Crown Royal pays its respect to the Jazz queen

In this stunning and enchanting piece out of Stept Studios, we get an inside look as old traditions refuse to let jazz die in Harlem.  

Jazz is a thing of echoes. It’s recall and rhythm, it’s soft and gravelly, it’s hard to define but easy to recognize. Sundays at the Triple Nickel, a short docufilm directed by Jess Colquhoun, takes on the challenge of rending jazz understandable to the casual viewer, embedding the DNA of the art form into her work. 

Meeting Marjorie Eliot, she is a venerable, beautiful older woman, playing at her piano and walking through gardens in Harlem. She’s been an artist her whole life, embedding music into her children from an early age. When one of her sons dies young, she decides to honor him, turning sadness into joy every week, at the Sunday jazz celebration she hosts in her apartment. To her, the audience is the most pleasant part of the evening, as they gather in communion to respect her child.  

The grainy quality of the film reflects the subject. Sundays at the Triple Nickel looks dated, it looks like it’s out of the 70s, it has a mix of Grey Gardens and Eartha Kitt’s All By Myself, invoking that feeling of something very old, something reflexively made. The mood is like that of church, walking into gospel, and the creation of the film seems to be an elegy to jazz the same way that Marjorie’s concerts pay respect to her late son. The flowers lie like offerings on her piano; a tribute to the Black Madonna of jazz, the power of community and love.