Week of May 16, 2007, Issue #604
FILM
Documentary explores the Sound of free jazz
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
‘It seems to me that what the music is, is everything you do,” says jazz legend Cecil Taylor, pontificating eloquently, if enigmatically, even humorously, from behind orb-like shades, with the ever-present cigarette allowing his restless digits something long and ivory to stroke and pinch in the absence of piano keys. This stray observation makes for a slyly appropriate entrée into a 91-minute discussion and invocation of the spirit of free jazz.
Ron Mann’s Imagine the Sound (1981) has been revived and thrown back into circulation for the event of its 25th birthday. Its return to the fringes of popular consciousness is nothing less than a revelation, a much-needed, lively, beautiful, strange, confrontational but effortlessly seductive document that had the wherewithal to address an enormously important movement in American music, one that stingy historians Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis (who engineered the influential PBS series Jazz) still neglect to acknowledge nearly a half-century after it first began to burble up from West Coast nightclubs.
Eschewing conventional narrative voices or broad contextualization, the film revolves entirely around interviews and performances from Taylor, Archie Shepp, Paul Bley and the lesser-known but no less engaging trumpet player Bill Dixon. The four speak about the development, ambitions and politics of free jazz, with Mann cutting sharply and dynamically between these dialogues and several roundly inspired musical performances from each (Taylor and Bley solo, Shepp and Dixon with small groups).
Taylor, a real character, is the fullest, purest embodiment of the music in question, characterized by fiery, inventive abstraction, a music informed by a dizzying array of traditions while submitting to the formal rules of none. Taylor dances with his piano, resembling an orgasmic woodpecker at times, a master showman who seems to have music perpetually seeping involuntarily from his pores, his true craft perhaps residing in harnessing all this, giving it shape, refining its distribution.
Shepp is more astute in commentary and accessible in performance. Often in suit and tie and with a pipe cradled upon his elephantine lower lip, Shepp speaks of his reverence for both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as contrasting philosophical influences, and for Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as musical predecessors, forces that he fears are losing their rightful presence in African-American culture. (A quarter-century later, this comes off as a sad understatement.)
Bley, wiry, smart and dryly hilarious, tells the best stories of any of the film’s subjects, particularly with regards to the early ‘60s, when all the hippest Los Angeles jazzmen were first freaking out, improvising on themes rather than standard tunes, gradually dismantling several of the touchstone constructs of jazz.
The free scene was not at first very popular. Bley notes how, driving through LA, you always knew when a band was playing in a club because the audience was out standing in the street. Though his body language is far less wildly hieroglyphic than Taylor’s, Bley’s piano performances possess a cool, curiosity-driven mastery, as though the instrument’s possibilities are infinite. (I kind of wish there was more of him in the movie.)
Dixon, rolling a wine glass stem between his fingers, decked out in a leather top hat and midnight shades —we never once see the man’s eyes!—is also witty, and talks casually about the difficulty of maintaining a career in the wilderness of the avant-garde. I don’t know if it’s just because I was least familiar with his music, but I found Dixon’s group to deliver some of the film’s most startling performances, wonderful, sometimes sinisterly textured rumbles that move like sparks, coals and smoke.
He and his band do just about as good a job as anyone could hope for with regards to turning a few more skeptics onto free jazz, creating music not abrasive but rather quietly assaulting, hinting at some half-remembered melody or maybe just some sound culled from the urban subconscious, giving it a rippled caress before it drifts back to where it came from.
And maybe this is really what the music strives for: the beauty of something touched, marvelled at and utterly ephemeral. V
Sat, May 19 & Mon, May 21 (7 pm);
Sun, May 20 (9 pm)
Imagine the Sound
Directed by Ron Mann
Produced by Mann, Bill Smith
Featuring Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp,
Paul Bley, Bill Dixon
Metro Cinema, $10