Word: jazzman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story feel distant and made-up, but it also allows the screenplay to be uninhibited about making the characters into pure flights of fancy, without worrying too much about contradiction or consistency. The movie is more interested in portraying what we might imagine the life of a 30s jazzman would be like than getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty aspects of biographical recreation...
Dedicated by Ellison "to that Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes"--he proudly and defiantly resisted the successive fads to rename that tribe--Juneteenth turns on the complex relationship between an ex-jazzman and trickster turned preacher, Alonzo Hickman, and his white--or nearly white--foster child, Bliss. Hickman reluctantly agrees to midwife and then raise this child of a white woman whose false accusation of rape had caused his brother to be lynched. Bliss, though lovingly nurtured by his stepfather, eventually runs away in search of his lost mother and later transforms himself into Senator...
Wild Man Blues follows Woody Allen and his seven-member jazz band along their 1996 springtime tour of Europe. If that synopsis sounds like material for a three-minute "Entertainment Tonight" profile, then kudos go out immediately to Kopple, who knows that Allen's career as a jazzman is not a fluff-level footnote to his more obvious engagement in the cinema. Her feature-length documentary has already been faulted by some viewers at Sundance for downplaying Woody-as-Filmmaker, a criticism that misses Wild Man Blues's whole point: Woody Allen considers himself a developing musician who's lucky...
...album Blues for the New Millennium (Columbia), it's no casual gesture. Having played regularly with Wynton Marsalis, the pianist shares with his former bandleader a taste for pedagogy, historicism and sheer ambition. Roberts' two most recent albums were a song cycle about romantic loss and rebirth, and a jazzman's reclamation of Rhapsody in Blue. The new disc begins with basics--covers of Robert Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton--and then branches out with 12 self-penned numbers. The climax, Roberts writes, "symbolizes what the whole record is about...our belief that jazz (blues) will dance into the 21st...
...produced a long string of guitar heroes, a list that would begin with Chuck Berry, continue on through Hendrix, Page and Eric Clapton, and include players of more recent vintage, like Eddie Van Halen and Living Colour's Vernon Reid--musicians celebrated for their sheer instrumental talent, their jazzman-like flair for expansive, showy (and sometimes self-indulgent) solos. But with the advent of alternative rock and grunge in the late '80s and early '90s, guitar heroism became uncool. Peter Buck of the influential rock band R.E.M. shies away from the exhibitionism of flashy solos; other alternative rockers, including...