Visual bias in Whiplash

In an interview on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon prompts Miles Teller about his role playing Neiman – and the drums – in Whiplash: ‘it has to be really you playing’. ‘Oh yeah, I mean, I started playing when I was fifteen’, replies Teller, avoiding the point somewhat before describing the training that transformed him from a self-taught ‘rock drummer’ into a convincing ‘jazz drummer’ for the film.Footnote ²³ Teller has also implied that his drumming was authentic in other interviews: ‘It would look weird if you were holding back because you didn't want to make the noise, so you just actually have to play. It was all a seamless kind of process. My mum's saying that this will always be her favourite movie. Because it's her son, playing music.’Footnote ²⁴ Numerous articles and discussions can be found online on the topic of whether Teller actually performed the drumming in Whiplash, and these often reach the same conclusion: ‘it's really him playing in the movie’,Footnote ²⁵ or ‘that is, indeed, Teller playing the drums’.Footnote ²⁶

Missing in these observations is the crucial distinction between what we see and what we hear. ‘We had a visual double occasionally for a few little shots of hands. But almost everything you see on-screen is Miles himself’, according to Chazelle.Footnote ²⁷ While some audio was also recorded live on set, though, most of what we hear, notably including the tracks for the more difficult performance scenes, was pre-recorded by an uncredited studio musician.Footnote ²⁸ The reactions of viewers, and Teller's own remarks (whether he misleads by omission intentionally or notFootnote ²⁹), are nonetheless revealing. For one, there is an apparent lack of ‘imaginative resistance’ among audience members here, in the sense that Ben Winters invokes in describing how his own immersion in a film's fiction is disrupted when actors fail to convincingly impersonate classical musicians.Footnote ³⁰ Trained observers may notice the problems in Whiplash: Erskine asserts that ‘his [Teller's] hands are a mess in terms of technique, holding the sticks, etc.’;Footnote ³¹ in Figure 1, for example, note how the pad of Teller's right thumb does not appear to be in contact with the stick, where it should form the basis of the fulcrum. General audiences seem to be convinced by what they see, though, and if Teller looks convincing, there is no question for many viewers that ‘it's really him playing’. Along with Teller's claims, this points to the importance of visuals to the film's idea of drum kit performance.

Figure 1

Two stills from the same shot of Whiplash's climactic drum solo, with my zoom showing Miles Teller's right-hand grip.

It is worth examining the visual construction of Whiplash's climactic drum solo – the film's most focused depiction of performance – in detail. This comprises 101 shots (up to and including the last shot of the film, which covers the band's re-entry for a final chord, and accounting only for visible cuts), of which only six clearly show Teller's face, hands, and instrument in the same frame. More often we see close-ups of Teller's face and upper body or the instrument being struck. Though it may be Teller we most often see on screen (and Chazelle notably claims that, ‘even shots where we didn't have to have him, a lot of the times we ended up having him’Footnote ³²), it is therefore possible that those ‘few little shots of hands’ for which the director admits using a visual double carry relatively significant weight in terms of authenticating the performance. Even where we do see Teller, though, framing and editing obviously played a crucial role in making the actor look believable. ‘It was a matter of choosing the best takes to keep his drumming in sync’, recounts editor Tom Cross.Footnote ³³ The scene's short average shot length of just 2.85 seconds (at the original 24fps) may, in part, have been a matter of necessity in this regard.

The fast editing style did have other intended functions, though. For one, Chazelle suggests that the visual style was partly a means of illustrating musical movement:

Cross clarifies that ‘Damien wanted to create a rhythm and a pace through the quick cutting … He wanted the cutting to be overt so the audience would feel the editing and the speed.’Footnote ³⁵ He further suggests Chazelle ‘wanted the viewer to feel the physicality of practicing and playing’;Footnote ³⁶ ‘he really wanted the cuts to feel brutal and violent. He told me that he wanted the music scenes to feel like the boxing scenes from Raging Bull [dir. Martin Scorsese, 1980].’Footnote ³⁷ The final such boxing scene (Jake La Motta's 1951 rematch with Sugar Ray Robinson) was, in turn, modelled on the famously quick-cutting shower-murder montage in Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960).Footnote ³⁸

