Hawaii Five-O: Trouble in Mind

Trombonist Trummy Young played with Armstrong and Ellington, so when he partially-retired to Hawaii, he naturally became the big jazz cat on the local scene. Naturally, he would get the call for a jazz-themed episode of the original Hawaii Five-O. He even has a brief speaking part, but the star of the episode is jazz diva Nancy Wilson, who did a fair amount of guest shots during the 60s and 70s. Her best was probably the “Trouble in Mind” episode of Hawaii Five-O, which airs Tuesday on Me TV Plus.

Wilson plays Eadie Jordan, a popular jazz vocalist much like herself, but hopefully not totally like her. She will be playing some high-profile gigs at the Waikiki Shell with her pianist-musical director-ambiguous lover, Mike Martin, who was just paroled on a drug charge. What McGarrett doesn’t know is that Martin has always been clean. He just took the wrap for Jordan.

This is a bad time to be strung out in the 50^th State, where a batch of lethally poisoned smack is in circulation. That is why Kono was casing the little club Jordan and Martin came to score. Martin ends up cold-cocking him to protect her, even though he knew it would jam him up with the law.

It turns out square-looking McGarrett is an Eadie Jordan fan—a real fan who knows every obscure record she cut. That changes the dynamics of tonight’s episode, from a typical cops-versus-dealers story to a race to save Jordan from herself. More than most episodes of the era, “Trouble in Mind” depicts drug addiction as a health issue, just as much as a law enforcement problem.

In fact, even the dealer who is the episode’s ostensive villainous figure is surprisingly sympathetic—and ultimately almost as tragic a figure as Jordan. He too is a former jazz musician, who boosts he still has his 802 Union card (the New York musicians’ local).

Wilson gives a truly bold performance as Jordan, probably drawing on the infamous struggles of Billie Holiday and other musicians she may have known. She performs bluesy renditions of “Trouble in Mind” and “Stormy Monday,” as well as a brassy arrangement of “Spinning Wheel,” very much like the cover she released the year before. Morton Stevens is credited with the music for this episode. Having arranged for Sinatra and many of his Rat Pack fans, he clearly had a good feel for old standards. This is definitely the “jazz episode” of Five-O, because Wilson and Young are also joined by bassist Red Callendar, who also gets a line of dialogue.

Sundance ’20: Sylvie’s Love

Nobody ever said loving a jazz musician was easy. Sylvie Johnson can tell you about that. They are always on the road and they never get paid what their talents deserve, but they feel things very deeply. Johnson cannot help loving tenor titan Robert Holloway, but the world seems to conspire against their romance in Eugene Ashe’s Sylvie’s Love, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Johnson is the daughter of a prominent Harlem family. If truth be told, her mother the etiquette teacher is the prominent one, rather than her father, “Mr. Jay,” a former musician and owner of a hip record store. That is where Holloway first met her. He went in looking for the latest Monk record, Brilliant Corners (the Fantasy/Riverside/Contemporary catalog of labels get prime placement in the film), but he applies for a part-time position to woo Johnson. Rather inconveniently, she is engaged to the proper sort of man her mother approves of, but their mutual attraction is undeniable.

Somehow, despite the passion, they just don’t end up together in 1957. The pattern will repeat when they cross paths again in 1962. He is still a sideman in the Dickie Brewster Quartet. The band is having some success, but it is mainly the less talented leader who is benefiting. To a great extent, this is because he is sleeping with their manager, who is rather transparently and unfairly based on the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. He also owns all the publishing rights for the group’s tunes.

By this time, Johnson has married her respectable fiancé and they have a little girl they both adore, but her heart still belongs to Holloway. Her only real satisfaction comes from her work as a TV production assistant for a large New York affiliate, until Holloway reappears again (and again).

This is a wonderfully lush period production that perfectly captures the look and texture of an era when Howard Johnson’s was a Times Square landmark. It also gets the jazz right, starting with the lovely Nancy Wilson standard playing over the opening credits (if this film gets distributed relatively widely, it could very well put Wilson back on the charts). Even the jazz dialogue, especially Holloway and Johnson’s shop talk, sounds legit for the times. The original music composed by Fabrice Lecomte also sounds era-appropriate and swings quite nicely. You can definitely say the Brewster band can play, since their musical parts are supplied by musicians like Mark Turner on tenor and Uri Caine on piano.

The music is terrific, but the drama can get a little manipulative at times. Frankly, the contrivances keeping the two lovers are often clumsily forced. Be that as it may, Nnamdi Asomugha rises above it as the cool-on-the-outside, blue-and-sentimental-on-the-inside Holloway. He carries himself like a musician on the bandstand and slow burns with passion and pride when he is off. He also develops some deeply soulful chemistry with Tessa Thompson’s Johnson.