INT. BAR, LE BAISER SALE, (THE SALTY KISS) RUE DES LOMBARDS, PARIS - NIGHT
Le Baiser Sale is a Paris jazz club, with a long wooden bar. A pewter bucket of Casablanca lilies stands on the corner of the bar. Black and white jazz performance photographs line the wall behind the bar.
The space is crowded, frenetic with pre-show orders. There is an anticipatory buzz from the crowd, below the LIVE HARMONICA.
A waiter, black vest and bowtie, weaves his way through standing room only, leans over, picks up a beer glass, adds it to the meter-high stack of glasses in the crook of his arm, which curves precariously to one side, but is expertly balanced.
He meanders through the crowd - Excusez-moi! - as people naturally shift to allow him to whizz through the swinging doors of the kitchen. The stack of glasses RATTLE, and the DIN OF THE KITCHEN SEEPS OUT as the doors open and close.
The ambiance is warm, earthy and Parisian - people of all ages, races and origins, from Africa to South America and islands in the Pacific and the tourists, Parisians for a day or two - gather to listen to live music.
WE HEAR APRIL IN PARIS
EXT. LE BAISER SALE, RUE DES LOMBARDS, PARIS - NIGHT
FREEMAN LEE, BILLY BROOKS and BENNY BAILEY are seated at a table outside the club. Wine, beer and cocktail glasses reflect the streetlights.
The trio look the quintessential jazzmen. Billy, however, is unusually diminutive and leans up into the table. They are in animated conversation, much laughter.
AS THE CAMERA APPROACHES, WE HEAR THE WHITE BLUES, SNIPPETS OF NEARBY FRENCH CONVERSATIONS, HEARTY LAUGHTER.
FREEMAN
Look up the definition of jazz in the dictionary. And look up the definition of music, and then improvisation, and see if it applies to it. They say jazz is something to do with the rhythm of "negro" music! (laughs)
BILLY
(laughing)
To do with the rhythm of Negro music? Must be. Maybe the rhythm was ours but the money they made certainly wasn't ours. I mean Louis Armstrong, man oh man, he should have been rich, but uh...
BENNY
(nostalgic)
Yeah man, Freeman, I mean you remember them cats jamming with Big Nick at the Paradise? It seems pretty amazing now looking back. Those sessions were really swingin'! Idrees could cook, Stanley Turrentine was blowing everybody away, Art Farmer could cook...
FREEMAN
I mean, gentlemen, Dave Brubeck and Benny Goodman were supposed to have been king of something or the other! (laughs.) Yeah, Benny Goodman was an excellent clarinet player but, I mean, there were a lot of black cats that could play better than Benny Goodman?!
REACTION Benny and Billy - rhetorical laughter.
And Miles was a black cat, right? And everybody says, "Wow, Miles!" But Miles, as a trumpet player, he wasn't nothing special to us.
Bird gave him a gig, but if Bird hadn't given him a gig, who was going to hire Miles Davis?
I mean you had Kenny Dorham, you got Fats Navarro. You had a bunch of trumpet players that could play better than Miles.
YOU ARE READING
A Jazzman's Tale
RomanceA Jazzman's Tale is a screenplay memoir of bebop trumpeter and pianist Charles Freeman Lee, who is listed in Leonard Feather's Jazz Encyclopedia, as he tries to make it on trumpet in 1950s New York. He falls in love with another jazzman's wife and...
