Word: blandes
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EVERYTHING GERALD FORD touches seems to turn into the bland and mediocre. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all inspired savage and often brilliant satire, but Ford-based humor seems hardly able to rise above the level of Hellen-Keller-of-the-mind jokes. Perhaps it's too early to tell, but The Laughingstock, anyway, seems pretty much on this level--a collection of more or less political jokes instead of a satirical revue...
...must turn to Baraka's essay, written four years after this film was made, to find the glue that Bland needs to bind his loosely-constructed "unique suffering" argument together. Rather than ignoring the existence of a few competent white jazz musicians, Baraka admits that some white musicians, "originally Dixieland Jazz Band, Bix, etc. sought not only to understand that phenomenon of the Negro Music, but to appropriate it as a means of expression which they might utilize...
Regardless of both Bland and Baraka, whites will continue to play (or at least listen to) what they think is jazz. And even if, as both claim, whites will not be able to understand the social or cultural origins of jazz because they have not experienced them, whites will no doubt continue to believe that they even enjoy just the type of jazz that Bland and Baraka say they...
...other films in The Boston Center for the Arts series of which Bland's film is a part include Dizzie Gillespie, a 1959 Les Blank production, and John Jeremy's Jazz Is Our Religion. Jeremy's 1970 film supports Bland's thesis that even when a black musician plays from his roots he blows his soul "through a white man's machine." But the work is most notable for some fine stills of the conditions and communities that breed jazz as well as a scattering of poetic jazz talk by Langston Hughes...
...Unlike Bland's film, Jazz Is Our Religion offers both hope and enthusiasm for the future jazz scene. And more realistically, rather than limiting the jazz rites to blacks, Jeremy invites us all to "go worship in the church of jazz--the nightclub...