A Night in Havana: Dizzy Gillespie in Cuba

In the 1940s, Dizzy Gillespie helped birth bebop: syncopated, improvisational riffs on jazz standards. John Holland's A Night in Havana is a bebop documentary in both substance and feel. Ostensibly, it trails jazz pioneer Gillespie in 1985 as he journeys to Cuba for the first time in over 30 years to headline the Fifth International Jazz Festival in Havana, and it can be seen as Gillespie coming full circle; collaborating with Chano Pozo, the jazz trumpeter who was one of the first to fuse American jazz arrangements with blazing Afro-Cuban rhythms, creating "Cubop."

Yet there's no central narrative to the free verse film, which gleefully bounces among performances, Gillespie waxing poetic with musical and sociological history lessons. Like bebop, this doc often feels like it can go anywhere, as when we find Gillespie touchingly visiting Pozo's sister and then comparing Cuba to the segregated South Carolina of his boyhood. This spontaneity is matched in the motley musical numbers, with Gillespie introducing his multicultural collaborators -- to themselves, not the audience -- mid-performance.

All the Gillespie standards are here, but frequently with twists highlighting the range of his boundless talent. For instance, the first rendition of his legendary "A Night in Tunisia" (which many feel ushered in the bebop era) finds Gillespie on piano with Cuban wiz Arturo Sandoval on trumpet. Later, Gillespie provides both blowfish trumpet and scat vocals on "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You?" The musical apotheosis, though, is Gillespie leading an All Star team of international jazz heavyweights through an extensive rearranging of "Manteca."

Gillespie is generous with the stage, so we get a veritable cornucopia of jazz tapas with the most notable highlights being Cuban wunderkind Gonzalo Rubalcaba's delirious piano and Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabyyr's wailing clarinet. Of course, there's still an abundance of Gillespie dancing, drumming, and the musical manna of his trumpet duets with Sandoval.

Holland achieves in a terse 84 minutes what Clint Eastwood attempted in his slightly overwrought, but solid Charlie Parker biopic, Bird. Drawing upon his earlier work creating music films in the Virgin Islands and Murray Lerner's Oscar winning doc From Mao to Mozart, he paints a multifaceted portrait of the gregarious Gillespie and the country that inspired him.

The full screen presentation can't repress cinematographer Bill Megalos' lush Cuban compositions, but the momentous music deserves better than the disc's Dolby Digital 2.0. The extras are limited to the doc's trailer and a filmmaker's statement and bio. The disc is a must for jazz connoisseurs, but it also works as an accessible introduction for bebop neophytes. -- Colin Miller