Customer Reviews

Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues - Godfathers and Sons

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Mostly surface stuff. I mean if you are into the blues you know blacks had it hard right? Duh. Mostly about Chess Record. Marshall Chess is a really nice guy and undoubtedly a positive force for the blues guys but I would have rather seen more about the artists and less about the business. Chuck D is a good guy too, and thoughtful but too much the in the center with Chess.

I'm particularly interested in the aesthetic of the artists which didn't get much time. Of course blues/rock is party music, but among them, particularly Howlin' Wolf was extremely thoughtful and intelligent. I would have liked to see more about the nuts and bolts of how and why he and others made music. Not the chord changes but the strange stuff.

Part of the appeal of this video is seeing former Miles Davis guitar Pete Cosey play. I would have liked to see much more of just him. He's an underrated monster of guitar, and the brief shots of him playing are awesome and tantalizing.

My guess is that Marshall Chess commissioned this film: about 15 minutes in, you find yourself saying, "Well, I hope I don't have to listen to much more of him..." And then that's exactly what happens, for the rest of the film. Really sad, that the Chicago Blues history and milieu gets "represented" in this fashion.

The premise of the film: Chuck D had early on gotten turned on to "Electric Mud," the 1968 psychedelic jam session Chess LP (w/ GREAT Pete Cosey and others aboard) done with Muddy Waters, produced by Marshall Chess to pull in a younger crowd. So the idea crops up, "Let's re-do 'Electric Mud' and bring in the turntablists and rappers." Actually it's a nice idea. It's potentially a great idea, connecting a few of the dots between old school and hiphop.

But, once the actual deal goes down, the music gets second stool to the chatter and "commentary": Marshall talks too much. It's embarrassing, "Motherf***er this..., motherf***er that..." etc, ad nauseum. Chuck D tries his best to pull something gracefully out of their too many on-screen encounters. Common is on camera for a good stretch of time before he gets identified as Common. Questlove only gets identified as "Ahmir." It's like nobody connected with the film knows who they are. Maybe Marshall's kid does.

Meanwhile, the Chicago blues musicians in this film are pretty much only significant in-so-far as they have "Chess" branded on them. The contemporary blues numbers towed in, by Lonnie Brooks, Koko Taylor, the great Otis Rush, are treated like an afterthought. Where's Buddy Guy? No mention of Albert Collins? Alligator Records gets name-checked once, when the young dudes are shopping for blues vinyl & one of the Alligator LP jackets looks good.

Scorsese must have signed on to the great idea... "Godfathers and Sons" (shades of Copolla?) The realization is depressing. You'll feel better about Chicago, and its music ("ancient to the future") if you skip this sorry two hours and put on a record.

I simply had to resubmit my review after seeing Dr. Coulardeau's review and rating. With all due respect, if the movie were presented as he describes in his review, I would have loved it. In fact, he is analyzing what he is seeing and expounding based on knowledge he already possesses, but this is not what is in the movie. Some of what is in the movie is tons of Marshall Chess's ego. First we have to listen to him try to justify his making of Muddy Water's Electric Mud, which was highly criticized and even Muddy disliked it. Then we have to listen to him try and convince us of how much he loves the Black man and how the Jews and the Blacks are like brothers. As evidence we get to see one picture of a Black couple who were invited to one party. The amusing part is that Chuck D, who comes off as angry about how the White man used and took advantage of the Black man, has to change his attitude when he then becomes part of a project where he interacts in some musical project with Marshall. He then becomes all buddy-buddy with him. It is amazing how money is the perfect salve for righteous indignation. I also loved seeing Chess whine about how he gave away all this money to Blacks on his label who never repaid him for loans (boohoo) as proof of how much the Chess's loved the Black man. Of course, he doesn't discuss how much money his artists didn't receive from publishing rights and royalties. It reminded me of how slave plantation owners would say how much they loved their workers and how much of a big happy family they all were. Furthermore, I am tired of seeing Chuck D as an expert on anything that involves Black people. From what I see, Chuck D is no Blues expert. He just likes the money and attention he gets to psychobabble, and idiots pay him plenty to talk. He has become product at the one-stop Black expert shop. If I were Chuck D I'd take the money and run as well, good for him. Unfortunately, the makers of the movie, instead of doing research and giving us valuable information about the subject, find Marshall Chess and Chuck D and try to make a movie based on a lot of filler. The film makers abdicate their responsibility to tell a story or impart information, because, it seems to me, they had no vision for their film, nor authoritative knowledge of their subject. They just turned the cameras on a couple of people who they thought had all the answers, and they tried to get a movie from this. They simply filled some space. This is the most boring, uninformative movie on a subject I have ever seen. Read Garcia's review because he starts to hint at much more of the reason why this movie is simply awful.

It is all about music on one hand and the emergence of the Blacks through music in the US on the other hand. As for music, it clearly shows how hip hop or rap are not a musical genres that come from nowhere but that they were prepared by and they inherit a lot from the blues, even maybe gospels, and I would even say jazz. The main idea developed by the film is that any musical form sums up older forms and trespasses their limits. It is true of Black music as well as any other form of art anywhere in the world. Black music is as so noit different at all from Mozart, Purcell or Verdi. Even the most revolutionary form is nothing but the descendent of previous forms. On the other hand, and this is essential, the emergence of the Blues in Chicago was due to the confluence of the same ambition, to emerge from poverty and segregation, among Blacks and Jews, in this case a certain Muddy Waters and a Polish Jewish immigrant (and his family) after WW2, the latter creating the first record label, Chess, that launched the Blues in the world, on radios, on record players, on TV later, and of course in various bars and clubs. It also shows how the Blues was black in its majority but not only and that some Whites took part from the very start, meaning that the Bluies was a music coming from the Blacks, but not only, carried by the Blacks, but not only, and directed at the Blacks, but not only and by far. And it finally shows how the Blues of these old bluesmen can be easily merged with rap or hip hop. The general idea then is that music is a way for down-trodden people to recapture their pride and to conquer a position in the culture of the oppressive society they live in and eventually a position in this society. Culture is a way to liberate energies in people and to liberate people from their humiliation. Culture is also and necessarily a blend of various elements that come from different experiences and people, different historical and geographical backgrounds. Merging is a vast movement that brings together the past and the present to create the future. There is no future for any cultural form if it does not have roots. It is from the roots that the fruits come.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU