Reinventing Bird: The Evolving Image of Charlie Parker on Film (Critical Essay‪)‬

Despite Hollywood, jazz cannot be adequately portrayed nor adequately described. For to describe it contains it and it cannot be contained. Certainly not by the four sides of a picture's frame. Jazz cannot be contained. It flies free. (Spence 43) Despite his descent into hyperbole, Kenneth Spence does remind us that the relationship between jazz and the cinema has often been contentious. When Spence's essay appeared in Film Comment in 1988, many hoped that the end of the century would yield better fortunes for the jazz film, a moment marked by the arrival of major Hollywood productions such as Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood's Bird (1988). However, the reality was that many of the conventions of the jazz biopic outlined by Spence were all too familiar in the late 1980s:/p pre Set up the creative artistic genius as