’Round Midnight: Return from Exile

Jazz wasn’t simply on a world tour; it was in exile. Tavernier set out to depict this more complex reality in ’Round Midnight, as well as to do the music itself more justice than he felt Paris Blues had done. As he said in an interview around the time his film came out, his goal was to make “the exact opposite of Paris Blues.” He went on, “It was never clear what style of jazz those musicians were supposed to play . . . From their attitudes and speech, they seemed to be modern musicians, from the bebop generation, yet they worked with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. There was total musical confusion, and that reflected on the characters’ credibility as individuals.”

Tavernier had Dale Turner land in Paris in 1959, a time that in many ways marked the “death” of jazz as it had come to be known, with the literal deaths of Billie Holiday and Lester Young that year. Dale was a composite figure that Tavernier and his coscreenwriter, David Rayfiel, based largely on Young and Powell, two of jazz’s noted improvisers, and part of the film’s story is based on the latter’s relationship with commercial artist Francis Paudras, who documented the friendship in his memoir La danse des infidèles (1986). Dale, like so many of his real-life Black American counterparts, was escaping a music industry that was, as Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. writes in his book The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop, “stark, unglamorous, and undignified.”

’Round Midnight’s fictional Francis Borier, like Paudras, is what we might refer to contemporarily as a “stan”; the image of Francis stooping in the rain, listening through a vent in the wall of a club that he can’t afford to go into, just to capture any shards of the playing of the great Dale Turner, speaks volumes about his admiration for jazz and its practitioners (as well as Tavernier’s, and that of Paudras, from whose book the image was taken). When Francis takes the step of bringing Dale into the home that he shares with his preteen daughter, it represents an ethos of care and devotion—even obsession—rarely experienced by Black jazz musicians in the U.S. This is less an indication of freethinking on the part of the French—note that it was William Gardner Smith who first invoked the term “niggers of France” in describing the treatment of Algerian immigrants in the fifties—than a specific indictment of race politics in the U.S., which had already turned its back on the music and its innovators. As Tavernier said, “I have a love-hate relationship with America, because I admire so many of its artists and reject so many of its values. I have always been attracted to those creators America ignores, underrates, or rejects.”

Tavernier’s casting of Gordon as Dale was genius. Gordon himself had spent the bulk of the period between 1962 and 1976 in Europe (primarily in France and Denmark), and, though he performed and recorded regularly in that time, “many fans, friends, and critics” treated these as “‘lost’ years,” as his biographer and widow, Maxine Gordon, writes in Sophisticated Giant. But more important, Dexter Gordon was a figure who sat between some of jazz’s giants; he was never as famous as saxophone gods like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, did not possess any of the freneticism of Albert Ayler or Pharoah Sanders—whose otherworldly music sounded like music in exile—and was not as accessible to the lay Black audiences who embraced figures like Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and Lou Donaldson, whose music pivoted toward so-called soul jazz. In this way, Gordon exists as a jazz everyman, with so many of what Ramsey describes as the “reliable stereotypes of the self-destructive jazz musician.”

The only thing bigger than the music in the film is Gordon himself. Cutting a figure at six feet five, he literally towers above all else in ’Round Midnight. As Maxine Gordon recalls, “One of the remarkable things about ’Round Midnight is how much improvisation went into the development of the characters and the story line.” That feature of the film was due to the direct input of its lead actor, who, according to Sophisticated Giant, told Tavernier that “the script wasn’t real and the dialogue was not happening . . . I owed it to all the jazz musicians who could have been actors but never got the chance to make a movie.” As film critic Roger Ebert observed at the time, “[Dexter Gordon] is a musician, not an actor, and yet no actor could have given this performance, with its dignity, wisdom, and pain.”

Throughout the film, Francis shoots footage on a Super 8 camera, in effect creating a movie within the movie. The footage is not shown until the end, some years after Dale’s inevitable death. Shot in black and white, and featuring voice-over from Dale, the footage is a visual citation of Stopforbud (1963), a short film by Jørgen Leth, which captures Powell walking and playing in Paris, and which is narrated by Gordon himself. As Ramsey notes about the film, “Together with the narration, the visual setup—the white background, the avoidance of camera . . . makes Powell seem to be some kind of specimen, albeit an exceptional one.” The same can be said about ’Round Midnight; the film leaves ambiguous whether it is delivering a postmortem on a great artistic form—a long-dead one, given the movie’s nostalgic leanings—or shepherding in a new era for a new generation of listeners.