by ·Comments Off on Kansas City / Jazz ’34 (1996, Robert Altman)

Finally a period movie that acknowledges that everyone is named Johnny. Altman took note of Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Hudsucker Proxy‘s 1930s and cast her in his own 1930s flick. It’s less a follow-up to Hudsucker than a precursor to Uncut Gems (someone tears around town making a lot of noise and pissing people off until they are shot in the head).

Rosenbaum calls the story “borderline terrible”:

It counts on the dubious premise that a gangster (Harry Belafonte) would fritter away a whole night deciding what to do with a thief who rips him off — thereby enabling the thief’s significant other (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to kidnap a society lady (Miranda Richardson) and Altman to crosscut to his heart’s content as he exposes the inner workings of a city on the eve of a local election.

“Democrats: they’re whatever they’re paid to be.” I could take or leave the Belafonte plot with Dermot “Johnny” Mulroney or the election rigging plot with Steve “Johnny” Buscemi (another actor cribbed from the Coens’ period films), but greatly enjoyed hanging out with Leigh and Richardson, the stars of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Spider.

Jane Adams:

Christian McBride:

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Jazz ’34

All the music performances from Belafonte’s club in Kansas City allowed to run at their full length, with multiple narrators giving context. Not exactly a rock doc, but not far off – 1990s jazz guys pretending to be 1930s jazz guys, but they’re actually playing the music, so it’s a concert film. It is popular to say that this movie is better than parent film, but only I have the bravery to say: they are both good.

Ron Carter:

by ·Comments Off on Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988, Charlotte Zwerin)

Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa. Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee. A musician’s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I’ve seen. I first heard him in another doc, his mouth wide open, playing technically-imperfect tunes, immediately striking, a true jazz weirdo. That movie’s archive footage was shot in 1969, this one’s in 1967, both released decades later.

Paul Grimstad for Criterion:

From the [1967] Blackwood footage, interspersed with other archival film, photographs, new interviews, and narration, Zwerin distilled an hour-and-a-half-long structure not all that different from a Monk composition: jumpy, elliptical, catchy, moving … As a counterpoint to the archival material, Zwerin shot new footage of pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris (both Detroit natives, like Zwerin) playing through Monk tunes as four-hand duets. We see how much fun they’re having, how generous and congenial their sharing of the music is, and how a Monk song like “Well, You Needn’t” allows for endless elaboration without its melodic outline ever becoming blurred.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 16: Jazz, Race, & Poetry

Same Vogel chapter as The Spanish Earth, “Left and Revolutionary Cinema: the West.” Useful to note that Vogel is never posting lists of his favorite movies, but the ones that illustrate a particular quality or movement – he spends half this chapter complaining about early 1970s Godard.

Unfortunately, the resultant films – from British Sounds to Tout Va Bien – prove that to “will” political cinema into being without the mediation of art is self-defeating. Despite brilliant sequences (reminiscent of the “old” Godard), these works are visually sterile, intellectually shallow, and, in terms of their overbearing, insistent soundtracks didactic, pedantic, dogmatic.

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The Cry of Jazz (1959, Edward Bland)

“Rock and roll is not jazz.” Argument within a college(?) jazz club about whether only Black people could have created jazz, the white boys arguing that there are plenty of white players so race has nothing to do with it. Narrator Alex explains how music works (repeating chorus, changes/harmonies) and how jazz has evolved, culminating in the hottest group of today, the Sun Ra Arkestra. While the kids are stuck arguing in their musicless bland room, our camera hits the streets and the clubs seeking examples for Alex’s explanations. After a savage scene comparing Black life (pool game) to white life (poodle getting a haircut), eventually there’s a short debate over whether Americans have souls, concluding ambivalently: “America’s soul is an empty void.” For a half-hour movie that begins looking like a MST3K educational short, this sure takes some wild turns.

The two restraining elements in jazz are the form and the changes. They are restraining because of their endless repetition, in much the same way that the Negro experiences the endless daily humiliation of American life, which bequeaths him a futureless future. In conflict with America’s gift of a futureless future is the Negro’s image of himself. Through glorifying the inherent joy and freedom in each present moment of life, the Negro transforms America’s image of him into a transport of joy. Denied a future, the joyous celebration of the present is the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him. Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal recreation of the present. The Negro’s freeing worship of the present in jazz occurs through the constant creation of new ideas in jazz. These new ideas are born by improvising through the restraints of the form and the changes. Jazz reflects the improvised life thrust upon the Negro. Now, melody is one element which can be used in improvisation. The soloist creates this melody through elaborating on various details of the changes. The manner in which each change shall be elaborated upon is a problem of the eternal present. As Negro life admits of many individual solutions, so does the way in which a change can be elaborated upon. Of course the Negro, as man and/or jazzman, must be constantly creative, for that is how he remains free. Otherwise, the dehumanizing portrait America has drawn of him will triumph.