The content of the images was also important to Whiplash's creators, however. William Forde Thompson, Phil Graham, and Frank A. Russo distinguish between filmed performances in which a performer's whole body is generally shown (suggesting ‘a total performer’), and those – like in Whiplash – in which ‘contemporary and highly edited cinematography works montage-like with extreme close-ups and fast-cuts to “dismember” bodies, lingering on isolated body parts’.Footnote ³⁹ In a montage, meaning inheres in the differences and relationships between shots, and in Whiplash the filmmakers took care to balance shots of the mechanics of performance with emphasis on the faces of – and eye contact between – Neiman and Fletcher. Close-ups of Neiman's face (or parts of it) in fact comprise roughly a quarter of the final solo's shots, and in several cases last considerably longer than the average 2.85 seconds. Cross reports that this emphasis on ‘our characters’ was added because an original version of the scene ‘didn't work emotionally’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The filmmakers thus avoided a potential pitfall of the ‘dismembering’ editing style, when research shows that one role of visual aspects of music is, as Thompson et al. summarize, to ‘personalize the music, drawing performers and listeners closer together in a shared experience’.Footnote ⁴¹

That most shots during the final solo are close-ups of Neiman or his instrument paints him as an isolated figure, notwithstanding those moments of connection with Fletcher. This sense is amplified by the roughly ten seconds mid-solo during which the sound of the instrument fades from the audio track, replaced by a faint ‘whooshing’ sound – of the blood flowing around Neiman's body, perhaps. The absence of active audio directs the audience's attention to the visual, where successive shots show Neiman's face, glistening with sweat and carrying a pained expression (Figure 2), and a drumstick hitting a cymbal (itself covered with beaded sweat) in ‘out of time’ slow motion (Figure 3). These techniques again recall Raging Bull's final boxing scene, in the subjects and forms of the shots (close-ups of Robert De Niro as a sweaty La Motta (Figure 4); the use of slow motion), and how in large part – as Tom Shone puts it – ‘[w]e hear nothing but Jake's breath, and flashbulbs, through whistling wind. He might as well be alone, with his demon – the minotaur become his own maze.’Footnote ⁴² Just as Scorsese wanted to communicate the fighter's own experience,Footnote ⁴³ Whiplash's creators suggest in this moment not only the great physical effort Neiman expends (as in the many other shots of grimacing, sweat, and even blood) but also the mental demands of his solo.Footnote ⁴⁴ Neiman's performance is full, then, of the ‘desperation and peril’ of Carolyn Abbate's drastic music (‘real music: the performances’, with all their ‘responsibilities and anxieties’ for the performer),Footnote ⁴⁵ a concept I cite again via Winters and his discussion of film depictions of musical performance. Those depictions, writes Winters, tend to emphasize ‘the physical and mental demands of performance and the concomitant effort such performance is seen to require’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Neiman's solo, that effort is certainly seen.

Figure 2

Shot of Andrew Neiman's (Miles Teller) face, from Whiplash's climactic drum solo.

Figure 3

Shot of a drumstick hitting a cymbal, from Whiplash's climactic drum solo.

Figure 4

Shot of Jake La Motta's (Robert De Niro) face, from Raging Bull's final boxing match.

The fast editing style of the solo scene is the exception rather than the rule in Whiplash, but the film also emphasizes those physical and mental demands through the blood, sweat, and tears present in its other performance scenes and broader narrative. In one shot showing Neiman immediately after a gruelling rehearsal, for example, Chazelle notes in a commentary track the intention that the character's face appear swollen like a boxer's post-fight,Footnote ⁴⁷ while a scene of Neiman dipping his bloody, practice-damaged hand into a jar of ice is once more lifted from Raging Bull. Neiman faces competition throughout Whiplash, such as for the Shaffer big band's drum stool or in formal band contests,Footnote ⁴⁸ and further events notably include his involvement in a violent car crash while travelling to one such contest (curiously foreshadowing the crucial event in Bleed for This (dir. Ben Younger, 2016), in which Teller portrays real-life boxer Vinny Pazienza and his battle to recover from a similar accident).Footnote ⁴⁹ Whiplash's suggestion of parallels between drumming and boxing specifically is not novel: a 2007 All About Jazz article argues that the practices ‘share qualities both primal and sublime’, for instance.Footnote ⁵⁰ More generally, while Pillai reads Whiplash primarily as a horror film, the more obvious model is surely the sports film, in which the protagonist – often paired with the authoritarian coach – overcomes various obstacles on their rise to athletic greatness.Footnote ⁵¹ During his final solo, Neiman pushes himself towards a climax that can easily be interpreted as sexual, too: read again those pained expressions, vigorous hand movements (often ambiguously out of shot, but physically reflected in Teller's shoulders), and phallic drumsticks (Figures 3 and 4). The solo, especially as seen, is a masturbatory demonstration of Neiman's virility, through which he attains the conventional masculine-heroic status of the virtuoso. As Robert Walser notes, virility and virtuosity share the Latin root vir, man, and virtuosity consistently appears ‘concerned with demonstrating and enacting a particular kind of power and freedom that might be called “potency”’.Footnote ⁵² This may be particularly true in what Alex Stewart calls ‘the almost exclusively male or homosocial universe of jazz’,Footnote ⁵³ as well as for drumming, which is traditionally coded as masculine.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clearly, Whiplash works only to cement such associations.Footnote ⁵⁵

