The Nashville Film Festival is underway. In fact it's winding down to its last two days, but I finally got to spend some time over there to sample the music docs. After the jump, I review The Bass Player (A Song For Dad), about jazz and family, Do It Again, about a music journalist's quixotic quest to reunite the Kinks, and Waiting For A Train, about an endearing Japanese man who adopted bluegrass music and the nation that gave birth to it. Hopefully more to come in the next couple of days.
The Bass Player
It was the kind of preview that makes one imagine an uncomfortable hour in the dark: “As Niall McKay helps his elderly father Jim, a jazz bass player, return home to Ireland, father and son revisit Niall’s tumultuous childhood with an abusive, unpredictable mother and a musician father who was often on the road.” Honestly, if it hadn’t been for the words “jazz bass player,” I’d have missed it.
But I’m really glad I didn’t. There’s a great deal of sadness and melancholy in it, but I left the theater feeling markedly better and clearer than I went in. It was the blues as film – catharsis and music mingled together. Father and son speak openly, if haltingly, about the boundlessly frustrating and heart-breaking woman who was at the center of their lives. They reflect on her suicide. And all the while, father Jim practices his bass, both jazz changes and Bach, which he plays studiously. We get to see Jim perform one tune with his jazz quartet (establishing that he really is good), and he plays with a violinist at Niall’s wedding to his filmmaking partner Marissa Aroy (an incredibly cheering scene). So throughout, the woody boom of one of the world’s greatest instruments makes a diverse and spare soundtrack.
That said, Niall sketches his dad’s story more out of his family life than his life in music, and I think the film would benefit from ten more minutes of Jim the musician talking and reflecting. I wanted more to tie together Jim the man with Jim the career player. But my concerns kind of melted at once with a line that McKay captures late in the film. He asks Jim for advice on fatherhood, and Jim says “take the jazz approach; it’s better than the classical approach.” And he goes on to talk about how it’s best to feel free to respond to each of life’s beats as the moment calls for, rather than treating anything as rote or routine. “There’s no straight line” he says.
Not many films of any kind achieve insights of such clarity told by someone so appealing. Website HERE.
Do It Again
Music journalists can be obsessive and eccentric, but the collapse of the two central pillars of our profession – music and journalism – should be driving us bat-shit crazy. We’re all adjusting and reacting in our own way - some of us by diving into filmmaking. But Boston Globe reporter Geoff Edgers goes a few steps further, taking on a new medium, chasing a harebrained scheme AND exposing his life to the modern glare of a camera. The result is a quixotic, funny and rocking journey to England in search of the members of The Kinks, his favorite band.
It would be difficult enough to make a Kinks doc, but Edgers is obsessed with the idea of using the film as leverage to convince the epically estranged Davies brothers (Ray and Dave) to reunite. And then in a truly inexplicable but charming twist, he decides it’s important that he get all of his interview subjects, from Clive Davis to Sting to the great Paul Weller to sing a Kinks song with him on camera. Some of those attempts go better than others, and I won’t give away which.
So with a task ahead of him that many people tell him is impossible, Edgers plunges forward like a maniac, albeit one with a lovely family and a house that needs the gutters cleaned. We see Geoff on the phone with former Kinks members telling him his curiosity is admirable but his goal is foolhardy. He trades endless emails with Ray Davies’ assistant about a possible interview. Meanwhile, his newspaper is slashed and his pay is cut and he’s forced to cover tedious stories well off his beat.
Geoff was wise not to try to handle the filming himself. He works with director Robert Patton-Spruill and very talented cinematographers to make nearly the whole film look as good as a feature. So while this project could have fallen apart in so many ways, it never does, and the holding-on-for-dear-life quality is its greatest strength. See this. You’ll be massively entertained and oh yes, you’ll learn a great deal about the Kinks and a brother rivalry worthy of Shakespeare to boot.
Website HERE.
Waiting For A Train
The feature I went to see was called Radio On: The Shawn and Hobby Band Documentary, not because I’d heard of them but because I’m always curious about Nashville bands working with filmmakers. The audience loved it because the audience was the band and their friends, but as a film, it was inexplicably lazy and poorly made. It began with shaky, low-quality video of the dudes plunking guitars and telling a worn-out masturbation joke, and it didn’t get much better from there.
That said, I’m glad I saw the opening short, a charming and fascinating profile of Japanese country and bluegrass singer Toshio Hirano by San Francisco director Oscar Bucher. Hirano was one of the many Japanese smitten in the 1960s by American classic country music, but he took it to a new level, touring the Appalachian region by bicycle in 1974. He took up singing and performing and fully emigrated to the US, where he lived in Minnesota, Texas and finally San Francisco. We meet him there, where today he’s a nice family guy who happens to just go buggo for bluegrass. His descriptions of the music and its effect on him are revelatory, testimony to the universal power of the sound.
I especially loved the sequence where he talks about his amazement that his passion for that old time sound hasn’t waned during his forty years of playing. This doesn’t go away, he says, and his sincerity is absolutely piercing. Website HERE.
sounds like the critic was lazy and his review poorly made. Of course Radio On was attended by fans! They are from Nashville and have a big following.Funny but critic mentions only the beginning of film and the short that preceded it. probably left right after so he could armchair bury what was a charming and down to earth look at some great young guys chasing their dream. Not every documentary has the hook of a japanese guy who plays country. Next Time stay awile and enjoy the SHAWN AND HOBBY RIDE
Posted by: reenie laughlin | April 23, 2010 at 05:08 AM