Add Blue Giant to that big long list of Japanese animes about jazz. Yes, precisely.
It’s a “how we got the band together” story of good-looking Japanese dudes meeting and becoming a tight jazz outfit, but mostly it’s concerned with Dai Miyamoto, a passionate saxophone player who outgrows his small town and so heads for the bright lights of Tokyo once he hits 18. Though everyone tells him that jazz is doomed Dai remains fired up by its possibilities and is on a quest to become “the best jazz musician in the world”.
Once in the big city Dai hooks up with Yukinori Sawabe, a talented pianist, and together they recruit Shunji Tamada as drummer, the old school friend whose hospitality Dai has been abusing by camping out in his apartment. Shunji can’t actually play the drums but since this is jazz no one will notice – joke.
One thing you can say about Blue Giant straight off is that it doesn’t do jokes. Not about the music or anything else. It’s in deadly earnest about jazz, particularly jazz from what you might call the Blue era – Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Blue Train, Thelonious Monk’s Blue Monk. Jazz as a form of play isn’t a concept you’ll find entertained here. So many close-ups of sweat on straining youthful faces.
Instead, as the band find a rehearsal space in a unpopular bar run by a jazz enthusiast, and progress from faltering first steps to slaying every audience that hears them, there’s some space given to the competing virtues of technique and inspiration. Pianist Yukinori has all the moves but it’s Dai who really feels the music in his soul.
The film is an adaptation of a manga by Shinichi Ishizuka and, possibly as a homage to the many American greats of jazz, Dai, Shunji and Yukinori don’t look like the sort of Japanese people you often get in animes. Big-eyed lollipop-headed characters are not to be found here.
The three guys are a boy band, in essence, and it’s possibly to avoid the charge of pop frivolity that director Yuzuru Tachikawa keeps things so serious. Blue Giant‘s earnestness is a bump in the road. On the other hand its lack of cynicism is refreshing. We’ve seen this story a thousand times before but it’s told here with such a directness that it will probably win over a few doubters.
And how often does jazz get the hero treatment in a movie? Miles Ahead (Don Cheadle being remarkable as Miles Davis), Bird (Forest Whitaker ditto as Charlie Parker), Mo’ Better Blues (Denzel as a fictional jazz trumpeter), Whiplash and La La Land spring to mind, but there are not that many.
In case you can’t tell whether the music is meant to be good or bad (like when Shunji is tentatively first paradiddling away on the drums), Tachikawa has a little visual crib sheet. The more groovy and out there the music is meant to be, the more out there the visuals. In the final number as the band pull victory out of the flames of defeat in the film’s climactic gig the screen goes golden, then gooey, then fuzzy and finally psychedelic as the farthest reaches of musicality are visited. 2001: A Jazz Odyssey.
Or that’s what the screen tells us. It all sounded a bit like strings of jazz cliche to these ears, but then jazz is a personal thing… and all that.
Ultimately, and touchingly, it’s a hymn to solidarity and togetherness rather than individual creativity – no troublesome musical differences here – the jazz outfit as a band of brothers. And that’s OK.
Blue Giant – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
