Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop is impressed by THE EDDY (Glen Ballard, Damien Chazelle, Randy Kerber, Alan Poul, Jack Thorne, UK, Germany, USA, France, 2020)

When Jack Thorne was given a writer’s brief for the The Eddy, the series was to be set in “a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-faith Parisian jazz club”. 

Years before, however, the series had started life as a jazz club in the mind of the Grammy Award winning music producer Glen Ballard: “I have lived in Paris a long-time and have been to every jazz club multiple times”.

Ballard’s career includes recording and writing for Michael Jackson’s albums Thriller, Badand Dangerous, but his ultimate aim for The Eddy was a television series. By the time production started he’d written over 40 songs with his collaborator Randy Kerber whose own career includes piano work for a vast number of films and who has worked with an awe-inspiring list of artists from Frank Sinatra to Leonard Cohen.

Kerber also plays the brilliant pianist in The Eddy alongside the other musicians in the band. They were all chosen for their musical talents, not their acting skills.

With producer Alan Poul, Ballard and Kerber enlisted the help of French-American film director Damien Chazelle (below, before he directed Whiplash and La La Land) and also the prolific hit-and-miss British screenwriter Jack Thorne.

Thorne wrote what was asked: a struggling jazz club in a gritty part of Paris run by renowned former jazz pianist Elliot Udo (André Holland), an African-American from New York, who is in an on-again-off-again relationship with the band’s Polish singer Maja (Joanna Kulig), while also struggling with his wayward 16-year-old daughter Julie (Amandla Stenberg, below). 

Elliot’s partner in the jazz club is Farid (Tahar Rahim) and he has become secretly involved with violent local criminal gangs in an effort to keep The Eddy from going under.

Other band members are from Eastern Europe, Haiti, North Africa, Cuba and Croatia. There are also local Moroccan musicians fusing hip-hop with traditional Islamic music; and they’d also like time on The Eddy’s stage. 

There are many references to the history of Parisian jazz, home for a time to the likes of African-Americans Sidney Bechet, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis. Glen Ballard has said; “The mission for me was to connect young listeners and viewers to what jazz really could be…Paris never gave up on jazz.”

Spoken in French, Arabic, English and Polish and shot on 16mm with camera movements inspired by John Cassavetes, it retains its uniqueness through all eight episodes.

And there’s lashings of jazz - all exemplary.