Drawn by the promise of seeing a young Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday on film, doing what they were best known for, we watched New Orleans last night, a 1947 film directed by Arthur Lubin.  According to an essay included on the CD, it was the result of an Orson Welles initiative, though it morphed through several stages before the final cut. What great music!  And to see both Holiday and Armstrong in speaking roles –Louis acting as cupid near the end– was a real treat.

The generous helpings of music were wrapped in a story, of course, but one set up in support of the essential message: jazz can sell itself if released from prejudice and allowed to swing.

It’s easy enough to roll our eyes today at the story. A stunning white debutante, classical singer, Dorothy Patrick as Marilee Smith, comes to New Orleans to make her musical debut. She hears her mother’s maid, Billie Holiday (Endie) sneaking in some time at the piano and singing and is immediately struck by the music.  Resisting her mother’s disapproval she makes Endie take her to Basin Street where she  joins her fiance, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, for a night of singing. And do they sing!  Merilee is captivated by the music, and nonplussed to find her very correct classical conductor there, digging it as well.  In short order she falls in love with the owner of the club, Mexican film star Arturo De Cordova as Nick Duquesne.

The club is a double stand-in for society at large.  Dark, down at the heels and candle lit the jazz club is for people of color.  A car ride through Story Town shows elegantly dressed street corner hookers and drunken WW I sailors and soldiers enjoying the offerings.  But through a door is an extravagant, high-rolling casino blazing with lights, where the wealthy and well placed of New Orleans come for an evening’s dissipation — including Merilee’s millionaire mom, and the local newspaper scold.

Mrs. Smith is so determined to keep her daughter away from the clutches of jazz and the gambler Duquesne she tries to buy him off.  Failing that — Duquesne is the most stand-up gambling impresario ever seen on film —  a scandal and a drunken death to bad girl Marjorie Lord as Grace Voiselle gets Story Town closed down.  Duquesne and all the musicians scatter far and wide, after a marvelous, mournful march led by Armstrong and his whole band as the lights go out on Basin Street.  Marilee, convinced that Duquesne has sold her out,  and her mother sail to Europe and a great classical vocal career.

The years go by and Duquesne leaves the gambling life and finds his new role in Chicago as a jazz producer.  Armstrong and all the jazz greats eventually find their way there.  Under Duquesne’s benevolent business sense they set about capturing the American ear and loosening up the pre-war Victorian stiffness. Music is to dance to!  Woody Herman takes the country by storm.  [There is a funny send up of Duquesne’s not so bright competitor with Herman himself riffing on the clarinet.] Before you know it, Marilee and Nick are reunited.  Her mother has been won over to the joys of jazz and Woody Herman is playing at Carnegie Hall.

It’s all typically starry eyed Hollywood stuff and might make us squirm a bit in 2010.  We don’t like to see Billie Holiday portrayed as a maid and being ordered around by an imperious grand dame.  But in fact the movie was created and distributed in 1947.  President Truman’s order to desegregate the military was a year away. Billie may not have been a maid but thousands of talented black women were.  It may make us uneasy to see a white man (even if Mexican) as the owner of a club where blacks were the patrons, entertainers, cooks and waiters but that was most often the case in the big cities around the country of the time.  The famed Cotton Club in Harlem [closed in 1940]  was owned and run by whites for a whites only crowd to see the top negro performers of the day. It may seem odd to make a movie big deal about whites being necessary to bring  jazz into the mainstream — but so it was.  It may have been because a growing cadre of promoters saw profits in the “new” music as the economy and culture picked up speed after the war; they weren’t all big hearted soulful cats like Duquesne. Nevertheless, it was as it was.  And it took women like Merilee Smith, rebellious enough to push against family and tradition, to walk into the forbidden and appreciate “the other,” to help make the case for the music and the people who created it.   The spread of jazz was one of the many changes that made possible the more tolerant and wide open world we live in today.

I say, cast aside your modern eyes and ears.  Don’t be deaf because of what we now disapprove.  Step back to 1947 and enjoy New Orleans for what it brings — a far too scarce look at some musical greats and a pivot point in American life.