Editor Howard Alk worked on Dylan movies, and one of the jazz club girls grew up to be Magnolia‘s Rose Gator. Bland went on to arrange for Sun Ra in New York and compose orchestral works. From his NY Times obituary:

The British critic Kenneth Tynan, in a column for The London Observer, wrote that it “does not really belong to the history of cinematic art, but it assuredly belongs to history” as “the first film in which the American Negro has issued a direct challenge to the white.”

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I’m a Man (1969, Peter Rosen)

“Police are always frightened.” John walks through a Connecticut town carrying a spear in order to provoke white people, then calls his wife to say he’s about to be arrested. The doc(?) interviews people from John’s court case: the whites think he’s incompetent, the blacks realize he’s an intellectual. John sees himself as a militant, says he expects to die poor and hated, but aims to increase freedom for his kids.

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Wholly Communion (1966, Peter Whitehead)

Something completely different: document of a post-beatnik pre-hippie poetry reading in June 1965 at Royal Albert Hall. “This evening is an experiment” – with minor crowd disturbance or drama or movement, it’s mostly just guys reading poetry with better-than-decent sound recording.

Ginsberg listens and waits his turn:

by ·Comments Off on Zorn I-III (2010-2022, Mathieu Amalric)

Zorn I (2010-2016)

Rehearsing bands, mixing albums… setting up and breaking down equipment, cleaning his sax, unglamorous work. It documents JZ’s first time working with Nate Smith at The Stone, which is such a small place. Amalric is recruited to read some Rimbaud on the Conneries album. No onscreen text but if you cross-reference with Discogs you can figure out when some of the scenes took place. When I am rich, after buying every Tzadik album I’d like to find or recreate the black t-shirts Zorn is always wearing with his different ensemble designs.

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Zorn II (2016-2018)

“It was terrible when John started working with people who could actually read music. It fucked things up for the rest of us” – Ribot. Zorn and Dave Lombardo played a duo set at the Louvre. They soundtrack Harry Smith films, and during a dance scene Amalric cuts in some Maya Deren. This episode is more concert-backstage, shows and rehearsals, almost wall-to-wall music, and is therefore great.

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Zorn III (2018 – 2022)

Emails between Barbara Hannigan and JZ combines with some Cobra philosophy scenes to make this one about the composer’s relationship with the musician, really good. Prepping a difficult vocal piece which will be Hannigan’s JZ debut in Lisbon with Gosling as her pianist. Gave me a better appreciation for that first BH/JZ CD, which I’d written off as “not my thing” a few weeks earlier. Amalric seems intent on making each of these movies a different type of thing (this one is intensive prep/process) instead of just “more adventures in the life of Zorn.” Good quotes:
“You’ll see me start to die. That’ll be your cue.”
“You can go relatively satanic on this one.”
“I keep forgetting you people have to breathe.”

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Must hear soon:
Masada box
Moonchild trio
Psychomagia
Zorn/Hannigan 1 and 2

by ·Comments Off on Mo’ Better Blues (1990, Spike Lee)

Spike Lee manages a jazz band composed of trumpeter Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes on sax, Radio Raheem on bass, Sweet Dick Willie on drums and Giancarlo Esposito on keys, and I’m fine, I’m very happy with all this, don’t need any kind of storyline. But we get one anyway, with Spike’s gambling debts and poor management, Snipes wishing to lead his own group, and Denzel juggling two girls: Joie Lee and Cynda Williams (later of the Arkansas-set One False Move). Movie is heavyhanded with its ideas, everyone telling Denzel that he doesn’t know what he wants in life. He gets what he gets – busted in the face by Sam Jackson while trying to defend Spike, ending up with a family with Joie and no music career, overall a halfway decent script, but with ten of my favorite actors and some of the greatest scene staging of the decade, an excellent movie. In Rosenbaum’s heavy jazz-analysis review he reports the movie was to be titled A Love Supreme “until Coltrane’s widow denied him permission, reportedly because of the film’s use of profanity.”

by ·Comments Off on The Other One (2023, Henry Threadgill)

It’s hard to make time for the movies at Big Ears, but sometimes they’re programmed at 10am so you can watch one without missing any concerts. I would’ve loved to see The Tuba Thieves but it conflicted with Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant, and I later heard that Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave and subsequent interview got delayed by an hour, which would’ve made me miss Secret Chiefs 3 and Kronos Quartet. This didn’t conflict with anything except brunch, and I’d already seen Threadgill’s Very Very Circus ensemble and knew I like his music. This was consumer-looking-video of a few interwoven Threadgill covid-era projects. Primarily it’s a concert performance of a new piece, music played by a small orchestra he’s conducting with pauses to read poetry off projected pages (their layout and typography being as good as the language). There are sections where he’s arranging small mystical objects while yelling at cloud in voiceover, and slideshows of the photographs he took of junk New Yorkers put out on the sidewalk when they had to actually inhabit their apartments due to the pandemic.

by ·Comments Off on Rewind & Play (2022, Alain Gomis)

Grungy documentary outtakes, then a French TV studio – the idea being that Gomis is showing the rushes from a conventional half-hour Thelonious Monk TV appearance. We do get to hear him play more than once, first in a traveling shot around the studio where everyone else is chatting and not paying any attention, then for a few songs in a row after the interviews have gone badly.

