Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film

NPR jazz critic Kevin Whitehead frames his intended goals in writing Play the Way You Feel as “partly about jazz movies as a narrative tradition with recurring plot points and story tropes” (p. ix) as well as “how jazz and its people are regarded in American culture and how filmmakers depict jazz subculture” (p. xi). With a primarily chronological organization that works its way from the 1920s to the present in topical chapters, such as “Origin Stories,” “Suffering Artists,” and “The Jazz Musician (and Fan) as Character,” the book is written as a guide for a jazz-loving but not necessarily academic audience. The deep knowledge of jazz film history in America Whitehead offers is impressive, but those topical threads prove difficult to track over 350 pages of prose for both scholar and layperson alike. The book’s strength resides in the detailed knowledge Whitehead provides about the individual films on which his book focuses. Many of the films covered, particularly those from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, are either obscure or lesser known. Whitehead’s topics focus on the flaws and failings of the films’ content, but his approach foregrounds their positive traits—or at least those elements worthy of a second look. This decidedly “kleinmeister” approach to music history, in which unknown works are highlighted as worthy of scholarly attention, is well-known in the musicological discourse, and this book would have benefited from addressing head-on the shortcomings of that approach. Yet it is Whitehead’s treatment of film narrative that prevents the book from negotiating any larger considerations of his stated goals: “jazz movies as narrative tradition” or “how filmmakers depict jazz subculture.” Whitehead’s discussions of individual films offer play-by-play walkthroughs of the plot with occasional statements that nod to larger issues. He prioritizes detailed narrative summary over analysis. For example, in his discussion of St Louis Blues (1929), Whitehead states that “St. Louis Blues is a male director’s woman’s picture; the heroine suffers for our entertainment” (p. 7). Whitehead never explains what he means, nor does he thread that connection, tying it to later discussions. This specific point itself is buried in the middle of a paragraph and is situated as more offhand, unsupported aside than analysis. This approach to narrative summaries proves difficult to follow throughout the book. Whitehead is most concerned with the process of film adaptation and accuracy: what details from a jazz performer’s life were excised, changed, or chronologically compressed to fit the film narrative. Whitehead peppers his text with anecdotes and offhand observations in search of a larger, unifying argument. Similarly, he occasionally draws connections between narrative, cinematography, and other elements of a production’s mis-en-scène. But he fails to link them as part of the larger arguments he frames in the introduction. Especially in the later chapters, Whitehead jumps from detail to detail, when topic sentences would have helped the reader understand why those details are compelling or important. Snippets of dialogue from the selected films are occasionally