Local director memorializes forgotten jazz legend

Seattle filmmaker Kristian St. Clair’s inspiration for his first feature documentary, “This is Gary McFarland,” stemmed from his childhood appreciation for McFarland’s jazz music and a concern that McFarland wasn’t getting a fair shake from music history.

McFarland worked mostly out of New York City and California; St. Clair’s great love for music, film, and filmmaking came up through his Seattle roots. The director grew up in Lake City and Sand Point neighborhoods and has lived in various parts of the city; his current home is in the Central Area.

St. Clair studied journalism and history at the University of Washington, but he grew up loving movies. He recalled, as a kid, his father pushing a television out onto the family’s deck, so everyone could watch “Operation Petticoat,” starring Cary Grant. St. Clair has watched thousands of films, but his all-time favorite remains another Cary Grant feature: “North by Northwest,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

He found work at Seattle’s legendary video store Scarecrow Video, where he worked alongside the store’s co-founders, Rebecca Latsios and her husband, the late George Latsios.

St. Clair has loved jazz from childhood, starting out with his parents’ Dave Brubeck records, and Scarecrow Video led him to a pivotal jazz documentary film, “Jazz on A Summer’s Day,” shot at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

St. Clair took a job at Amazon after leaving Scarecrow Video and geared up to make a movie about his musical idol, a man who’d largely been forgotten.

McFarland (1933-1971) was a jazz composer, arranger and vibraphonist who performed and/or recorded with such jazz giants as Anita O’Day, Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan and Johnny Hodges. He co-founded a record label and worked an interesting combination of jazz and pop, before his sad, bizarre death in a New York City poisoning.

The project eventually became St. Clair’s finished film “This is Gary McFarland,” released to DVD by Seattle’s Light in the Attic Records. He credits his collaborator, Joel Ozretich, who co-produced the film and conducted many of the interviews, with being a crucial help. The two studied together in the UW’s now-defunct broadcast journalism program, and the film took shape over “many nights drinking many beers at the College Inn Pub.”

The DVD edition of the film comes with a special Seattle-centric bonus: a compact disc of McFarland and his group, playing the Penthouse jazz club, which stood at the corner of First Avenue and Cherry Street, just off Pioneer Square. It operated between 1962 and 1968, hosting all kinds of big and small names in jazz, including John Coltrane, George Shearing and Miles Davis.

The tape comes courtesy of Jim Wilke, a Seattle resident since 1961, who ran a radio show from the Penthouse on KING-FM and has a library of hundreds of hours of live tapes.

“The essence of the Penthouse broadcasts were to capture the sound of each band as it played a typical set in the club,” he elaborates. “This tape is exactly that and typifies the sound of that band during that engagement. I think Gary McFarland was aiming at more of pop market than most jazz players. He was a good jazz musician, but he might be considered a forerunner of the smooth-jazz movement.”

St. Clair also thanks film editor Emily von W. Gilbert with helping him to rework the film for its DVD release; he added performance footage of McFarland, redid the film’s animation and inserted one piece of footage he’d been struggling for years to secure: a Fresca commercial McFarland shot a few years before his death.

Now a Microsoft employee, the director is currently working with Gilbert on a film about arranger/producer/composer Jack Nitzsche.

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