Dumb Feds, Blind Fury, Deaf Jams
Two new music docs explore rhythm and evoke the bluest of blues
By Andy Klein
Context is everything. When reality overtakes art, a pretty good, aesthetically modest film can suddenly become deeply affecting in ways its makers could never have predicted.
So it is with Make It Funky!, a documentary on - brace yourself - New Orleans. More specifically, New Orleans music. And yet more specifically, New Orleans funk, mostly circa the '60s and '70s. The film arrives only 11 days after Katrina; the date was scheduled long ago, so it's sheer coincidence. While Sony Home Entertainment's plan is a week or two in the theaters and a DVD release very shortly thereafter, it might make sense now to arrange a more substantial theatrical window.
Director Michael Murphy has assembled something similar to last year's blues doc Lightning in a Bottle - primarily a concert film, interleaved with interviews and snippets of historical information. (Actually, the balance here is less toward the concert material than Lightning.) Much of the music was recorded live at the Saenger Theatre on April 27, 2004. The acts on display include the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Funky Meters, Irma Thomas, Ivan Neville, Allen Toussaint (playing a duo with Brit Jon Cleary), Lloyd Price, the Neville Brothers, Snooks Eaglin, and big-marquee-value guests Keith Richards and Bonnie Raitt.
Art Neville narrates, augmented by interviews with Atlantic Records' Ahmet Ertegun, N.O. studio owner Cosimo Matassa, and deejay Jim Russell.
As much as I love this music - I'm listening to the Meters' late-'60s stuff and Allen Toussaint's 1950s instrumentals while I write this - I missed the first few press screenings. I saw the film on Wednesday, August 31, as the misery in the Crescent City was reaching a crucial moment: People can go without water for two or three days; as I sat in the theater, many New Orleans folks had been without for about 60 hours. Do the math. And meanwhile, the authorities - primarily the federal government - were responding so sluggishly that it was hard to stick to my usual policy of not imputing malice where stupidity will serve. Much of FEMA's vile performance can be explained by sheer incompetence - and this administration's appointment policies nearly guarantee that. But how to explain the multiple, independent reports of FEMA turning away truckloads of goods that might have saved lives?
Could it be that the feds actually wanted to kill these people?
It's hard to imagine a scenario where that would be politically advantageous ... . Well, hard but not impossible: "This just goes to show that the federal government is not the proper actor for this sort of project, so let's shut down FEMA and leave disaster relief to the locals, thus freeing up more money for our brilliant Iraq adventure," or alternately "let's shut down FEMA and outsource disaster management to the private sector, in particular the fine folks at Halliburton/Kellogg Brown & Root, who really don't have any connection to Vice President Cheney anymore, no, really, honest."
Pardon me, but, if it's not obvious, I'm pissed and all too afraid that the Bush spinners will be able to dodge responsibility for even this impeachably catastrophic performance. Attempts to shift blame to the locals and the victims have already been dubbed "Rove v. Waders." (I wish I had thought of that.)
Okay, I'm drifting a bit far afield from my job here, which is reviewing movies, so let me return to the experience of watching Make It Funky! Every shot of beautiful old neighborhoods is a knife to the heart: You can only wonder which of them are still standing. Worse yet, how can you look at the scenes of people dancing in the streets and not wonder which of them are dead now?
Statements in the interviews trigger sardonic thoughts: When someone says "It's a city steeped in tradition," you think "Not anymore; now it's a city steeped in sewage." A city where music fills the streets? No, a city where bloated corpses fill the streets.
Fuck George Bush and the Supreme Court decision he rode in on. Mourn the death of William Rehnquist ... for not being more protracted and painful.
Meanwhile, go see Make It Funky! For all the filmmakers' joyous intentions, it should make you weep, even as you groove to music that can't be blown apart, flooded, starved, dehydrated, or otherwise murdered, no matter how hard the current administration might try.
Another music documentary opens this week, one with less timeliness but a good deal more art. Touch the Sound - from Thomas Riedelsheimer, who made the acclaimed Rivers and Tides - is a portrait of Evelyn Glennie, perhaps the most respected classical percussionist alive; certainly the best known classical percussionist ever.
Glennie, a Scot in her late 30s, isn't limited to the classical world. In addition to symphony orchestras, she has played with samba groups, Japanese Kodo drummers, Balinese gamelon ensembles, and Björk. She has written her own pieces and commissioned others.
Now for the punch line: She's deaf.
As a preadolescent, Glennie was studying piano when doctors informed her parents that she was losing her hearing. Not willing to give up music, she switched to percussion. She discovered that, by not wearing the hearing aids, she could learn to "hear" more fully with her whole body.
It's a tough concept to wrap your mind around. We've all experienced over-amped bass rattling our intestines and loud drums shaking our bones, but the effect is usually pretty blunt and inexact. In Touch the Sound, we see Glennie distinguishing tiny music-box tunes in the midst of bass drums thumping; if her perceptions are best tuned for discerning rhythm, she still seems able to "hear" pitch ... just not through her ears. It's a pretty amazing proof of the way the loss of one sense can induce the others to grow sharper to compensate. Still, her body cannot feel differences between words; when someone calls on the phone, her assistant has to mouth each sentence visibly to her so she can read his lips.
Although we accompany her to the family farm where she was raised, most of the film follows her to Japan, Germany, the U.S., and other countries, where she does solo numbers in public places, including the center floor at the Guggenheim Museum. Most frequently, we see her at Fred Frith's studio in Germany, jamming for an album.
Riedelsheimer lets Glennie talk and interviews a few other people, but his approach is much more ambitious and abstract. He plays with the soundtrack, forcing us to be constantly aware of the sorts of everyday noises that we are accustomed to filtering out - giving us a sense of how Glennie's body and mind feel their rhythmic patterns. At the same time, he often assembles gorgeous, abstract visual montages that recall Godfrey Reggio's -qatsi trilogy.
Published: 09/08/2005
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