Some things never change: from Broadway, you’ve gotta head downtown (or way further uptown) to hear the real thing.Įqually deflated are Seb’s real-life counterparts - who do exist, though they’re the exception, not the rule. The jazz/musical link also means that there’s strong historical grounding for Chazelle’s product - a musical spotlighting jazz, in which The Music Itself is secondary to the central narrative. Whether he likes it or not, Seb’s a song-and-dance man, which helps deflate his self-importance and snobbishness from the jump (to both Mia, Emma Stone’s character, and the audience).
Seb likely adores John Coltrane’s seminal version of “My Favorite Things” and abhors the original Sound of Music version, but here he is trying to be the next Gene Kelly. Images of Coltrane throughout La La Land signal Seb’s hypocrisy: here’s a man loathe to ever do the same thing twice, much less rehash musical history note for note or (shudder) be part of a Hollywood musical. This relationship means portraying Seb - a self-described jazz purist who chafes at crowd-pleasing - via the extra-cheese sound and aesthetic of musical theater creates a pleasant irony. Listen to the Hollywood and Coltrane versions of each below. It’s widely seen as a breakthrough moment for Coltrane, bringing him both new popularity (partially because of the familiar song choice) and critical renown, thanks to his almost-unrecognizable modal reinvention of the Rodgers & Hammerstein tune and use of the soprano saxophone.Īll four songs on the release are originally from a musical (or in the case of “Summertime,” an opera), and two had already been on the big screen: “Summertime” (Otto Preminger’s now-lost 1959 MGM version of Porgy and Bess) and “But Not For Me” (the 1943 MGM version of Girl Crazy). The title track is a reinvention of The Sound of Music classic, which at the time was just two years old (to compare, jazz musicians today are already putting their own spin on songs from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly). Take, for example, John Coltrane’s seminal 1961 album My Favorite Things. “I just wanted to get at that a little bit.” It’s a part of American history that Chazelle explicitly wanted to spotlight: “ had sort of a conjoined birth,” he told New York Magazine in December. It was only as musicians began to tinker with (and eventually subvert) those songs that the genres grew apart. In the era of those early musicals, jazz and pop were more or less one, which meant the songs they produced were simply hits that musicians across genres would be compelled to perform. The hundreds of musicals that soon followed, from the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy (1930) to the groundbreaking Stormy Weather (1943) to basically the entire Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers oeuvre, created what’s now known as the Great American Songbook.
With that first “talkie” came the first movie-assisted jazz standard, the Irving Berlin-penned “Blue Skies.” Jazz and musicals have been tied since the very first feature-length “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), which starred then-megastar Al Jolson as a Jewish immigrant trying to make it as a jazz singer (both in the film and outside of it, Jolson performed in blackface - the film was loosely autobiographical). The perverse thing, though, is that those same problematic musicals are actually an essential part of jazz history. 2 on Billboard 200 Chart, Weeknd Spends Third Week at No.