Though Whiplash won the Academy Award for editing, Brody argues that it ‘has no music in its images. There are ways of filming music that are themselves musical, that conjure a musical feeling above and beyond what's on the soundtrack, but Chazelle's images are nothing of the kind.’Footnote ⁵⁶ It is significant, though, that the filmmakers’ conception of the music – fast, violent, and mastered through individual athletic prowess and commitment – is actually communicated primarily through their images. Regarding the final solo, editor Cross even states that they ‘looked at the scene silently to make sure it played purely visually’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Like Brody, we might find the film's vision of virtuoso drumming problematic, but here again we should consider its relationship to a broader reality in which precisely that – vision – is key. In the remainder of this article, I present a visually conscious assessment of Neiman's inspiration: Buddy Rich.

Buddy Rich: ‘mere’ virtuoso

From the beginning, Buddy Rich's career was an audiovisual one.Footnote ⁵⁸ Born in September 1917, by just eighteen months old Rich was a feature in his parents’ vaudeville show as a novelty child drummer. As ‘Traps, the Drum Wonder’, Rich soon became the main attraction and apparently, for a period, the highest-paid child star in the world.Footnote ⁵⁹ At age 12, he appeared in a short Vitaphone film: Buddy Traps in ‘Sound Effects’ (dir. Murray Roth, 1930). The video is lost, but the audio survives, and the marketing copy gives a further sense of the short's content and Rich's now well-rounded abilities: ‘Buddy twirls his drumsticks, tap dances unbelievably, and sings amazingly well. He beats music out of chairs, paintings, pots and pans, glasses and everything imaginable. He is one of a kind!’Footnote ⁶⁰

By the 1940s, Rich was a well-known big-band drummer, and appeared in several feature films as a member of Tommy Dorsey's orchestra as well as leader of his own band. With Dorsey in Ship Ahoy (dir. Edward Buzzell, 1942), for instance, Rich stars in two numbers: ‘Hawaiian War Chant’ features a drums-and-trumpet duet with Ziggy Elman, while at the climax of ‘I'll Take Tallulah’ Rich abandons his kit to dance and juggle drumsticks with Eleanor Powell. There are no close-ups or quick cuts here; whether drumming (or rather miming, albeit to his own playingFootnote ⁶¹) or dancing, Rich's whole body is shown, framing him as the ‘total performer’ referenced by Thompson et al.Footnote ⁶² Rich continued to develop this identity elsewhere: in two 1947 live reviews of Rich's own band, Hal Webman tellingly refers to ‘those infrequent occasions when Rich sits in at the tubs’,Footnote ⁶³ and how he ‘wisely holds his drumming efforts to a minimum’ (despite calling him ‘unquestionably … one of the greatest drummers ever’), while praising his singing, dancing, and ‘clowning’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Later, Rich recorded three vocal albums (the first, Buddy Rich Sings Johnny Mercer, in 1956), opened two ill-fated New York City clubs (Buddy's Place, 1974, and Buddy's Place II, 1975–6), and hosted three pilot television episodes of his own variety Buddy Rich Show (1982). In his biography of Rich, Mel Tormé argues that it was through regular guest appearances on The Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson and beginning in 1966, that Rich became ‘an identifiable personality in his own right … to the mass public, who instantly loved the give-and-take of quips, barbs, and laughs between Buddy and Johnny’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Rich's fame was nonetheless founded on his drumming ability – his talk show appearances invariably included a performance – and it was as a drummer that he continued to have most success. ‘The Drum Wonder’ became, in adulthood, ‘The World's Greatest Drummer’, a label that sticks more than thirty years after his death in 1987.Footnote ⁶⁶ Notably, Rich is revered by fellow drummers, topping Modern Drummer magazine's list of ‘The 50 Greatest Drummers of All Time’ in 2014.Footnote ⁶⁷ For Matt Brennan, ‘Rich's key contribution was to raise the benchmark for technique and execution on the drums’, and indeed his technical ability continues to impress even by modern standards.Footnote ⁶⁸ The criticisms that we have already seen applied to Whiplash – that there was little substance behind Rich's speed and that he was problematically individualistic – have a long history, though. In 1939, for example, critic George T. Simon wrote that Rich, playing with Artie Shaw's band, was ‘cursed with the misconception that the drummer is supposed to do more than supply a good background. As a result, Buddy in his enthusiasm plays too much drums, consequently breaking up the general rhythmic effect.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Shaw himself recalled complaining to Rich in that same year that his playing was ‘like a drum solo accompanied by the band’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even the actual solos for which Rich became famed are not immune to criticism: in a 1960 review of the drum-battle album Rich Versus Roach, for instance, Max Harrison compared Rich unfavourably with his peer Max Roach, asserting that ‘Rich's contributions are little but technical displays while Roach shows, as everyone would expect, a great deal of rhythmic imagination and a more flexible approach to his instruments. There is a great variety, more light and shade, in his solos.’Footnote ⁷¹

