Customer Reviews

Martin Scorsese presents The Blues - A Musical Journey

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The premise is a good one: take seven visionary directors and turn them loose on a subject like the blues. The result, while for the most part excellent has a slight tendency to lag a little.

The Blues takes us on a musical journey through perhaps the only true American art form. The journey begins in the Mississippi delta and winds its way to Mali and all points in between. What we wind up with is a history of the black influence in American and its expansion to the world.

The series opens with Martin Scorsese's Feel Like Goin' Home a documentary that takes modern blues player Cory Harris from the Misissipii delta to Mali in Africa to explore the similarities in the music that moved from Africa with the slave transports to the Southern United States.

German director Wim Wenders film The Soul of a Man chronicles the lives of three blues players that affected the director. Through fictional recreation and archival footage we get biographies of Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J.B. Lenoir.

Richard Pearce takes us on a musical journey with B.B King. and Rosco Gordon back to Memphis and Beale Street og the past and present in his Road to Memphis. Also explored is the story of moden player Bobby Rush who continues to travel the "chitlin circuit" of his ancestors. The film culminates in a performance of bles legends at the W.C. Handy Awards.

Charles Burnett tells the story of his youthful travels with his southern blues loving uncle in Warming By the Devil's Fire. This film relies heavily on archival footage of the great southern blues artists and explains the differences between the music that was played on Saturday nights in contrast with the gospel music of Sunday mornings. It is interesting to note that in many respects that there was not a whole lot of difference between the two genres in style.

Perhaps the most interesting film is Marc Levin's Godfathers and Sons which explores the Chicago blues scene. The film profiles Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess and founder of the legendary Chess Records. Chess meets with rap icon Chuck D to take the blues to its next level with a modern recording of Electric Mud. The reunion of the origal band with blues next generation makes for an interesting film.

Red, White and Blues by director Mike Figgis explains the blues impact on classic rock in the 60's and 70's. This is a straight interview piece that covers the British invasion by the music and its branching out to the world.

Piano Blues is Clint Eastwood's contribution to the series. This film features interviews with piano masters Ray Charles, Dr. John and Dave Brubeck. This piece also includes archival footage of Art Tatum, Theolonious Monk, Fats Domino, and Professor Longhair.

The series is a good one if not necessary one that you'll want to watch over and over. The main problem is that there too little emphasis on the actual recordings. The films stress the music but I would have enjoyed hearing more.

I've been a student of the blues for a long time, reading what I can find and listening to a wide variety of the music. But I still managed to learn quite a few details in this set. I don't consider this set to be the ultimate, but until something better comes out, it's the best you can find. I would have liked to have seen many more tunes in their entirety, but admit that the tidbits are tasty. The special features are a real plus, I admit, but I was left wanting more. The overall video and audio quality are as good as one could expect for the archival material and are excellent for the current material.

About the cost: The Amazon discount brings this down to 15 bucks per disc and although I love the material, if I'd had to have paid that price, I would have balked. I would understand the price for individual discs in the set being that high or even a little higher, but in a set, I expect a significant discount. These aren't DVDs you're going to watch over and over like you might some movie box sets, so the cost is a real concern.

I'm a big blues fan but was very disappointed with this series.

The problem, to me, is the concept: have movie directors make films about the blues. This leads to trying to come up with some "plot" to carry each installment.

In striving to come up with a storyline, most of the directors came up with the same one: a contemporary musician (blues guitarist Corey Harris, rapper Chuck D) travels someplace to find his musical roots in some form of the blues (Delta blues, Chicago blues).

This repetitive storyline leaves no room for the history of the blues.

Another problem is that not only are the storylines repeated, but so are many of the film clips and songs.

I do have to single out the episode Clint Eastwood directed about piano players. It was excellent, and the concept (have piano player Eastwood interview and play with legendary pianists) sets it apart from the other episodes.

My advice: buy the CDs from the series and skip the video.

The videos are rich in material but leave you craving for more. The movies themselves run about 80-90 minutes each, covering a tremendous amount of ground but leave you with just little bits and pieces of the Blues. There are additional tracks on the DVD's but I was hoping to hear more of Ali Farka Toure and instead got more of Corey Harris. I like Harris, and I like the way Scorcese followed him on his pilgrimage from Mississippi to Mali, but Toure seemed so subdued on this recording. It would have been better to see him jam with his own musicians.

