Jazz In Film

The Cool World

The Director: Shirley Clarke

The Writers: Shirley Clarke, Carl Lee, Warren Miller and Robert Rossen

The Actors: Rony Clanton, Carl Lee, Yolanda Rodriguez, Clarence Williams III, and Gloria Foster

The Music: The soundtrack of abstract jazz colorings was never officially released, however, this Dizzy Gillespie re-recording is the next best thing.

The Story: This 1964 film is a powerful, stark semi-documentary look at the horrors of Harlem ghetto slum life filled with drugs, violence, human misery and a sense of despair due to the racial prejudices of American society. There is no patronizing of the black race in this cinematic cry for justice. A fifteen-year-old boy called Duke is ambitious to buy a “piece” (a gun) from an adult racketeer named Priest, to become president of the gang to which he belongs, and to return them to active “bopping” (gang fighting) which has declined in Harlem. It is a clearly patent allegory of an attempt by Duke to attain manhood and identity in the only way accessible to him – the antisocial one.

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