Jazz is America’s quintessential music, as well as one of its most globally influential cultural expressions. Yet, because jazz has always been—paradoxically—as subcultural as it is popular, the music has also consistently defied efforts to capture its essence, milieu, dynamics, and quicksilver magic effectively in the mainstream medium of movies.

Although cinema and jazz were born at roughly the same time—and while jazz has played an ongoing role in Hollywood since the beginnings of synchronized-sound technology—film and jazz, despite being the most iconic American cultural products of the 20th century, have often appeared to be two art forms at odds with one another.

Tim A. Ryan, professor of English at Northern Illinois University, surveys the history of jazz on film and assesses the challenges of dramatizing jazz in film, from short “soundies” to feature-length narratives, from the classic golden age of the major studios to the fragmented ecology of the 21st century, and from popular American cinema to European art films.

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