The movies are reverential in their presentation. The directors seem cautious in their approach, which surprised me given their own stature in the cinematic world. Wenders flirts with his musicians the same way he did on the Buena Vista Social Club, without revealing what really makes them tick. However, there is a great mix of music and some fantastic old footage such as a couple of pieces with Son House. But, it seems to me that Scorcese could have taken this PBS series much further.

Pros: Great Films and Bonus Features are top notch.
Cons: You just want more vintage clips

Scorsese seems to have decided to use a variety of directors to tell the story of the blues from a new and fresh perspective. Its not as much a history lesson as it is indeed a journey. Some are documentary and some mix fictional segments with historical reality. But whether the high concepts work or not really doesn't matter as much as how enjoyable the music and content is when exploring the set as a whole. There's great documentary footage, interviews, and contemporary performances. One of the best aspects of the DVDs, is the way it was designed to make finding the music easily, more than finding a narative chapter. The bonus material features everything from complete never before seen out takes to extensions of performances and clips seen in the films. The DVD's all open with beautiful graphics and interesting menu design pages. The standard extras like director commentary and bios are there, but there is also so much more including interviews with the directors, no shortage of bonus music most in 5.1 and stereo, and best of all is the fact that the menus, navigation and architechture is state of the art, and the new feature to play just the music from the films skipping the narrative that brackets each tune is a tremendous idea. Although, since some clips are short, it does leave you wanting to hear more in almost every case. The fact that Scorsese used his skills and that of 6 other directors including Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Wim Wenders, Richard Pearce, Charles Burnett and Marc Levin to make these films was overall a very successful idea. The films alone would make a good box set to own, but add the fact that they brought veteran music filmmaker Michael Borofsky into the mix to create the DVD's from the sensitivities of what a serious music consumer would like to do with these DVDs makes the overall package one of the best I have ever owned. David Michaels

I don't consider this set to be the ultimate, but until something better comes out, it's the best you can find. I would have liked to have seen many more tunes in their entirety, but admit that the tidbits are tasty. The special features are a real plus, I admit, but I was left wanting more. The overall video and audio quality are as good as one could expect for the archival material and are excellent for the current material.

About the cost: The Amazon discount brings this down to 15 bucks per disc and although I love the material, if I'd had to have paid that price, I would have balked. I would understand the price for individual discs in the set being that high or even a little higher, but in a set, I expect a significant discount. These aren't DVDs you're going to watch over and over like you might some movie box sets, so the cost is a real concern.

I couldn't stop watching (and listening!). Very interesting and great blues music/history. 3am in the morning and there I am putting the next DVD in to watch some more. If you have any interest in blues music, you will thoroughly enjoy this set.

Please see the other reviews which adequately sum up the contents of these films. I won't spend my time on that.

What I will do is describe my viewing experience, which was profound joy and glee at seeing the vintage performance footage, followed by dismay and confusion as each filmmaker interjected annoying Voice-Overs, dramatic re-creations, and other material that completely detracted from the significance of what was being shown, even as they attempted to emphasize it.

For example, the "Soul of a Man" video (horrid, horrid title, by the way) concludes with an unbelievable performance of the song "Crow Jane" by Skip James, which was culled from a Dutch television performance not long before his death. It is gripping and enthralling. I almost don't have words to describe it. I would buy the DVD for that performance alone.

Now picture that epic performance followed by some cheap CGI graphic of outer space, with the Voyager spacecraft floating by, (I'm not kidding) and Lawrence Fishburn giving a heavy handed narration that sounds like a seventh-grader's book report: "These Blues artists have a place in history, even though they died a poor man's death ... blah blah blah" -- NO KIDDING!!??!! Just let me watch the vintage footage of Son House already, and SHUT UP!

I was very interested also in the DVD "special features" but they turned out to be just another basket of frustration. I clicked on the "Songs from the Movie" link, hoping to have UN-CUT renditions of the songs featured in the film. Would that have been too hard?!?! Apparently so. Instead, you get treated to the 30-second snippet of the hacked-up songs *exactly* as they appear in the film. Thanks for nothing, idiots. But hey, you can read all about the director's filmography and hear his commentary all day long (who cares!).

