as Krin Gabbard shows, they create images of racial and sexual identity, many of which have become inseparable from popular notions of the music itself. In Jammin' at the Margins, Gabbard scrutinizes these films, exploring the fundamental obsessions that American culture has brought to jazz in the cinema.

Gabbard's close look at jazz film biographies, from The Jazz Singer to Bird, reveals Hollywood's reluctance to acknowledge black subjectivity. Black and even white jazz artists have become vehicles for familiar Hollywood conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. Even Scorsese's New York, New York and Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues have failed to disentangle themselves from entrenched stereotypes and conventions.

Gabbard also examines Hollywood's confrontation with jazz as an elite art form, and the role of the jazz trumpet as a crucial signifier of masculinity. Finally, he considers the acting careers of Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Hoagy Carmichael; Duke Ellington's extraordinary work in films from 1929 until the late 1960s; and the forgotten career of Kay Kyser, star of nine Hollywood films and leader of a popular swing band.

This insightful look at the marriage of jazz and film is a major contribution to film, jazz, and cultural studies.

Genres: Jazz

357 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1996

About the author

Krin Gabbard is a “come-back” trumpet-player even though he spends most of his time writing books and teaching classes about movies. In recent years, most of his writing has been about jazz. He was born in 1948 in Charleston, a small town in East Central Illinois. He spent the first eighteen years of his life in Charleston, the home of Eastern Illinois University, where both his parents taught. At the University of Chicago, Krin was not skilled enough to play trumpet with the Art Ensemble of Chicago (which actually held auditions at the university), and the local rock bands had no need for trumpets. Mostly he read old books and acted in a few plays. After graduating with a B.A. from Chicago in 1970, Krin went to Indiana University where he took graduate degrees in Classics and Comparative Literature. He also hosted a weekly radio program devoted to the music of Duke Ellington. In 1973, he met and fell in love with Paula Beversdorf. They have been married ever since.

In 1981, he began teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. Krin has taught many different courses at Stony Brook, everything from ancient Greek literature to a seminar on Miles Davis. Mostly, however, he has taught cinema studies. His first three books grew out of his interest in film.

As a child, Krin played the cornet in the school band, but he gave it up in college. Thirty-seven years later he bought a new trumpet and began taking lessons. His most recent book, Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture (2008), describes his new life as an amateur trumpet-player. The book also gives a history of the trumpet from ancient Egypt to the present, with special attention to the African American jazz artists who transformed the instrument in the twentieth century.

Krin and Paula live on the Upper West Side of New York City and occasionally find time to go to a movie or a jazz club.