INDEX
The Selection of Artie Shaw: Exploring the Choice
If we delve further into this episode from the perspective of racial issues, the question arises as to why Curtis’s favorite big band jazz leader was not a “compatriot” like Count Basie or Duke Ellington. While I know I should refrain from going too far, if I may use an analogy, I think it is because the problem consciousness of director Payne himself (and the music team, including Orton) is engraved here, rather than the character of Curtis.
In 1938, Shaw became the first white band to recruit an Afro-American woman, Billie Holiday, as a singer. Billie Holiday as a singer and toured the U.S. South. However, under the Jim Crow laws of the South, where strong discrimination was rampant, Holliday was subjected to intense ill will, and despite Shaw’s efforts to have her treated equally with the white members, she was forced to leave the band at the behest of the industry. Strange Fruit,” a song in her repertoire recorded in 1939 and known for its bitter protest against racial discrimination, was indeed recorded after the experience described above.
Described by Holliday as a fighter against the vulgar “norms” of the music industry of his day, Artie Shaw was a man who took a firm stand against unfair discrimination and, according to numerous anecdotes, was an honorable man who would not bend, or to put it another way, a very difficult man. He was also a man of literature and the arts in general. Moreover, he was a man with extensive knowledge of literature, the arts, academics, and science. In other words, he was quite similar to Dr. Paul Hannam, the main character in the film “Holdovers: Holiday Without Me.
Dr. Hannam, in turn, is portrayed as someone who is aware of the problem of racism, albeit not in an overt way. In one scene, shortly after Christmas vacation, Hannam asks Mary to join him and his friends at the dinner table. Mary politely declines and leaves the scene, but Kunz, the school’s baddest boy, scolds her, saying that it is foolish to invite a servant to join her at the table out of sympathy for the loss of her son in the war. Dr. Hannam rebukes Kunz with a fiercer tone than ever before.
