Young Lions and Historical Fictions 1990–2000

The young generation of musicians such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis who shook up jazz in the 1980s arrives on screen in the following decade. Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and the cable-TV movie Lush Life fictionalize successful musicians of the era. Underage players also show up, as in 1940s movies: a teenage Toronto trumpeter gets advice from good and bad mentors in one, and a young pianist grapples with Tourette’s syndrome in another. In the 1990s, we see an outbreak of historical tales with unreliable narrators: a sometimes fanciful biopic of early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and Woody Allen’s extended tall tale Sweet and Lowdown, one of two 1990s films with a guitarist beholden to Django Reinhardt. In several particulars, Robert Altman’s Kansas City parallels his earlier film named for a musicians’ hub, Nashville, but in Kansas City, jazz doesn’t invade the main story.