Their Sounds Were Watching God

Throughout its cycle of concentric golden eras, stretching from the 1920s to the late ’70s, jazz was as stunning visually as it was aurally. The players’ self-imposed dress codes accented the hipness coded into the music, and the audiences were fashionable, too, fawning, and willing to train their ears to appreciate polyphonic riffing. On-screen, the vibrations coming off the instruments and the glinting metallics of horns and drum rims became pure cinema. The look in the players’ eyes and the cadence in their stances became an element of the jazz sound.