From Lansing City Pulse

MUSIC :: DECEMBER 08, 2004

Jubilant MSU jazz film to air on WKAR

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

Nobody would think of asking half a dozen English professors to express their love of literature by playing musical instruments. That would be just plain cruel.

Thank God the problem isn’t transitive, at least where the MSU Jazz Studies Department is concerned. “Inside Jazz,” a superbly crafted documentary to air on WKAR-TV at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 14, has plenty of music. But it’s also full of eloquent and passionate talk from some of the world’s most accomplished jazz musicians, most of whom happen to be local heroes as well.

The film, a joint effort of MSU’s Jazz Studies and Telecommunications and Media Departments, plunges the viewer into a hothouse of dizzy activity during MSU’s Jazz Spectacular in the spring of 2004. Guest artists, including Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, are seen performing, jamming, teaching and just plain bullshitting with program director Rodney Whitaker, his colleagues and eager students.

The film is not only a glowing affirmation of musicians’ love for music, but also a rare document of educators actually doing their jobs, midwiving their students’ second birth into a world beyond themselves. It lives up to its title in several ways, exploring both the human and technical dimensions of jazz education.

A prime case in point is a live-wire workshop held at the MSU Union, where Wynton Marsalis prods trumpet student Kris Johnson to improve his technique and stage presence. The fluid, unobtrusive camera registers Johnson’s emotions — pride, nervousness, even resistance — as jazz’s biggest megastar makes a public lesson of him.

In another segment, Whitaker and Marsalis explain the importance of singing, even for instrumental students of jazz (the pedagogical DNA passed from Marsalis to Whitaker is clearly apparent throughout the film, especially here). To illustrate the point, Whitaker is seen humming a bass line for a student, and the stoned, happy expression on his face as he sings is worth the price of admission alone.

Meanwhile, visiting reedman Andrew Speight, Whitaker’s predecessor as Jazz Studies chief, rides herd on a student big band by insisting they repeat a swinging vamp over and over without making a mistake. He tells them to sing the tune in their minds, not making a sound with their instruments until they have it down cold. The lesson suddenly brings to view the huge iceberg of mental effort underneath the finished product of jazz.

Purely musical segments in the film are tantalizingly short, but effectively deployed to drive home important points. Last year’s MSU Jazz Spectacular featured a priceless, spontaneous round of musical give-and-take between alto saxman Speight and vocalist Sunny Wilkinson that nobody who was there will ever forget. Not only did the filmmakers capture the exchange, they got all the principals to comment perceptively on what happened and how. You can almost hear the satisfying “thloop” as this ephemeral magic is bottled, corked and saved for posterity.

In another scintillating music sequence, Whitaker explains that jazz musicians are like a family to one another as concert footage homes in on the back row of the Lincoln Center Orchestra during last year’s Wharton Center performance. As Whitaker pumps away in the engine room at his bass fiddle (a position he held for six years at Lincoln Center), Marsalis decides to draw him out by shooting some trumpet riffs in his direction. Before long, they’re smiling at each other and batting it back and forth as if the rest of the musicians weren’t there. Suddenly, they’re more like teenage girls in a pillow fight than professorial jazz eminences. Even the lucky few who saw this happen live last year didn’t get so close a view.

“Inside Jazz” has hundreds of sweet moments like these. There’s 68-year-old drummer Randy Gelispie, grinning like an excited kid during a radio interview. Guest vocalist and teacher Ursula Walker beams as a shy student quietly blows her away. Another student collars crusty Lincoln Center virtuoso Joe Temperley for an impromptu baritone sax lesson on the stage of the Wharton Center’s Great Hall. Trumpeter Derrick Gardner casually knocks out an incredible solo in his empty studio. Students hang out and jam in Whitaker’s office after hours, as if no campus haunt could beat the camaraderie and fun they’re getting at school.

All these scenes are recorded as if through a crystal-clear, floating mental window, unsmudged by current clichés of documentary filmmaking. Cameras don’t lurch in every direction; there are no silly whooshing noises between shots. This production is first-class all the way. All the local locations — even the cinderblock dungeons of the Music Practice Building — look smashing.

Well-made as it is, the film’s pacing, editing and camerawork go beyond professionalism to show a profound sensitivity toward its unique subject matter. In one spoken sequence, Whitaker and Marsalis are interviewed separately on the importance of phrasing in playing jazz. Both compare musical phrasing to spoken intonations, choosing wildly different phrases to illustrate the point (Marsalis picks “what’s the matter with you” while Whitaker, smoothie that he is, picks “I love you”). Their verbal riffs are edited together into a verbal jazz “chase,” with Marsalis and Whitaker trading fours just as they would on the bandstand.

The only downside of “Inside Jazz” is that it’s so well done it makes you forget that these guys don’t really speak for all jazz musicians. Talk to, say, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Buddy Rich or Cecil Taylor (ignoring boundaries of life and death), and you might hear more four-letter invectives about fans and other musicians than love talk. And there are always the dissidents who maintain that Lincoln Center alumni and their university allies are turning jazz into a standard-issue, Marsalis-approved macrobrew.

But the world is big enough for all styles and approaches, and this crop of musicians is so earnest, endearing and fearsomely talented it’s an honor to spend an hour in the more welcoming neck of the jazz woods. Besides, nothing lasts forever, and this film will serve as a fine record of a golden age long after Whitaker’s round table of jazz has passed into history.

“Inside Jazz” is so full of good work and good people it siphoned several tears to the tip of my ducts, where they wobbled embarrassingly for nearly the whole hour.

The tear in my eye while seeing the film was, in part, an expression of relief. The last time I looked, WKAR and public TV had all but given up on rewarding excellence in music, numbing its aging audience with creaking doo-wop retrospectives, Lawrence Welk and pseudo-classical noodlers who think the music of ABBA sounds dynamite when played by a symphony orchestra. By offering such a shining exception to this misrule of musical mediocrity, they’re reminding people how great public TV can be.

------------------------------------------------------------------------