A Michael Caine-ish host talks about Monk to the viewers in French while leaning on the piano, then they do retakes of the interview questions until it feels like Monk is caught in a Lynchian limbo. Monk suggests they forget the interview and go to dinner, they can’t have a conversation because the interviewer wants to rephrase everything in French and Monk won’t repeat the same answer twice in the same way. And certain topics are forbidden as “not nice.” This movie landed with good timing for me, as I’m “getting into jazz” and just watched a trio whose latest album is a Monk tribute.

Michael Sicinski on lboxd:

Gomis’s presentation of the material, largely untouched, not only displays the technical mechanics involved in “making TV,” although there’s that. When Monk doesn’t provide satisfactory answers to Renaud’s questions, the crew adopts a plan-b mode, showing Monk playing during extended shots, and then later shooting B-roll with Renaud pretending to listen appreciatively. But more than this, we are seeing how a media apparatus deals with an artist it finds difficult or uncooperative. French TV is trying to sell a product called “Thelonious Monk,” and the man himself is perceived as an impediment to that pandering.

Max Goldberg in Cinema Scope:

Rewind & Play brings to light the violence of getting an artist to say what you want them to say. Not coincidentally, it also centres the musical performances recorded for Jazz Portrait, allowing them to flow together as a solid block of song. Taken together, the two things insinuate a sharp critique of the standard music documentary.

by ·Comments Off on Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960, Aram Avakian & Bert Stern)

After the Prince movie, I went back to Criterion for more music docs and gave Deep Blues (1992) a shot. Looking for blues guys playing music, but we got the guy from Eurythmics shopping for voodoo stuff in Memphis. Might give it another shot sometime since RL Burnside’s in the cast and Glenn Kenny recommends it, but for now we switched from blues to jazz.

Opening credits over beautiful shots of reflections in wavy water, already a good sign. An outdoor festival, single stage I think. Since it’s mostly in broad daylight, they’re able to shoot audience member antics, which often involve impractical hats, and there’s a boat race happening in the same town in case the editors need a visual shift. Cutaway skits of a portable jazz band traveling around town, in a car, to an amusement park, houses, a rooftop. Just a perfect lesson in how to make a music doc in an engaging way, codirected by fashion photographer Stern and filmmaker Avakian, whose brother George was the fest’s music producer.

The music itself – well, my idea of “jazz” has been warped by last month’s Big Ears fest, so it took some time to get into the 1950’s groove. As with Big Ears, there’s also a non-jazz headliner in Chuck Berry. A toothy, confident scat-singing white woman almost derails it (this was Anita O’Day – apparently John Cameron Mitchell is a fan), but things pick up nicely, culminating with night sets by Louis Armstrong and Summer of Soul fave Mahalia Jackson.

by ·Comments Off on Space Is The Place (1974, John Coney)

“It’s after the end of the world / Don’t you know that yet?”

Sun Ra finds a new planet, decides to bring over some Black people. He appears in the 1940’s as stage pianist “Sunny Ray,” playing futuristic jazz piano to the annoyance of the patrons (the Back to the Future of its time). Some sort of interdimensional devil finds him, and challenges him to card games in the middle of the desert.

Somehow I thought this movie was a concert/rock doc, but it’s not a doc of any sort. Ra ends up in present-day California and observes all kinds of dickish behavior. He is kidnapped by NASA agents, who tie him up and torture him by playing him “Dixie” in headphones, until he’s rescued by young men who were earlier arguing about whether Sun Ra was selling out by releasing his music on LPs. There’s a sidetrack where the (white/racist) NASA guys beat up some prostitutes, a running joke where the devil-man has two naked women and his crony gets excited only to be kicked out so the devil can have both women for himself, and at the end, one of the young men sacrifices himself to save Sun Ra from an assassin, then all the decent(ish) Black people are raptured away to Ra’s planet before Earth explodes.

The youth of today:

The wikis say Ra made his own edit, 20 minutes shorter, cutting out the blaxploition stuff, which would probably be for the best. No info on the director… cowriter Josh Smith’s other credit is a G-rated family movie about a kid’s baby seal. Devil-man (Ashley Clark called him a “megapimp”) is Ray Johnson, who showed up 15 years later in a previously unheard-of TV version of The Bourne Identity, and his hanger-on is Chris Brooks, who played both Hieronymus Bosch and Jesus Christ in his short career. But that’s all if you believe IMDB credits, which are often bunk. I see a John and a Chris, a Johnson and a Smith – these are all generic pseudonyms, since this movie was clearly made by aliens from the future.