Great Acid Shorts: BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929)

You can draw a thin but prominent line after a certain moment in jazz history, and the early-sound Duke Ellington short BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929) could be the pen. It marks the moment jazz split into sanitized radio 'sweet' music ala Benny Goodman or "the old Maestro" on one hand, and the delirious forward-thinking danger of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives on the other. It's the line that separates uptown Manhattan from gritty swingin' Harlem, back in the day when the thing to do was get drunk and dance sweetly in midtown until around midnight, then jet up to Harlem and watch agog, through a haze of reefer smoke, as black artists strut, shimmied and blew the roof off. And in between those two lines, the point of that pen - was Duke Ellington.

Using the big band format to craft elaborate, beautiful, wistful, dark, surreal and elegant yet raw and bluesy compositions that sound fresh and new to this day, he was--especially in the 20s/early 30s (Prohibition made it all so urgent)--supernatural. He'd later become polished and institutional. But back in the late 20s he's like a fancy ship that starts out slow and sweet and is soon taking you to strange lands between life and death.

Duke's first film appearance, Black and Tan Fantasy  reflects this mix of surrealism, existential openness and social commentary. Floating elegantly by in 20 minutes or so, it begins as a piano rehearsal set around an almost-repossessed piano and--after a bit of comedy with a bottle of gin and some piano repossessors--segues into dance numbers on the Cotton Club stage and the lead female dancer, physically and spiritually exhausted, killing herself, Red Shoes-style, in a drugged-out shimmy. Finally she lays dying in a shadowy backstage dressing room. As her last request, she asks that the band, gathered around her like a mix of angels, coffin-bearers and an AA intervention, play "that Black and Tan." This becomes a bedside serenade, kind of like the dwarfs singing to comatose Snow White (the Disney film was still some eight years off, but the Betty Boop version (with fellow Cotton Clubber Cab Calloway singing "St. James Infirmary" as a rotoscoped ghost) was only 4 years off and is even more psychedelic than either, which says a lot about how DMT-enriched fairy tales used to be. 

Alas, most of the versions available online are just the music segments edited together, so you miss the drama of Duke, his dancer Fredi Washington (above) and his trumpeter (Arthur Whetsol) bribing the collection agency piano movers with a quart of bootleg gin. And you miss the backstage drama of the doctor warning Fredi not to dance because of a heart condition, and you miss her psychedelic collapse, but the more complete version can be found in a highly-recommended Kino compilation.

Alongside his fellow masters of Harlem Armstrong and Waller, Ellington's is the perfect music to wind down with after a long crazy night of psychedelic colors and angry inner demons devouring the soul. But while Armstrong focuses on the cheery and fun side of the psychedelic abyss, and Waller the playful trickster flirty side, Duke never shies from plunging down into the obsidian oval with you, wrapping you  up with him and his band in a warm blanket of opiates and starlight, and you're glad for the company, because when it comes to locating the redeeming angel of mercy buried somewhere in the vast core of the dark and lonesome blues, Duke is a magic bloodhound.

The film also offers a rare and precious glimpse of the kind of stuff white patrons would see at the Cotton Club, where the Duke often held court and lithe black Venus-style flappers gyrated in a manner that might be too shocking even for pre-code Hollywood. But Harlem was Harlem, and in this marvelous little 20 minute film, you see just why it mattered, and still should.

Standing at the dawn of the sound age with few surviving peers, BLACK AND TAN FANTASY still crackles with weird, lysergic power. That muted trumpet in the beginning can light up your spine like a Kundalini serpent if you're chemically open to it, so open up! As they used to say at prohibition era parties when the guy arrived with the suitcase full of bootleg bottles, "that man is here!"

Acid Shorts #1: Betty Boop in SNOW WHITE (1933)

In true reefer-smoking, laudanum-quaffing Paramount pre-code glory, everything in the 1933 Betty Boop short SNOW WHITE is alive and wriggling and--best of all--swathed in the groovy music of Cab Calloway and his Orchestra. If you've ever wanted to see Cab peel of his skin and dance around like a ghost, scatting and hi-de-hoing into all sorts of pretzel medallion shapes (as above), this is it.

