Sounds for Silence: Jazz & Silent Films

Shaun Brady

The little man with the toothbrush moustache and the waddling walk looks familiar, but the scheming Judge Perry finds himself in situations that even Charlie Chaplin’s hapless Little Tramp managed to avoid: fathering a child with a New Orleans prostitute, say, or running afoul of a young Louis Armstrong and his street-urchin friends.

This odd mash-up of 1920s cinema and jazz history is Louis, one of two new films by director Dan Pritzker that take inspiration from the life of mythic trumpeter Buddy Bolden. The first-time filmmaker initially heard of the legendary bandleader in 1995 as “the guy who invented jazz,” and the mystery of his tale became an obsession. “It struck me as a very beautiful and tragic story,” Pritzker says. “In the course of studying Bolden I went to see Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and decided that I wanted to make a companion piece that would be a silent film about a little boy name Louis who wanted to learn how to play the trumpet in New Orleans in 1907.”

A little more than 80 years since the dawn of the talkies, silent films are viewed by most modern audiences as artifacts of a bygone era, as relevant to modern life as horse-drawn carriages or radio plays. But Pritzker’s film was created with Hollywood heavyweights like cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, whose credits include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deliverance and The Deer Hunter. The picture premiered at the end of the summer with a five-city tour featuring live accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis, classical pianist Cecile Licad and a 10-piece jazz ensemble.

It didn’t hurt that Pritzker, also the founder of rock band Sonia Dada, could underwrite the multimillion-dollar budget himself, as the son of Hyatt Hotel chain co-founder Jay Pritzker and a regular entry on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest people in America. But Pritzker is not the only artist combining jazz and silent films; a number of prominent jazz musicians have been composing and performing their own scores in recent years for silent films both classic and contemporary.

Of course, “silent film” has always been something of a misnomer. Even in the earliest days of the “flickers,” film screenings were always accompanied by music. “I think that music and image want to be together,” says Dave Douglas, who founded the band Keystone to perform music written for film. “Sometimes I have the feeling when I’m performing that the visual of us standing there on the stage isn’t really a natural reflection of what I think the music is about. It’s nice to be able to pick images and write music that goes with those images in interesting ways.”

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