Rather as in much nineteenth-century criticism of classical virtuosity, Rich is here seen to be in service of himself more than the music. The parallel is inexact, of course: classical music became firmly established as a composer's art in the nineteenth century, with influential critics promoting ideals of werktreue and of instrumental music's aesthetic autonomy, and judging virtuosic liberties and physicality harshly against them,Footnote ⁷² whereas jazz has always been primarily a performer's art. It is for this reason that Antoine Hennion hears ‘an aesthetic of virtuosity’ in John Coltrane's Giant Steps: in jazz, the bodily act of performance is the making of the work of art, rather than a reading of the work that can only (per Romantic and then Modernist aesthetics) either realize or detract from it.Footnote ⁷³ The art, and a jazz performer's contribution to the making of it, might still be judged more or less successful, though, and for reasons similar to those used in arguments against classical virtuosi. A vein of Rich criticism closely echoes one put against Liszt, in fact, for his performing style that, in Kramer's words, ‘courts visual excess and foregrounds the performer's body’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Pianist Ethan Iverson, in a critique of both Rich and Whiplash, finds fault again with Rich's aural ‘hyperactivity’ – the way he ‘would cram everything he could into every corner’, playing ‘almost as much during the band parts as during the solos’ – but also notes his ‘antics and theatrics’ and labels him a ‘stage band drummer’ (‘“Stage band” suggests a big band in a floor show [in] Las Vegas, playing for burlesque, crooners, dinner, dancing, and the occasional hot instrumental capped by drum fireworks and a final blaring “Ta-dah!”’).Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather like Williams, Iverson thereby distances Rich from a central tradition of jazz drummers exhibiting what he terms a ‘devotional’, specifically African attitude to performance. According to Iverson, jazz drummers should be concerned with the collective and with the ‘feel’ of the music, and not with individual – and implicitly visual – showmanship.Footnote ⁷⁶

Much of the recent criticism of Rich, as exemplified by those articles that link him to Whiplash, is an understandable and welcome corrective to the ‘world's greatest drummer’ line of celebration he has inspired elsewhere. Such celebration is especially fraught in recognition that Rich – a white and conventionally handsome man – achieved his status with the support of an institutionally racist and sexist entertainment industry. This is a particularly important acknowledgement in a visually conscious assessment of Rich: put simply, he would not have had the same opportunities (and especially the many audiovisual opportunities) to become a star had he looked different. Moreover, though Rich worked with and professed admiration for many significant African American jazz musicians,Footnote ⁷⁷ those opportunities towards stardom involved his contributing to a relatively white, commercial, and arguably exploitative corner of the jazz world. One of the more famous Rich performances, for example, is his drum battle with Gene Krupa in a 1952 Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concert at Carnegie Hall (later released on record as The Drum Battle: Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich at JATP, in 1960; the battle also toured other venues with JATP). Addressing the relationship of publicly staged instrumental battles to the contests that had a long history in private jazz and pre-jazz jam sessions, Katherine Walker argues that ‘the promotion of sensationalized, combative cutting in publicly staged battles – such as those featured in the Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series – detached the surface act of cutting from the spirit, purpose, and meaning of competition’ in the latter.Footnote ⁷⁸ Specifically, private jam sessions offered ‘a competitive environment that was nevertheless highly cooperative, productive, and community-centered’, directed towards the education and elevation of black music and musicians, whereas their public equivalents exploited white fascination with supposedly ‘primitive’ black culture for commercial gain.Footnote ⁷⁹

