The Great Woman Behind ‘A Great Day’
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When she began work on “A Great Day in Harlem,” Jean Bach was as inexperienced a movie director as Art Kane had been as a photographer when he shot his famous photo. In her long career, Ms. Bach had been a journalist and a radio producer, but was primarily known for knowing – and being adored by – just about every major musician in the jazz world, from Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie to Bobby Short
Her associations only began with her husbands, the big band trumpeter Shorty Sherock and the once famous New York deejay Bob Bach. The jazz singer Annie Ross once told me it was Ms. Bach who introduced her to Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks. Only Ms. Bach could have rounded up so many participants of the original shooting, simply because they were, for the most part, her close friends.
Ms. Bach and her longtime companion, Charlie Graham, conceived the project when they realized several musicians were amateur photographers themselves, and that many alternate shots existed. Over the next six years, she organized as much material and as many living partici pants as she could.
The documentary she put together, which was eventually released in 1994, was so successful – it was even nominated for an Oscar – that in 1998, Life magazine hired African-American photographer Gordon Parks to restage the original photo with the dozen or so original participants then still living. In 2000, Woodford Press released “The Great Jazz Day” by Mr. Graham and Dan Morgenstern, an oversize book that grew out of the film and for the first time published many of the alternate shots in print form.
In 2005, only a handful of these figures are still with us: Benny Golson, Marian McPartland, Sonny Rollins, Johnny Griffin, Hank Jones, Horace Silver. When they are gone, snippets such as Horace Silver talking about how he tried to replicate Lester Young’s tenor solos as a child (who even knew that Mr. Silver, one of jazz’s most formidable pianists, played sax?) or Mr. Rollins describing how hearing Coleman Hawkins made him want to play the saxophone, will only make Ms. Bach’s creation seem more valuable.
