Blues at The Cotton Club

[Below is a Youtube recording of Diane Lane
singing "Am I Blue" in the movie The Cotton Club]

Diane Lane was in the 1984 hit movie The Cotton Club, about the Harlem jazz club popular in the 1920s and 1930s, which originally excluded blacks unless they were jazz musicians or dancers. Richard Gere co-stars, where he plays the trumpet pretty competently. He also acted (and sang and danced) in another film of the same era - Chicago. It is always surprising to see movie stars who actually have skills other than speaking their lines charismatically. But, that is what old time Hollywood was all about. The stars were performers, and not mere actors. We seem to have forgotten that.

Duke Ellington led the band in the Cotton Club from 1927-1930, and his compositions make up about 80% of the songs in the film.

But with all the glamor also came sordid gambling, mobs, and call girls camouflaged as dancing girls. Gere plays the part of a musician at the club who is also involved with the Harlem mobs during the prohibition era.

Here are some taglines from the movie:

- It was the jazz age. It was an era of elegance and violence. The action was gambling. The stakes were life and death.

- Where crime lords rub elbows with the rich and famous!

- Welcome to The Cotton Club. Where Crime Lords rub elbows with the rich and famous. Where deals are made, lives are traded. And the legends of jazz light up the night.

Diane Lane sings "Am I Blue" accompanied by Richard Gere's trumpet. The song was composed by Henry Ankst, and sang by stars such as Billie Holiday, Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Lauren Bacall joins in to sing with the piano player in the 1944 film To have and Have Not, with Humphrey Bogart hovering jealously in the background. Even Cher tries her hand at singing it. And there were many twenties and thirties recordings by singers I haven't heard of. I could go on with the references. Whenever there is a good thing - a good melody, it seems to fit any type of voice, of any era.

Diane Lane does a great job of singing it straight, keeping the emotions (the blues) in the melody rather than in the performance. I prefer hers to blues greats like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald (links are to recordings by the two singers), who embellished it a little too much, and sang it a little too slow.

Below is the Youtube recording of Diane Lane singing the song in The Cotton Club, with Richard Gere's trumpet accompaniment.