What to Stream: Great Jazz Movies That Sing

Lena Horne sings in ‘Stormy Weather’ (Everett)

We’re currently living through a mini-be-bop boom of jazz movies. Don Cheadle is starring in theaters now in the jagged portrait of Miles Davis, Miles Ahead, while Ethan Hawke is picking up the horn in Born to Be Blue, playing tragic trumpeter and singer Chet Baker. And later in April, Zoe Saldana will be playing — somewhat controversially — the legendary Nina Simone in the biopic Nina.

Related: ‘Miles Ahead’ Star Don Cheadle On His Anti-Biopic, the Cautionary Tale of ‘Walk Hard’ and the Future of ‘Captain Planet’

Jazz stories offer performers an opportunity to climb musical heights and plumb emotional depths, one driving force behind this current trendlet of musical movies, which also includes Dee Rees’ Emmy-winning Bessie, the 2015 telefilm starring Queen Latifah as singer Bessie Smith. Movies have had a long love affair with jazz — the lifestyle! the music! the dance! — drawing in filmmakers as far-flung as Woody Allen (Sweet and Lowdown) and Spike Lee (Mo’ Better Blues). While we’re on the subject, here are some other, lesser-known favorites that you can watch now:

Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather (1943)

These two all-star musicals have some seriously problematic racial politics. But both are still worth seeing as showcases for the deep bench of African-American talent in the 1940s, at a time when few Hollywood films featured people of color in substantial roles. Cabin is a rollicking spiritual parable directed by Vincente Minnelli and features jazz singer Ethel Waters and comedian Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as a married couple estranged by his gambling and carousing (with a glamorous woman played by Lena Horne). Along the way to reconciliation, Waters warbles “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe” and “Takin’ a Chance on Love,” Anderson sings “That Old Devil Consequence,” Horne trills “Ain’t It the Truth,” and Duke Ellington and his orchestra play the classic “Things Aren’t What They Used to Be” as the crowd jitterbugs.

Watch Horne sing “Stormy Weather:”

Meanwhile Stormy Weather is loosely based on the career of dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson whose love interest is played by Horne. The movie gave the young beauty the title song that became her signature, features the puckish Fats Waller singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and boasts what Fred Astaire considered the greatest movie dance number ever: Fayard and Harold Nicholas tapping to “Jumpin’ Jive” as played by Cab Calloway and his orchestra.

Cabin in the Sky is available on iTunes; Stormy Weather is also available on iTunes.

Watch “Jumpin’ Jive” from ‘Stormy Weather:’



Forest Whitaker in ‘Bird’ (Everett)

Bird (1988)

Miles Davis once said, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.” Saxophone great Parker’s stormy spirit is the subject of Clint Eastwood’s moody, impressionistic biopic Bird (“Yardbird” was Parker’s nickname.) Both cinematographically and figuratively dark, Eastwood’s film frames its subject as Diogenes. This Bird (played by Forest Whitaker) carries a sax rather than a lamp as he searches for an honest sound, shooting heroin to fuel his journey. As biography, the movie is spotty. But as a portrait drawn with cigarette smoke on a nightclub wall, it conveys Parker’s sense of the immateriality of life and the primacy of his music. Added bonus: The scenes where Bird and his wife Chan (Diane Venora) face off are incomparably moving.

Bird is available on iTunes

Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman in ‘Paris Blues’ (Everett)

Paris Blues (1961)

Duke Ellington’s original score animates Paris Blues, Martin Ritt’s double-portrait of American jazzmen. Paul Newman is the expatriate trombonist and Sidney Poitier, the saxophonist — the two have both left the States for the professional and personal freedoms in France. Their chance encounter with tourists Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll throws the lives of all four Americans into confusion as each weighs the importance of love, work, and the fight for civil rights. Louis Armstrong has a cameo as legendary trumpeter Wild Man Moore.

Tragically, Paris Blues is only available on DVD, but there is a version on YouTube.

Doris Day and Kirk Douglas in ‘Young Man With a Horn’ (Everett)

Young Man With a Horn (1950)

Cornet player Leon Bismark Beiderbecke, better known as Bix, is the inspiration for Young Man With a Horn. Michael Curtiz’s film stars Kirk Douglas as the tormented instrumentalist, here named Rick. Juano Hernandez plays his mentor and Hoagy Carmichael (a real-life pal of Beiderbecke’s) plays his friend and bandmate Smoke. While in real-life Beiderbecke was from a prosperous family, here he is an orphan who saves money to buy the cornet in the pawnshop window. Douglas is all intense concentration as Beiderbecke, while Doris Day is sunny as the band singer with a crush on him, and Lauren Bacall plays the femme fatale who snares him and leaves him for a woman. The music (Harry James played the horn for Douglas) is dynamite.

Young Man with a Horn is available on iTunes