Word: jazzmen
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...Last of the Blue Devils, first-time director Bruce Ricker's movie about Kansas City jazzmen, gets around these limitations of jazz cinematography better than any film I have seen. Jazz purists may balk at the liberties Ricker has taken--solos are cropped from longer performances, music is cut up and excerpted, "vintage" Kansas City clips are few and far between--but they can't argue with his results. The entire film rushes along to Kansas City 4/4 time; a spare 91 minutes long, The Last of the Blue Devils is one sweet breath of Kansas City air, heady enough...
...similar reunion of old jazz dancers, but Blue Devils has little of the sadness and sentimentality that are at the heart of Taps. As Ricker is quick to point out, the golden years of Kansas City were good, happy times for jazz musicians, and the surviving Kansas City jazzmen have learned how to deal with the disappointments of the intervening years; when they get together, they share joy, humor, and open affection. Jazz fans already know about the tragedies of Kansas City--how Charlie Parker died an addict, destitute and disillusioned at 35, how a disastrous gig with...
...continued to work in the jazz-rock field; its latest album, Heavy Weather, which rides sophisticated solos over rock rhythms, has sold half a million copies. But fusion, as Davis' original album title foretold, is a dangerous brew. It was a short step to what many traditional jazzmen bitterly refer to as crossover music...
Each new current in jazz has, of course, always faced opposition. The '30s swing music swung at the '40s bop; bop booed the experimental movements of the '50s and '60s. But many jazzmen feel that fusion is not true jazz-and they are right...
Morton back to the roots: Caribbean-inflected jazz and gospel music orchestrated for a string and brass band format. These are just the sounds that the first New Or leans jazzmen might have heard when they picked up their instruments...