"City of a Million Dreams", "Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story", and "Live Out Loud"
June 18, 2022
Three fine movies play today.
Jason Berry’s “City of a Million Dreams” continues its run at New Orleans’ Broad Theater.
Frank Marshall’s and Ryan Suffern’s “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” remains in national and on-demand-streaming distribution.
Melissa Grrgory Rue’s “Live Out Loud” shows at 12:30 TODAY, Noon-time, as part of the Los Angeles’ Dances with Films festival. L. A. Weekly features “Live Out Loud” as one of its picks from the Festival.
Each of these documentaries is crafted with a care like love. Each is edited with graceful and even profound segues. Each is warm and generous in its feel. Each clearly is an assemblage of creation and subjects close to its director’s heart.
“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” focuses on the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival of 2019, but the movie’s center reall is New Orleans’ music and other culture, food and other pleasures, disasters and resilience personal and general.
Its coverage is broad. Its ‘headliner’ acts—Earth, Wind and Fire. Pitbull, Katy Perry, Jimmy Buffett—occupy about 1/2 of its 90 or so minutes. Earth, Wind and Fire’ superb musicianship and spirit is succeeded by acts from New Orleans “deeper roots” (as Festival co-founder Quint Davis says) in Africa and, yes, Arabia. Pitbull’s flames-flanked Tropicana-like dancers precede a young and ethereal Fife-and-Drum group from North Mississippi. Katy Perry is adjoined by Gospel from Glen David Andrews and comments from Gregory Porter and Boyfriend (Susannah Powell). Blues from Sonny Landreth 2019 is coupled wiht black-and-white of B.B. King extolling the Festival during its early 1970s.
Everywhere, participants express how how especially enlivening New Orleans and its Jazz Fest are.
Jason Berry’s “City of a Million Dreams” gathers from footage that the director has shot since the early 1990s. It’s a long and deep, dense and variegated labor of love. Deborah “Big Red” Cotton, transplant and videographer, and Dr. Michael White, musician, inheritor and educator, are the movie’s two main narrators. Deborah Cotton says: “New Orleans is a like a lover you can’t get enough of.” Michael White recalls the photographed, century’s-old eyes of an ancestor on his mother’s side, the pioneering bass-player Papa John Joseph, following him round his study before his house’s devastation by Hurricane and Flood.
Jason Berry depicts a lineage from one, two, three, four centuries—18th, 19th, 20th, 21st. All are informed by traditions of African and subsequent immigrants to the illogical city near mouth of North Americas’ most germinal River. Congo Sqaure, where slaves could freely drum and dance, before and after the Revolution that created Haiti, is central, as Fred Johnson of the Black Men of Labor, asserts. The Circles and Ring-Dances there, the Circles and Ring-Dances that carried from Ireland, Germany, Sicily, Croatia, … The processions honoring passing of dear ones.… “City of a Million Dreams” brings instance after instance of New Orleans’ uniquely evolved Jazz Funerals and Second-Lines. Paul Barbarin’s, blocks-long in 1969; Danny Barker’s, the banjo-player, composer and guitarist a salvation of tradition even in death: Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. 1998 and Big Chief Edwin Harrison 2016 from the City’s tribes of Black Masking Indian artiss; attorney and champion of Civil Rights and music Lolis Edward Elie 2017, …
Deborah “Big Red” Cotton was shot during a Second-Line of 2013. She endured 36 surgeries into her major organs. When well enough, she returned to dancers’ streets with her video-camera and big smile. She asked the sentencing Judge for clemency toward the young Black men whose revenge-splatter incidentally included her. Deborah Cotton’s example is the stated coda for the magnificent reaches of this movied by Jason Berry and friends.
Melissa Gregory Rue’s “Live Out Loud” takes its title from Emile Zola. The French novelist and essayist said over 100 years ago:'If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.'
Rue’s documentary is decidedly contemporary. Her “Live Out Loud” blends the stories of three intermittently homeless people in Portland, Oregon, circa 2012. Sumaiyya, Dave and John are given an empowering project by the Bud Clark Commons and BCCTV. Each is to make a movie.
We travel with them in Portland’s Old Town, the city’s former and current Skid Row. Rue’s exquisitely framed scenes and economy of narration are like that of De Sica in “Bicycle Thieves.” They’re both tender and sharp. Their prism adds up to whole portraits of the three excited and striving movie-makers. Music accompanying the characters’ development—from the GALLOP Quartet of which I was part with Alex de Grassi, Hamid Drake and Kidd Jordan … recording in New Orleans at Rick G. Nelson’s Marigny Studio—accents scenes. Sumaiyya, David and John, persons on edges not unlike prior pilgrims’, arrive at their separate triumphs under a gaze that’s always revealing and sympathetic.
Again, “Live Out Loud” shows today, June 18, 2022, part of Los Angeles’ Dances with Films festival, at 12:30 Noon-time in the worth-experiencing-in-itself Chinese Theater along Hollywood Boulevard. Here’s a link from LA Weekly:’Dances With Films 2022, at the TCL Chinese Theater, 6925 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood; June 9-19. More info at danceswithfilms.com.