Iverson makes the point in deliberately polemical terms: ‘if you think Buddy Rich is the greatest jazz drummer, you are racist’.Footnote ⁸⁰ He affirms elsewhere that ‘all the very greatest jazz drummers have been African American’.Footnote ⁸¹ There is no doubt that Rich's stardom comes at the ongoing expense of popular recognition for the contributions of black jazz drummers in particular. In a recent Reader's Digest feature on ‘7 Greatest drummers of all time’, for example, Rich appears alongside fellow white jazz drummers Krupa and Joe Morello in a list that features Art Blakey as its only person of colour.Footnote ⁸² While calling out this injustice, though, we can also recognize that certain jazz ideals cited by those who downplay Rich's significance are constructs, much like the ideals that concerned earlier critics of classical virtuosity. Authentic jazz is commonly proposed to be spontaneous, essentially African American, and a form of art. The conventional story of the jazz tradition, furthermore, is one of continuous stylistic evolution. By default, Rich does not meet the bar set here for jazz ‘greatness’. He was a white man best known for promoting composed, commercial, swing-oriented music decades after the advent of bebop (the innovations of which he railed against).Footnote ⁸³ He performed with great speed, power, and precision, and developed a style identifiably his own, but did not instigate wider changes in how the instrument (and, more broadly, the music) was played in the manner of, say, Kenny Clarke (who established new roles for the bass drum and ride cymbal and thereby helped to invent bebop itself).Footnote ⁸⁴ Rich is therefore not a major figure in most ‘serious’ jazz histories, but greater fault here may lie with those histories: Scott DeVeaux argues that the aforementioned ideas about jazz authenticity originated in association with specific social and political goals, particularly at the time of the bebop revolution (which explicitly opposed swing-era big-band commercialism), and were adopted by the broader jazz world for reasons of cultural and historical legitimation – the idea of a unified, evolving jazz tradition being attractive even as it ignores obvious discontinuities between styles.Footnote ⁸⁵ Other conceptions of the music and its history are possible, and one's estimation of Rich's contribution to both will depend largely on one's chosen perspective.

Rich, and Neiman after him, belong to a jazz tradition that has visuality at its centre. Krupa was their key predecessor as a drummer: Brennan notes how ‘flamboyant showmanship … combined with the visual of Krupa's commanding, grunting presence and cinematic good looks’ to give him ‘his irrepressible star quality’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Jazz showmanship is not the sole preserve of drummers, though. Much early jazz and swing-era performance was visual in nature: Catherine Tackley discusses the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's (ODJB) ‘awareness of the demands of variety theatre, in which acts had to be visually as well as aurally attractive’, for instance, and shows that the consequent integration of dancers into their 1919 London performances resulted in these being ‘perceived as an “act” which was visually and choreographically, rather than solely musically, entertaining’.Footnote ⁸⁷ (Tackley also challenges those who dispute the ODJB's broader authenticity, arguing that the band and their music ‘were clearly rooted in and representative of the New Orleans musical tradition’, reflecting that city's ‘wide racial mix’ and productive mingling of musical practices.Footnote ⁸⁸) While some later jazz moved away from visuality, there was also continuation, not least where the careers of musicians such as Rich successfully spanned several supposed ‘eras’ of jazz history. There are important disclaimers to make around this visual tradition – the connections to minstrelsy, the privileging of certain identities and pandering to racist tastesFootnote ⁸⁹ – but it has also been consumed by large audiences and for valid reasons, and therefore warrants attention.

