Pedro, Josep & Gutiérrez-Martínez, Begoña (2024). Jazz in Spanish Film Noir: Modernity and Youth Cultures During Late Francoism, en Ádám Havas, Bruce Johnson, David Horn (eds.) “The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies”. Routledge, ISBN 9781032080383
Following an ongoing research about jazz in Spain during Franco´s dictatorship, this article explores the presence and meanings of jazz in the late 1950s and 1960s Spanish film noir. Considering jazz a key genre within the spectrum of modern influences that impacted Spain, it provides a contextualization of the shifting political context and the cultural productions that disseminated it. The article focuses on the analysis of Juventud a la intemperie (The Unsatisfied, Iquino, 1961), a controversial transnational film that pioneered the production of alternate versions of films with more or less violent or erotic content, depending on varying censorship. Marked by a moral message that warns the audience about the growing corrupt youth in Western civilization, the film posits a clear confrontation between the stable and conservative adult world and the more materialistic and hedonistic youth, which appropriates jazz culture as part of their alternative practices and identities. Through the fictional Bongo Club, which attracts countercultural youngsters and rupturist discourses, Juventud a la intemperie represents the transformative power of glocal music scenes, and it features several musical performances that reveal its eclecticism and modernity. “Manhattan Blues”, by African-American singer and Barcelona jazz muse Gloria Stewart, is particularly significant, but there are also performances by composer Enrique Escobar, French artist Rita Cadillac, the Dutch pop-rock band Kroner¿s Duo, and flamenco singer Lorenza Flores Amaya. By analyzing the representation of jazz in Spanish film noir, we approach the multiple diasporic journeys of jazz within a closely-related film tradition that explored the dark side of modern urban life and the limits of expressive culture and social commentary within Francoism. These films had a realist orientation that dealt with existing urban transformations and sociocultural concerns. They tend to depict an occlusive environment that is provisionally subverted through everyday life practices and intercultural dialogues associated with alternative youth cultures, for whom jazz became a complex and disputed sign of dislocating modernity.
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