Film Screenings

This mix of nineteen films, comprising the work of fourteen directors from nine countries, is designed to provide an opportunity for New York audiences to trace the contemporary working-out of processes of intercultural and cross-cultural transformation of jazz and jazz-identified musical practices in non-US local scenes.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Documentary Film Festival,
National Track & Field Hall of Fame Theatre
The Armory At West 168th Street
Directions
216 Fort Washington Avenue
Entrance between 168th and 169th Streets 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Admission: Free

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2007

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2007

COMMENTARY

Film times and durations are approximate. Offerings are subject to change. For up-to-date information, please visit the Festival's website, www.globaljazz.columbia.edu, or the Center for Jazz Studies website, www.jazz.columbia.edu .

American jazz is celebrated around the world, and videotaped and filmed performances by Americans are perhaps most plentiful in Europe, whose publicly-owned radio and television services documented performances by the American musicians who came to their countries far more assiduously than either US private or public systems.

For this film series, however, I wanted to concentrate not on performance films, but on documentaries that highlight the cross-cultural and intercultural processes by which jazz and jazz-identified musical practices are pursued in non-US local scenes. Of course, this begs the question of what jazz actually is, an issue that continues to be debated in the United States. In today's globalized sociomusical condition, it seems, these debates inevitably become bound up with the concern that the United States might not indefinitely retain its dominant role as the definer of jazz. For some, this possibility is already disquieting, suggesting effects that are also being felt in the geopolitical arena. More ominous for many is the suspicion, increasingly bruited about, that these predominant roles have already been lost.

In any event, the ongoing Stateside debate over the canon of jazz has only infrequently been informed by non-US perspectives. The well-known Ken Burns film series Jazz, an often arresting celebration of the music's value as culture, nonetheless spent relatively little time on what was surely one of the signal achievements of this uniquely American art form--the music's important impact in the international arena.
Seen from a global perspective, the difficulties associated with US-style debates over the jazz canon seem easier to grasp. In fact, local, cross-cultural jazz hybridities have emerged in the most far-flung locales, right under the noses of prominent commentators on the music. Similar hybridities include the rise of reggaeton, a mix of hip-hop and Latin popular music, or the Trinidadian music called "chutney," an infectious mix of West Indian and East Indian popular music whose popularity now rivals that of calypso itself. As far back as the 1920s, however, musicians realized that any music could be "jazzed," and jazz's traditional openness uniquely situates it to enter into dialogue with local traditions, becoming itself revised and transformed in ways that wreak havoc with canonical dreaming.

We should not forget that a similar mix of hybridities and transformations was key to the early (and ongoing)

development of jazz itself, and this mix of nineteen films, comprising the work of fourteen directors from nine countries, is designed to provide an opportunity for New York audiences to trace the contemporary working-out of those processes of intercultural and cross-cultural transformation.

Each day of the series is devoted to a different musical area or direction. Session One's films are set largely in Europe and the United States, chronicling collaborations between Europeans and Americans in major metropoles such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, and New York. Session Two takes the journey as its theme, exploring the cosmopolitanism of African-American musicians, the consonances and dissonances between vernacular and classical forms and practices, both of which have an impact on jazz--for instance, the contrast in notions of human sonic expression between Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage--and the border-crossing experimentation that finds intercultural expression through improvisation. The third session is largely devoted to jazz and improvised music in Southern Africa, which in recent years has become a major site for new thinking on jazz, emerging from the South African exile diaspora to the post-apartheid opening of the country that set the stage for the very first festival of experimental electronic music to be presented on the continent.

Of special interest in this festival is the presentation of the complete four-part documentary on improvisation around the world, British director Jeremy Marre's "On the Edge: Improvisation in Music." Never shown on US television, this series is perhaps the most wide-ranging documentary on the subject ever made. The series was written and narrated (with a strong Yorkshire accent that contrasts markedly with the usual BBC Received Pronunciation) by the late British free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey, the author of the widely cited "Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music."
Non-US directors have been in the forefront of tracking global changes in jazz and its offshoots and tributaries, and one message that might be gleaned from these three days of radically variant perspectives on jazz and improvised music is that the music's continuing resistance to the imposition of definite borders and fixed canons, an artifact of the music's character as improvised, may well prove its greatest strength as an enduring international symbol of freedom and mobility--a power not only stronger than swing, but just possibly stronger than itself.

-- George E. Lewis