To be clear, I do not mean to equate prejudice against Rich's playing with the considerably more damaging prejudice still faced by black musicians, for which Rich holds some responsibility as a willing participant in a racist industry. Nonetheless, the former prejudice exists and clouds assessments of Rich, balancing the ‘world's greatest’ label but only by placing him in the similarly uncritical category of ‘mere’ virtuoso, via judgements based on subjective taste and constructed ideas of authenticity. Moving forward, I wish primarily to understand Rich's work, and in that regard, to dismiss him for failing to live up to ideals held by others is unhelpful.Footnote ⁹⁰ Instead, Rich must be met on his own terms, and those of his audience. In particular, while Rich might have claimed that he was not a ‘showman’,Footnote ⁹¹ I am convinced that such a visual identity – understood in a neutral rather than derogatory sense – was an intentional and central part of his appeal. Indeed, for it not to have been seems improbable, given that Rich's performances were so often – and still are – seen, his legacy stretching from vaudeville now on to YouTube videos with sensational titles and millions of views (e.g., ‘BUDDY RICH IMPOSSIBLE DRUM SOLO *HQ*’, nineteen million views at time of writingFootnote ⁹²). The next section therefore explores visual aspects of Rich's playing in more detail.

Rich's visuality

Tom Piazza's evocative description of a Rich solo (which could apply just as easily to Neiman's final solo in Whiplash) draws attention to both the visual appeal of Rich's playing (‘To see Rich’) and the particular nature of that appeal. Today, the dominant image of Rich is not of the joyful, carefree performer seen in Ship Ahoy. In Iverson's terms, it is of ‘the sweating white athlete’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Particularly in the extended, climax-of-the-set solos of his later career leading his own big band, from 1966 until his death in 1987, Rich promotes an idea of the drum solo as athletic endeavour. He does so largely visually (‘grimacing, covered with perspiration’, so exhibiting Abbate's desperation and peril) and to great effect (‘high drama’).

Generally speaking, the virtuoso-as-athlete trope is less common than its effective opposite. James Deaville notes how ‘evident visible and audible ease in performance has been valorized as a sign of virtuosity, within the paradox that only hard work could produce such apparent effortlessness’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Liberace might be compared to Rich in many regards, as another popular twentieth-century virtuoso whose fame spread through performances on audiovisual media – performances which emphasized visuality, moreover, and which have been derided by ‘serious’ critics for displaying style over substance (in this case relative to the norms of the classical tradition).Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet Liberace's performances convey effortlessness and a domestic intimacy, in the way his hands glide across the keyboard, in his knowing smiles to the audience and camera, and in the fancy-domestic candelabra that adorns his piano. Rich is different perhaps simply because his instrument and style do require more physical effort; certainly, his perspiration was not ‘fake’. Then again, the athletic style was one that he deliberately pursued through his musical choices, one that the evidence of Ship Ahoy and other screen appearances suggests could have been replaced wholly or partially by an impression of ease, and one that notably also aligns with long-standing – and commercially exploitable – ideas of drumming as ‘primitive’.Footnote ⁹⁷

In a 1985 televised interview with Larry King, Rich spoke clearly of the potential effects of visuals in response to King's question about whether an audience could be ‘fooled by histrionics’:

Rich's remarks do not constitute a mea culpa as such – he again insisted he was ‘not so much of a showman’ and appeared to aim the words above at drummers who ‘can't play’. Some level of showmanship is inevitable, though. I draw here on Philip Auslander's notion of musical personae, wherein ‘[w]hat musicians perform first and foremost is not music, but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae’.Footnote ⁹⁹ These personae ‘reflect the priorities of the performance context’ and are thus not fixed, though they are subject to expectations based on the audience's prior knowledge of the same performer; Auslander stresses that the audience co-creates the persona by negotiating a ‘working consensus’ with the performer.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Rich projected a ‘serious’ attitude in interviews as well as performances (recall ‘I concentrate on what I play – because I want to play good’Footnote ¹⁰¹), and that attitude was also apparent when he was unknowingly recorded ranting at his band on their tour bus.Footnote ¹⁰² We do not need to decide here whether Rich's serious, athletic musical persona was ‘genuine’ or not, though, or how consciously he might have performed it; the important point is to acknowledge that we do always see a persona when we see him perform and that it is always a creation. To quote Jenny Doctor, Peter Elsdon, and Björn Heile in the introduction to their edited volume Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen, ‘[t]his way of thinking should dispel any idea that watching jazz performers on screen can or should be seen as thoroughly different from watching actors’.Footnote ¹⁰³

In his own chapter in Watching Jazz, Elsdon furthers the musician–actor comparison by arguing that ‘jazz on film is never unmediated’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Actors are only one cog in the filmmaking machine, and when we see Rich on screen – the only opportunity we now have to see him – we must always account similarly for his mediation by camera operators, directors, and editors. This is as true of a documentary concert film as it is of Ship Ahoy. It is as true of watching Rich as it is of watching Neiman. Rich's contribution to the creation of his own persona is greater than Teller's contribution to the Neiman persona, of course, and those who filmed Rich have relatively less influence than did Chazelle and his colleagues. Yet that influence is still present, and both Neiman and Rich are therefore mediated virtuosi.

