Re: PBS Blues series starts Sep 28th

"Gary W." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> Scorsese et al.
> 
> Some descriptions @ http://www.stlblues.net/pbs_blues.htm
> 
> Gary Wesley


Here's another good description of the series. Should be pretty good.

Rich G.


http://www.newyorker.com/critics/television/?030929crte_television

BLUES CLUES
by NANCY FRANKLIN
The music heard round the world.
Issue of 2003-09-29
Posted 2003-09-22
There is probably no American filmmaker whose movies are more colored
by—even, sometimes, propelled by—music than Martin Scorsese's, so
music fans have been eagerly looking forward to the seven-part PBS
series "The Blues," for which he served as executive producer. At the
beginning of the first film in the series, "Feel Like Going Home,"
which Scorsese also directed, he says, "I can't imagine my life, or
anyone else's, without music. It's like a light in the darkness that
never goes out." He gave six other directors the freedom to make the
films they wanted to make, while seeing to it that the basic
ground—the history and influence of the Delta blues—was more or less
covered. The resulting movies, individually and as a group, make no
pretense to definitiveness—blues fanatics, and even normal music fans,
will notice omissions. But though the series isn't quite a balanced
meal—each course lasts about ninety minutes—by the end of it you are
likely to feel full. (You may feel a little too full, in fact: the
series, which begins this Sunday, runs for seven straight nights—not
the most viewer-friendly programming approach.)

The movies in "The Blues" all have a loose, just-let-the-film-roll
feel, and they've been edited in what comes across as a slapdash way,
which may be the result of an executive decision to let the music
speak for itself as much as possible. (The final film in the lineup,
directed by Clint Eastwood, wasn't ready for viewing at press time.)
The series is aimed more at the ears, and the heart, than at the head.
Often you have no idea of the significance of an archival
performance—of what you're supposed to be listening for and how it
influenced other musicians—or why the contemporary footage in a given
film is sometimes shot in black-and-white and sometimes in color. But
the films (with one exception) do have life in them, and their rich
material commands your attention.

As the lead-off film in the series, Scorsese's has to establish the
music's roots, and it does so in a leisurely amble through blues
history, beginning in Mississippi, working its way across to Alabama,
and then over to West Africa and back. Our tour guide is Corey Harris,
a young musical polymath whose own recordings have explored numerous
arteries of the blues. This I know thanks to Google; the show never
properly identifies him, despite the fact that current blues
practitioners are more likely to need an introduction than the ones
from fifty years ago. Although the film opens with some startlingly
strange old footage of three men in a field, dancing and playing a
fife and drums, and then, halfway through, startles us further by
showing us the same music being played in northern Mississippi today,
its coverage of the basics—tales of John and Alan Lomax recording
musicians in the nineteen-thirties for the Library of Congress; black
work gangs being watched over by a rifle-toting white man; people
picking cotton; the grizzled bluesman Son House laying down the law
about what the blues is ("Ain't but one kind of blues. And that
consists between male and female that's in love")—oddly lacks much of
Scorsese's usual personality and drive.

Wim Wenders's film, "The Soul of a Man," is both disorganized and
didactic. After an inexplicable beginning—in which you hear the
disembodied voice of a man pretending to be Blind Willie Johnson,
talking about how a record he cut in 1927 went up into deep space on
Voyager—you get a lot of 1931 performances by Skip James, alternating
with latter-day covers by such musicians as Beck, Lucinda Williams,
Lou Reed, and Bonnie Raitt. But it's hard to decide whether you even
like the newer versions, since you get only snippets of the songs and
you're too busy comparing those with snippets of the originals. It's
like being at the eye doctor: Better? Or worse? Better? Or worse? Or
the same? In the middle of "The Soul of a Man" is a film within the
film: some wonderfully homey footage taken in the mid-sixties of J. B.
Lenoir, who wrote songs about the Vietnam War and civil rights. (The
film was made for Swedish TV, by a couple named Steve and Ronnog
Seaberg, but was never shown.) Here, too, we hear contemporary
performers sing fragments of the old songs—which is particularly
maddening in the case of Bonnie Raitt's gorgeously sensual but
truncated rendition of the Lenoir song "Round and Round."

Richard Pearce's "The Road to Memphis" is also about the road away
from Memphis—the touring life that is the lot of most musicians—and
it's the first movie of the series to deal overtly with race. (Harris
does say at the beginning of the first movie that music is "the one
thing they could never take away from black people," but that leaves a
lot unsaid about the knotty fact that the blues as we know it owes its
very existence to all the things that had already been taken away from
black people.) The movie gives a real sense of the buffetings the
musicians took as a result of commercial decisions, changes in popular
taste, and complicated racial attitudes—buffetings that sometimes
lifted them up and sometimes knocked them down. Once soul music and
rock came into the picture, things changed. B. B. King talks about
being booed one night in Baltimore. "It was like being black twice,"
he says. Then he talks about the astonishing response he got some
years later, after white college kids had discovered the blues. At the
Fillmore, in San Francisco, in 1968, the audience stood up and
applauded, a reception that made King cry. "That night," he says,
"instead of ninety per cent black, we had ninety-five per cent
white—the first time ever. And that was a feeling I don't know how to
describe but I wish I could."

"Warming by the Devil's Fire," the movie by Charles Burnett, who
happens to be the only black director in the series, is educational in
the worst way. It tells the fictional story of a Northern boy who is
sent to the South in 1956 to visit his ne'er-do-well Uncle Buddy and
to be properly baptized. Every line in this canned narrative teaches a
lesson, and you can imagine thousands of bored schoolchildren zinging
rubber bands and spitballs across the classroom while they watch. The
movie that follows, "Godfathers and Sons," by Marc Levin, also suffers
a little from having a point to prove—that hip-hop is connected to the
blues. Chuck D., of Public Enemy, talks a few too many times about how
he was affected by a 1968 rock-infused Muddy Waters album called
"Electric Mud," and how kids today know nothing of their musical
history. "Electric Mud" was produced by Marshall Chess, the son and
nephew of the founders of Chess Records, the most influential Chicago
blues label, and in "Godfathers and Sons" Chess himself is on hand to
tell the stories of the label and of his family. But while Chess's
heart is clearly in the right place—he loves music and musicians—his
mouth often isn't. Chess Records was probably run more responsibly and
responsively than most labels of the day, but Marshall doesn't do its
legacy any favors with comments like "It wasn't the label that said,
‘I want to be the company store'—it was the artists coming every day:
‘I need, I want.'"

The sixth installment, Mike Figgis's "Red, White & Blues," is
delicious for music fans who know only a little something about the
cross-pollination between American blues, folk, jazz, and rock and
English music-hall, dance-band music, and skiffle that produced the
British Invasion (and led to the late-sixties blues revival here).
British musicians from Humphrey Lyttleton, a bandleader born in 1921,
to Eric Clapton and Lonnie Donegan talk on camera about how they
absorbed, in a ravenously indiscriminate way, every strain of American
music that made its way across the ocean. Having seen, in earlier
movies in the series, how deep the roots of the blues go, you see in
this one how far its branches have reached.

Scorsese's series shows that the blues really is everybody's music.
It's ultimately impossible to define—it's a feeling, and you know it
when you hear it. Several musicians in the six movies say that the
blues is the truth; at the end of Figgis's film, B. B. King says that
the blues is "life—life as we live it today, life as we lived it in
the past, and life as I believe we'll live it in the future." Or, as a
member of an earlier British Invasion almost put it, "Blues is truth,
truth blues—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."