Shadows - John Cassavetes’ experimental film Shadows tackled issues Hollywood would never have done at the time and was developed by Cassavetes in a venture which he saw as an “improvisation”. Selwyn Harris relates the film’s difficult birth and the curious case of Charles Mingus and a bunch of felines

“There were no more excuses. If he could do it so could we.” That was Martin Scorsese speaking about John Cassavetes whose directorial debut Shadows (1959) evoked the realism of the New York streets inhabited by a new restless beat-jazz generation, and achieved a landmark in American film for its cinema verité style. The film’s DIY approach went totally against the grain of Hollywood filmmaking up until that point. Cassavetes raised funds for the film on a radio show Night People, the presenter Jean Shepherd asking listeners to support a film about ordinary people rarely seen before in Hollywood movies. Being an admirer of the documentary style of the post-war Italian neo-realism movement, Cassavetes shot on 16mm film with a hand-held camera loaned to him by director Shirley Clarke who later made the excellent druggy jazz docu-feature, The Connection (1961) (Jazzwise 83). Shadow’s release coincided with Jean Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave release A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (Jazzwise 64) sharing techniques such as jump cut editing and naturalistic camerawork. Cassavetes used unknown actors from his workshop (shrewdly instructing them to keep their own names on-screen) to develop character rather than plot. Filmed mostly on location in the streets, apartments and bars of New York, Shadows isn’t just experiment for the sake of experiment; its characters reflect the ambiguity in the air at a vital turning point in urban youth culture at the end of the 1950s.

The score features the Charles Mingus ensemble of the period: pianist Horace Parlan, (and Phineas Newborn) trombonist Jimmy Knepper, and drummer Danny Richmond. But it’s the streams of conscious-type monologues by the double bassist and more significantly his tenor saxophone sideman of the time, Shafi Hadi that characterise the score. A year before saw the release of French director Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold with Miles Davis’ improvised score so the trumpeter was a more obvious candidate for Shadows. However, it wasn’t to be, as Cassavetes would later comment: “In those days we were…very pure. At first we were going to use Miles Davis but then he signed to Columbia Records and I got so angry I didn’t want to use him”. It may have in fact also been that Miles came at a price that would have stripped Cassavetes’ shoestring film budget. But when Cassavetes was asked to check out a bandleader/double bassist playing in Greenwich Village, he realised he had the perfect solution. Indeed the Manhattan underground milieu and the theme of racial identity in Shadows were subjects close to Mingus’ heart. However Mingus being Mingus, things didn’t quite go as planned. The following anecdote told by Cassavetes presages Mingus’ eventual lack of cooperation when asked by Cassavetes to improvise the entire score in three hours.

“So Charlie said ‘Listen, man… I’ll do it for you but you have got to do something for me’. Sure, sure I say. ‘Listen I’ve got all these cats that are shitting all over the floor. Can you have a couple of your people come up and clean the cat shit? I can’t work; they shit all over my music.’ So we went up with scrubbing brushes and cleaned up the thing. Now he says ‘I can’t work in this place. It’s so clean. I’ve got to wait for the cats to shit’.”

At any rate, Mingus produced very little music, either written or improvised. The director however did later reflect on a deep connection between them: ‘He was always torn between the two – the mathematical beauty of the composition and the freedom of improvisation. We had the same kind of fury…”
 
This feature is taken from Jazzwise Issue Number 108 - to read the full feature subscribe here and receive a free CD.