Also the footage of other musicians covering the classic tunes was a waste of time. Showing something like John Mayall's "Death of J.B. Lenoir" is completely appropriate, and integral to the story (so naturally that homage gets short shrift). Yet some "alternative" artist gets scads of screen time to do a punk rendition of a classic -- it's a crime to even include that kind of crud on these discs. OK, it's a tribute. OK, "Today's artists still draw influence from these Blues Masters" -- every person with an ounce of musical knowledge knows that already. It's a MOOT POINT. I can go to the record store and get 45 Bonnie Raitt albums and watch her on VH-1. Enough, already!

If anything this set of films is interesting as a Blues primer and a container of precious gems that are scattered throughout so much junk filmmaking. I'd suggest you check this set out from the local library and watch them, before deciding if it's something you want to own. It will definitely give you a jones to look up more vintage films and recordings.

Ken Burns would have done this project sooo much more justice. I wish Scorsese would just open up his vault of vintage recordings and release this stuff un-edited and raw. It would've been better that way.

Yes, the previous reviews are correct - limited footage of performers (and the audacity to narrate over footage instead of allowing the viewer to listen firsthand) and a selectivity that is baffling and, sometimes, offensive.

The bigger problem is that the series suffers from some major historical blunders. As much as each presenter is attempting to chart the history of the 'blues', its antecedents and forebears, there is little attention to the history of blues scholarship which informs the research attempted by the series. Blues scholarship has a history - one decidedly romantic, grounded in a 1950s/60s record collector attitude which has foregrounded some objectively insignificant artists in their time (Robert Johnson) and studiously ignored tremendously influential ones (Lonnie Johnson).

Typically, 'Feel Like Going Home' grounds the blues entirely in the Delta, and neglects to consider the popular blues 'queens' of the 1920s like Ma Rainey who had an enormous influence. Indeed, the 'blues' is here reduced to folk music, with the 'integrity' and 'spirituality' that this term has come to imply. There's no real mention of the blues being a form of pop music for its time, and that performers like Robert Johnson openly pillaged from records with shameless aplomb. Indeed, contemporary musician Cory Harris is seen ridiculing 'other musicians' who attempt to reproduce exactly the 'spontaneity' of Johnson's recordings - his so called 'interjections' (i.e. 'Can't You Hear the Wind Howl?'). Excuse me, Mr. Harris, but as Elijah Wald has demonstrated in his 'Escaping the Delta', Johnson's alternate takes include all these 'spontaneous' asides in the same place, with similar delivery - suggesting Johnson used them with conscious, technical precision. Blues was as much the product of a slick, orchestrated pop sensibility as it was a means for communal expression.

This is but one example of how Scorsese's 'The Blues' attempts to definitively 'place' the 'blues' - in some instances kicking and screaming - within a fairly stereotypical generic category of authentic 'folk' music dealing chiefly with personal expression and suffering. And, to be sure, there's truth in that - but it robs the music of the complexity identified by Wald: complexity which makes the music far more interesting, and its history far more fascinating.

So, ease into these films with a degree of skepticism. Do some broad reading first, and one HELL of a lot of listening, before taking this series as 'the gospel'. As this series demonstrates, the past is constantly being redefined to suit a specific (even unconscious) critical agenda, and it's up to the listener to determine the difference between black cat bones and mojo hands...

No one is going to be 100% pleased with this movie, but I personally appreciate the efforts of all to put it together and found it to be full of unexpected delights. I agree with one of the reviewers that the footage of Skip James is worth the the price of the entire set alone.
I also take issue with some reviewers that decried the inclusion of Lulu singing the blues - it was very soulful, and in fact, brings home the point that the English were paying attention to, and moved by the blues, when most of America was glued to sonic bubble-gum.
Those that whine and whimper endlessly about the lack of blues credibility
of some of the performers, historical errors, and personal preferences of the directors are probably just the sort who do little themselves to spread joy and wonder - the message of the blues for these people is a one-way street. For those that think this was boring...good luck, and fasten your seat belts, because you're in for a lifetime of boredom.