Betty was always great to "come down to" after a lysergic night on the town. Utterly bizarre, yet warmly comforting, all the trappings of a Saturday morning cartoon childhood were there coupled to racy 1930s jazz and "adult" Dali-esque symbolism. Even so,  the old Boop tapes we could find skipped the wilder stuff like SNOW WHITE and we had to search high and low. Lucky for all of us, now the Boops are on youtube!

Regular musical guests in the land of Betty, Cab Calloway and his orchestra were perfect foils to the squiggly shapes and (literally and figuratively) loopy adventures of the saucily under-garbed Betty, her dog Bimbo and the frighteningly balloon-like Koko the clown, with Cab's wild vowel extensions "WhooooaaaooH" finding perfect expression in Fleischer's expanding and contracting shapes. Accompanied by swirling phantasm chorus in the hell/underground/uptown jazz joint, the Mystery Cave, wherein Cab sings "Saint James Infirmary," with plenty of that dynamite "Hi de Ho", his lanky white tuxedo-ed frame rotoscoped into the figure of a twirling dancing ghost with improbably long legs,

As we now know, Harlem in the 1930s was a very cool and artistically happening place, and the hipsters in the white downtown spots all knew it --the intellectuals, long-hairs, bohemians, musicologists, anyone with a pulse, Harlem was a sacredly profane initiation rite to these white cats, akin to mystery initiation rituals of ancient Greece, usually undertaken late at night after downtown joints closed and the courage was up--for here art and life was far more vivid, with a mix of frenzy and precision that eluded white culture (hence the constant co-opting). Orson Welles did his Voodoo Macbeth and the Cotton Club music was so hot it made the rest of the city's orchestras seems to be in slurry comas. The Fleischer brothers, two very hip Jewish cartoonists, made the pilgrimage regularly and their culture shock-amped awe comes through SNOW WHITE at the Mystery Cave. Here life and death mix together in a ghoulish romp, with Boop encased in ice as a temple sacrifice while Cab and his bone orchestra whoops and struts and xylophones their ribs. Capturing the sense of giddy 'safe' cultural danger into a cartoon, bringing Cab and co. down to their midtown animation studio and recording and rotoscoping Cab's indelible saunter, the Fleischer's SNOW WHITE becomes one far-out pinnacle in pre-code cartoon jazz surrealism, taking the 'danger' exotica element of the white experience in black Harlem, and swings it all the way around so that there's no black or white anymore at all, the skins are long gooooaaoone.

say boy, hand me up another shot of that boooo-ooooze

Seen today, it behooves one to keep these historical details in mind, for they add to the cartoon's mythic and historical resonance. However, none of that is ultimately needed to dig the craziness for what it is. All you need bring with you is the realization that Miss B's magical universe is the perfect code cover for transgressions made under the ruling elite's very noses. Kids could watch it and just dig the slapstick, squares might just think it a lot of imaginative kiddie nonsense, but the "awake" hep cats up on 110th Street or down in the Village could dig how far gone the Fleischers were, doing their thing and capturing like few others the way death's presence represented memento mori (to contrast frenzied life with), frozen beauties (all the better to contrast cozy warmth with), dancing ghosts (to contrast frozen living squares with), and 'race' artistry at its wildest and most infectious. Swirled together it all affirmed life in itself, beyond the sickly sentiment of 'sweet' music played in midtown or under Disney's west coast cutesy pie critters.

Working all day with pen and ink / to win you with a wink / aint she cute / boop boop be doop / then trucking up to the Cotton Club to scope out new bands for the cartoon soundtracks, not lily-white crooners (though sometimes there were those too) but the real jumpin' jive swing of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong... that's kind of what it's all about, isn't it? Wake up, sleepy cats its four o-clock in the morning and your pupils are still big as Cab's ghost mouth in full "Ooooooo"! Just check them in the mirror and see, but then get the pre-code Boops up on your box and all is going to be all nice. Forever. To the boooones! (Find it on youtube here)