The Critics AgreeJumpin’ Jive is the coolest thing you will see all year. I know that you don’t want your year to peak in January, but a part of your soul will regret it if you miss this show.
Tuesday night, 8PM at Southpaw. Southpaw is at 125 5th Avenue, between Sterling and St. Johns (Park Slope).
You don’t have to just trust me anymore.
The Village Voice has featured Jumpin’ Jive twice. First as an item by Jim Hanas in last week’s Tear Sheet (which is not, for some reason, online):
In this digitized, TiVoized world, its easy to think nothing falls through the cracks—that every mechanically captured moment has been tucked away for convenient on-demand retrieval—but things do get lost. The shelf-lined Jackson Heights apartment of film-video archivist Russell Scholl serves as a reminder. Scholl, who has been collecting rare footage for two decades, will screen some of these ephemeral bon-bons Tuesday January 25th at 8PM at Brooklyn’s Southpaw. Presented by Stay Free! Magazine, Scholl’s Jumpin’ Jive: Music Shorts Before the MTV Era is a selection of Jazz, Pop, and novelty shorts pulled from the collector’s cache. Jumpin Jive features Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s famous “step dance” as well as Roy Smeck’s impression of the same on his ukulele. Plus rare footage of Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and Dorothy Dandridge, who appears in the 1942 song-and-dance short titled “Zoot Suit."
Second as a listing in NYC Guide. Douglas Wolk describes it as “a selection of red-hot jazz, gospel, and honky-tonk clips.” Red-hot is right.
Finally, Time Out New York—which for some reason has also not put its Jumpin’ Jive review online (I’m starting to sense a Manhattan-based conspiracy)—wrote:
Make no mistake about it; these clips—drawn mostly from the 20s, 30s, and 40s and compiled by local film archivist Russell Scholl—represent some of the most wildly gratifying American entertainment ever committed to film.
Not to mention that I get to face the crowd at the end of the night. We have one copy left of the publicity preview DVD that we sent to various press outlets (like, say, The Village Voice and Time Out New York). I am going to be auctioning it off.
Seriously, it is the coolest thing you will see all year. I know that you don’t want your year to peak in January, but a part of your soul will regret it if you miss this show. Tuesday night, 8PM at Southpaw. Southpaw is at 125 5th Avenue, between Sterling and St. Johns (Park Slope).
