Reel Jazz! Kevin Whitehead Dissects 93 Years of Jazz Films

–The 1947 film New Orleans altered jazz history by inspiring Louis Armstrong to form his small-group All-Stars, a format he maintained for the rest of his life. –Cornetist Warren Vaché Jr. coached and ghosted Richard Gere, brassy star of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club in 1984. –The Gene Krupa Story was the most sexually frank of all the 1950s jazz biopics, but viewers never hear about the drummer’s African-American inspirations, Baby Dodds and Chick Webb. Those are just three of thousands of fascinating tidbits found in a new book by Maryland-based jazz scholar Kevin Whitehead. Although best known as jazz critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Whitehead has also reviewed movies for Baltimore’s weekly City Paper and a daily, The Baltimore Sun. His new book published by Oxford University Press connects his two lifelong passions, jazz and motion pictures. Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film addresses this central question: How do movies tell stories about jazz and jazz musicians? “Not just what they get right, or wrong,” Whitehead writes in the introduction, “but how they tell it: jazzy, or not? And if so, how is that jazziness conveyed? Play the Way You Feel is partly about jazz movies as a narrative tradition with recurring plot points and story tropes, and we will trace their spread not just through the best-know