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'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
De Felitta puts it all together into a film which tries to answer the question of how success can turn into failure and oblivion, how a 'somebody' can turn into a 'nobody.'
'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
Outsider Pictures
Written and Directed by Raymond De Felitta
Producer: David Zellerford 2009
"You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody."—Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront
There are three quintessential types of American biographies: "The Success"; "The Tragedy"; and "The Faded Glory" (a variation being "The Anti-Hero"). Jackie Paris was a singer who "coulda been a contender" but faded into oblivion for several decades. In jazz, there have been the successes: 
Ella Fitzgerald
vocals1917 - 1996
Nina Simone
piano and vocals1933 - 2003
George Shearing
piano1919 - 2011
Louis Armstrong
trumpet and vocals1901 - 1971
Gerry Mulligan
saxophone, baritone1927 - 1996
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
Oscar Peterson
piano1925 - 2007
Bix Beiderbecke
cornet1903 - 1931
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
Billie Holiday
vocals1915 - 1959
Chet Baker
trumpet and vocals1929 - 1988
Frank Morgan
saxophone, alto1933 - 2007
Henry Grimes
bass, acoustic1935 - 2020
Jackie Paris was a singer who almost made it to "the big time" but, when jazz encountered a dry period business-wise in the 1960's, he fell under the radar screen until 2004, when he made a brief comeback only to die soon afterwards. A rising star during the bebop period, singing with groups led by the likes of Charlie Parker and 
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic
1922 - 1979
Nat King Cole
piano and vocals
1919 - 1965
Sarah Vaughan
vocals
1924 - 1990
Peggy Lee
vocals
1920 - 2002
Cut to the 1990's, when film director and jazz fan Raymond De Felitta is driving his car along a West Coast highway, hears an old Jackie Paris recording on the radio, and becomes obsessed with "whatever happened to" a singer he perceives to be on a par with Nat King Cole
piano and vocals
1919 - 1965
Tony Bennett
vocals
1926 - 2023
De Felitta puts it all together into a film which tries to answer the question of how success can turn into failure and oblivion, how a "somebody" can turn into a "nobody." He probes this question with musicians, critics, and producers like Will Friedwald, Gene Davis, Dr. 
Billy Taylor
piano
1921 - 2010
James Moody
woodwinds
1925 - 2010
George Wein
piano
1925 - 2021
The present writer was a kid growing up in Brooklyn at that time, and an avid Dodger fan. Watching the film, he thinks of a parallel with Billy Cox, the "Bums'" great third baseman, who spent his post-baseball life as a "nobody" tending bar in a small town in Pennsylvania, only briefly to resurface in Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer. That was a time when, for an adolescent, the world seemed divided into winners, losers, and the anonymous masses. Paris, who became a hybrid between the loser and anonymous categories, is somewhat rescued from this destiny by a brief nightclub appearance and De Felitta's personal grace and devoted filmmaking.
De Felitta does not come up with a definitive explanation of Jackie Paris' failures. Rather, he garners a multitude of theories such as the singer's erratic personality, the sudden drop in jazz's cache after the bebop period, the mercenary ignorance of record producers, a troubled marital and family life, and a lack of etiquette on the vocalist's part. None of these answers are quite satisfactory, because one can easily think of performers who encountered or possessed all of the above qualifications yet were enormously successful. (Just the name 
Frank Sinatra
vocals
1915 - 1998
Multi-talented (he was a competent tap dancer and guitarist) and unsure of where he belonged, Paris could have gone the route of either a serious jazz singer or a popular entertainer. He never made that existential choice, and so fell between the cracks. Adept as he was with the modern jazz idiom, he might have done well as a jazz vocalist like 
Johnny Hartman
vocals
1923 - 1983
Chris Connor
vocals
1927 - 2009
Joe Williams
vocals
1918 - 1999
Paris' failure was also due in part to his androgynous singing style at a post-World War II time when male and female singers needed to sharply differentiate into "guys" and "gals" in order to reinforce the romantic aspect of their songs. Paris sometimes sang in an almost hermaphroditic manner during an era of male and female stereotypes prior to the David Bowie, Johnny Mathis, and "Metrosexual" vogues. In fact, De Felitta uncovered the existence of a female singer with the same last name who could have been Paris' doppelganger! In all, it could be argued that Paris possessed an identity problem, that he never forged a forceful musical persona for himself.
Such an analysis points to an essential limitation of the film. Great documentaries, like all art, remind us of our common strengths, shortcomings, and destinies manifest in a unique person or situation. The film's understanding of Paris' downfall does not achieve such a status. Rather, the viewer is left with a confusing view of the human condition. The one redemptive aspect, however, is the touching way in which the narrative ultimately portrays Jackie Paris as "everyman," as one who, in the end, reflects on his life with both genuine joy and sorrow. And when De Felitta takes an aging Paris on a short drive to his home town of Nutley, New Jersey, where they walk among the people of a middle-class neighborhood with echoes of a time gone by, there is a simplicity there which reminds us all of where, whether "winners," "losers," or somewhere in-between, we acquired and shed our "training wheels," in a family and a community that, even in our modern state of alienation, which jazz partly contemplates, we called "home."
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