Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Release: Jazz on a Summer’s Day

Digital, DVD, Blu-ray Release Date: Feb. 9, 2021
Price: Blu-ray $19.89, DVD $13.99
Studio: Kino Lorber


Though I’ve never attended the seminal Newport Jazz Festival, I’m always up for revisiting Jazz on a Summer’s Day, photographer Bert Stern and Aram Svakian’s 1959 concert documentary on the 1958 edition of the annual musical celebration.

Anita O’Day in Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

It’s back on disc and digital from Kino Lorber, extensively restored in 4K by IndieCollect utilizing the best surviving vault elements.

Summer’s Day’s method mixes luxuriously colored footage of the city and surrounding yacht races with a front-row seat to the festival’s performances as observed by a fashionable, oh-so-hip audience. The lineup and numbers are first-rate, particularly Anita O’Day’s scatting “Tea for Two,” Thelonious Monk tinkling “Blue Monk” and Louis Armstrong letting loose on “Up a Lazy River.”

This new edition contains the following Blu-ray extras:

-“Bert Stern: Original Madman” (2011 documentary by Shannah Laumeister Stern)
-Archival interviews with director Bert Stern |Bern Stern photo galleries
-Booklet essay by Nate Chinen, author of “Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century”
-Audio commentary

Buy or Rent Jazz on a Summer’s Day

About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.