Netflix series The Eddy will wow music fans – Paris-set drama is a love letter to jazz, its grime and glamour
- Alanis Morrissette’s producer on Jagged Little Pill, Glen Ballard, set the ball rolling for The Eddy by writing a suite of jazz songs
- Chazelle, a fan of jazz and half French but who’d never filmed in Paris, brought enthusiasm to the project, and set its tone by directing the first two episodes
“It’s a sad idea, but jazz to me is an art born of suffering,” says Damien Chazelle. The American writer-director is making his TV debut with The Eddy, an eight-episode Netflix drama set in a modern-day Parisian jazz club, and it is full of exactly that suffering, as characters contend with debts, violence, grief, anxiety and addiction.
No wonder the show’s lead, Elliot Udo, smokes roll-up cigarettes as if his life depends on it.
Gritty and grimy but glorious with it, The Eddy began with Glen Ballard, the Grammy-winning music producer behind American-Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette’s classic album Jagged Little Pill. His notion was always to create a contemporary-sounding show.
“There aren’t any old jazz standards,” he warns. “It’s about you taking a journey with these characters and their circumstance and understanding the high cost of chasing this dream called jazz.”
In 2013, Ballard went to producer-director Alan Poul with a suite of jazz songs he’d written. Cannily, Poul recruited the up-and-coming Chazelle, who was immediately enthused.