“I just wanted to get at that a little bit.” It’s a part of American history that Chazelle explicitly wanted to spotlight: “ had sort of a conjoined birth,” he told New York Magazine in December. It was only as musicians began to tinker with (and eventually subvert) those songs that the genres grew apart. In the era of those early musicals, jazz and pop were more or less one, which meant the songs they produced were simply hits that musicians across genres would be compelled to perform. The hundreds of musicals that soon followed, from the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy (1930) to the groundbreaking Stormy Weather (1943) to basically the entire Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers oeuvre, created what’s now known as the Great American Songbook.

With that first “talkie” came the first movie-assisted jazz standard, the Irving Berlin-penned “Blue Skies.” Jazz and musicals have been tied since the very first feature-length “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), which starred then-megastar Al Jolson as a Jewish immigrant trying to make it as a jazz singer (both in the film and outside of it, Jolson performed in blackface - the film was loosely autobiographical). The perverse thing, though, is that those same problematic musicals are actually an essential part of jazz history. 2 on Billboard 200 Chart, Weeknd Spends Third Week at No.

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