With all this in mind, I turn now to examine one common component of a Rich solo – a component that was, in fact, imported directly into Neiman's final solo in Whiplash. Bill Reddie's West Side Story Medley, an arrangement of themes from the Leonard Bernstein musical, was commissioned by Rich for the 1966 engagement of his then-new band at the Chez Club in Hollywood, and recorded there for the album Swingin’ New Big Band. Thereafter, it was a popular element of Rich's performances – including several that were filmed – until his death, generally ending the final set. On record, the piece lasts for nearly eleven minutes, passing through renditions of Bernstein's ‘Prologue’, ‘Somewhere’, and ‘Something's Coming’ before a ninety-second Rich solo that leads to a brief band finale. Live, however, Rich treated the medley's structure flexibly and primarily as a vehicle for his solo display. The piece could run up to and beyond fifteen minutes, incorporating one or two extended drum solos totalling half or more of its duration, and often cutting one or both of ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Something's Coming’. The most extreme format, in which the ‘medley’ actually consisted only of the three-minute ‘Prologue’ and a longer solo, was common from the mid-1970s onwards.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Whatever the structure, though, a Rich solo always brought the piece towards climax and the band finale, and this solo regularly featured a gradually accelerating single-stroke roll – that is, a roll executed with the hands playing alternate single strokes: right, left, right, left – performed on the snare drum. Rich began the roll slowly and deliberately, before quickening to a visual and sonic blur.

The accelerating single-stroke roll was so common that Tormé describes it at length. The West Side Story solo ‘was different every time Rich played it’, he writes, but nevertheless ‘took on a specific form’ that included the roll – ‘a supersonic display of precision and speed that left even the most jaded watchers and listeners gaping in disbelief’ – to build to a climax and the band's re-entry.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The tension between jazz as a supposedly improvisational music and the use of such a stock device is worth noting here. Heile examines audiovisual recordings of ‘serial’ live performances by Duke Ellington's band to challenge the myth of jazz as essentially improvisatory, arguing that Ellington instead gave the audience what they wanted – namely, what they recalled from his records, including solos repeated almost note-for-note.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Drawing again on Auslander, Heile finds that Ellington's musicians still performed spontaneity, including through visual means, and thereby encouraged their audience to understand what they experienced as spontaneous at least in quality, if not as literally improvised. Rich's repetition is less straightforward because the roll is not present on the Swingin’ New Big Band recording, and is part of a solo that changed in shape and detail in other ways, too. It is nonetheless possible that some audience members would expect it, from having previously seen and/or heard (or heard about) other performances in which it occurred. From today's perspective, when we can see Rich perform the roll in several videos on YouTube alone, this expectation is more likely to be present when we encounter another West Side Story solo. It is therefore key to the device's effect that Rich appears invested in its execution, so that the roll does not seem a mere obligation.

Visuals are not just an ‘addition’ or ‘enhancement’ here, though. The accelerating single-stroke roll is as much a visual device as a musical one. Sonically, the roll has an overt narrative drive that should not be underestimated (and that perhaps partly explains why it is also the first sound heard in Whiplash, over a black screen),Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but no timbral or dynamic variation, and is also unmetered. It is, then, relatively unmusical. The audience's attention is thereby directed to the visual, and not only to Rich's ancillary ‘investment’ gestures (effortful facial expressions and so on; gestures that represent ‘a link between the music and the expressive intention of the musician’) but also to his instrumental actions (those ‘responsible for sound production)’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Simplicity is crucial here. Rich starts the roll slowly so that we can see what he is doing, and we therefore see that there is no ‘trick’ involved. He could generate much the same sound using a double-stroke roll (right, right, left, left), for instance, exploiting the way the stick rebounds off and back on to the drumhead to achieve high velocity more efficiently (with two strikes per downward stroke). Instead, he uses a single-stroke roll for a clearer – and, at faster speeds, more spectacular – cause-and-effect relationship of action to sound. This is drumming in its most elementary form, reduced to a straightforward and largely visual expression of athleticism – the musical equivalent of the 100-metre sprint (and a challenge that has since become the basis of the ‘World's Fastest Drummer’ competition, marketed as ‘extreme sport drumming’).Footnote ¹¹⁰

