Jean Bach

{{Short description|American film director}}

{{distinguish|Jean Back}}

Jean Bach (September 27, 1918 – May 27, 2013) was an American documentary film director, radio producer and jazz aficionado. Bach directed the 1994 documentary, A Great Day in Harlem, based on a 1958 photograph of the same name.{{cite news|first=Douglas|last=Martin|title=Jean Bach, Jazz Documentarian and Fan, Dies at 94 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/movies/jean-bach-jazz-documentarian-and-fan-dies-at-94.html |work=New York Times |date=2013-05-28 |access-date=2013-06-19}}

Bach was born Jean Enzinger in Chicago on September 27, 1918, and raised in Milwaukee. She made frequent trips to Harlem and the Apollo Theater as a student at Vassar College. She became a fixture in New York's jazz scene for the rest of her life.

The black-and-white photograph which formed the basis of A Great Day in Harlem is a portrait of fifty-seven prominent jazz musicians who were photographed in front of a brownstone at 17 East 126th Street in the Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan. Bach learned that jazz bassist Milt Hinton had a home movie from the day of the photo shoot in 1958. She acquired Hinton's home movie and used it for archival footage for her own film, A Great Day in Harlem, an hour-long documentary released in 1994. Her film won the top award from the Chicago International Film Festival and earned an Academy Award for Documentary Feature nomination in 1995.{{cite web |url=https://movies.nytimes.com/movie/134318/A-Great-Day-in-Harlem/details |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110521134612/http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/134318/A-Great-Day-in-Harlem/details |url-status=dead |archive-date=2011-05-21 |department=Movies & TV Dept. |work=The New York Times |date=2011 |title=NY Times: A Great Day in Harlem |access-date=2008-11-20}}

Jean Bach died at her home in Manhattan on May 27, 2013, at the age of 94. Her husband, Bob Bach, a production coordinator on What's My Line?, whom she married in 1948, died in 1985.