Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2009 November 26 • Thursday

Happy Thanksgiving!

All Night Long was a British movie from 1962 that used Shakespeare's Othello as a template for a drama about jazz musicians. Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck appear as themselves (as do other real-life players and composers like Johnny Dankworth, composer of the original, pre-Diana Rigg theme for The Avengers), which makes me wonder about the standard disclaimer, visible in the screen shot above: "All characters and events in the film are fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."

So when Dave Brubeck shows up and everybody says, "Hey, it's Dave Brubeck!" and Brubeck starts to play the piano, it's not meant to be the real Dave Brubeck. It's Dave Brubeck playing a fictitious character named Dave Brubeck, I guess.

Charles Mingus has the first line in the film. He's playing solo bass in a warehouse space owned by Richard Attenborough's character, a wealthy jazz enthusiast.

That's Attenborough drinking a toast with Mingus there. Other players soon show up and jam with Mingus.

Attenborough is also on hand to welcome the arrival of Dave Brubeck.

Then it's Brubeck's turn to play something.

At some point in the second half of the movie, Brubeck and Mingus jam together as a duo.

The Iago character is a drummer named Johnny Cousin, played by Patrick McGoohan.

McGoohan takes an impressive drum solo and is either actually playing the drums rather well or faking it even better.

It's a good movie, handsomely photographed and with the live jazz ingeniously serving as a dramatic underscore when required.

I imagine it was inspired by The Man with the Golden Arm. McGoohan's Johnny Cousin is perhaps a "cousin" of Frank Sinatra's golden-armed man, jazz drummer Johnny Machine.

All Night Long was our forty-fourth Soundtrack of the Week last January when McGoohan passed away.