Peter Gunn was a half-hour detective show that aired on national TV from the Fall of 1958 through 1961. I may have watched an episode or three, but I didn’t watch it regularly, presumably because we could only get one channel (of 3) on our television set. I’m sure I became aware of it because of its compelling theme song.
Someone brought that theme up on an email list I’m on, TPIN (Trumpet Players’ International Network), and someone else responded that the Gunn featured jazz throughout the show. That intrigued me, so I decided to watch it (on Amazon).
I’ve now watched the first three episodes of the first season and, yes, the show features jazz. Wikipedia notes:
Peter Gunn is a well-dressed private investigator whose hair is always in place and who loves cool jazz. Where other gumshoes might be coarse, Peter Gunn is a sophisticate with expensive tastes. A contemporary article in Life noted that Edwards "deliberately tailored the part after the famous movie smoothie Cary Grant".
Gunn operates in a gloomy waterfront city, the name and location of which is never revealed in the series. He can usually be found at Mother's, a smoky wharfside jazz club that Gunn uses as his "office", usually meeting new clients there.
And, judging from these three episodes, Mother’s generally has a jazz band. And the house band has a singer, Edie Hart, who is Gunn’s girlfriend.
The second episode, “Streetcar Jones”, is about a jazz musician, a vibraphone player who we see playing on the bars of his cell when we first see him. He was accused of murdering another musician, but he didn’t do it and Gunn, naturally, gets him off. This episode featured a band that played a modified form of Dixieland, modified to include a piano player, who had a major speaking role in the episode. The house band at Mothers, a trio or quartet to back the singer, plays in a swing style.
That is to say, the jazz featured on the program is jazz of a bygone era, at least so far. But I don’t expect to hear much, if any, jazz that was current in the early 60s when I watch some more episodes – which I will. The show looks very good, film noir, and these three episodes have been well written and well acted.
It’s the mere fact that jazz is featured in the show that interests me. By 1960 jazz had ceased being a major force in popular music, though it still had some presence. Rock and roll was on the rise – Mancini mentions that his theme owes more to rock and roll than to jazz – and the jazz styles that were just emerging, modal and then free, would never have a popular presence. Though, for what it is worth, the best-selling jazz album in the world, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, was issued in 1959.
So, Peter Gunn represents jazz’s last hurrah, a noir detective show set in a waterfront jazz club. What does that say about jazz’s place in American culture? It would be a quarter century (1987) before jazz took up residence in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, home to the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the Julliard School of Music. Whatever Lincoln Center is, it is not a waterfront dive. It’s center city and marble-clad.
By that time, of course, jazz had become peripheral to popular culture. Like the other music featured at Lincoln Center, it has been institutionalized as high culture. To be sure, jazz is performed in clubs and concert halls across the land, as classical music is, but it no longer has the force it had in the first half of the century (and that classical music had in the 18th and 19th centuries).
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