Rich's deliberately didactic and unmusical use of single strokes encourages not merely an abstract comprehension of his athletic ability but more particularly a ‘bodily empathy’ with his actions even among non-drummers and non-musicians and perhaps to the extent that the audience member actually moves their body in mimicry.Footnote ¹¹¹ Paul McIntyre discusses this effect in filmed jazz performance, drawing on observations from psychology regarding ‘embodied cognition’ (the idea, quoting Marc Leman, that ‘music is performed and perceived through gestures whose deployment can be directly felt and understood through the body’Footnote ¹¹²) and ‘motor resonance’ (‘observers feel physically stimulated by others’ actions’Footnote ¹¹³). McIntyre concludes that ‘performers’ use of gesture, embodied cognition, and motor resonance … allow viewers not only to empathize with musicians but also to feel “part of the music”, partaking of a shared experience’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Rich's apparent success in this regard is evidenced by his audiences’ responses: on live recordings, the roll can reliably be heard to elicit loud cheers of both encouragement and celebration (rather like those that might be directed at a sportsperson). Audience members understand what Rich is doing here – for a while they can even do what he is doing – and are therefore all the more impressed when he proceeds beyond their own limits and expectations.

That the roll seems to ‘work’ for Rich's live audiences calls into question McIntyre's further suggestion that the perception of a shared experience ‘depends … crucially’ on filming and broadcast technologies to create ‘an illusion of intimacy and direct presence’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It might be that one or more of drumming, Rich, and the accelerating single-stroke roll present a special case, given factors such as the size and simplicity of the instrumental gestures involved.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Undoubtedly, though, those technologies still amplify the effect. The framing of the roll in a 3 January 1970 BBC broadcast – Buddy Rich at the Talk of the Town (prod. Terry Henebery) – is typical (see Figure 5). As the roll begins, an on-stage camera zooms in to show only Rich's hands, sticks, and snare drum, responding to Rich's focus on that instrument and offering a clear view of the roll's execution. As the roll accelerates into the climactic section of the solo, this close-up shot alternates first with a view of audience members applauding, and then with a long shot from the audience's perspective showing Rich in the context of his band (who are all turned to watch him), zooming towards a front view of the drum kit. This long shot draws attention to the posture and movement of Rich's entire upper body, which hunches over the snare, and moves up and down with apparent effort as he uses the bass drum to re-establish metre underneath the continuing roll. The original close-up then returns with a slightly wider angle, showing Rich's face hunched into the top of the frame, dripping sweat as he stares down at almost ninety degrees.

Figure 5

Sequence of shots from Buddy Rich at the Talk of the Town, covering the accelerating single-stroke roll in Rich's West Side Story Medley solo.

The same core elements are emphasized by the camera's mediation here as in Whiplash: the movements of hands, the concentration and physical effort required, and the connection established with others (the live audience, in Rich's case). Aside from their power to bring Rich into the audience's own space (on television or, now, computers and other devices), the close-ups in the BBC broadcast additionally enhance the inherent intimacy of his accelerating roll. Rich cradles the snare drum not only between his legs, as is standard, but also with his upper body. He consistently played with poor posture, but his hunch here is an exaggeration, and the final shot in the sequence further emphasizes it by using Rich's torso and head as a visual frame for his hands and instrument. While the intimacy conveyed may be constructed, though, it is clearly opposed to the exhibitionist ‘gimmicks’ that Rich derided in rock drum solos, and which Brennan traces from the ‘ever-larger drum kits’ of the 1970s onwards to the ‘ridiculous heights’ (quite literally) of Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, whose live performances have been enhanced by stage set-ups including two ‘which effectively saw Lee and his kit riding on an actual roller coaster during his solo’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Rich was often showier, of course, particularly in more obviously entertainment-led contexts – he even once performed upside down, on an episode of the television show What's My Line? Footnote ¹¹⁸ By contrast, his performance of the accelerating single-stroke roll – an essential component of his virtuoso-soloist act – was more serious, drawing attention inward to the body and a purer kind of musical-athletic challenge. However, it was nonetheless showmanship, in which a visual impression of effort and commitment authenticated what was unashamedly ‘mere’ technical display. This may have been unconscious, Rich's formative and continuing experiences on stage and screen having moulded him into an instinctive showman, but in any case – and whatever his own protests about such a label – Rich the virtuoso clearly was a showman who must be understood visually as well as aurally.