The cover star for this playlist is Scott Lavene, whose show at the Portland Arms in Cambridge last week will be reviewed on this site later this week. A lot of my time this past month has been spent diving into music documentaries and cinematic biopics. For my documentary fix I watched the whole of Ken Burns 2001 ten feature length installment series simply titled ‘Jazz’. Each episode ran to over an hour making this a deep dive into the history of Jazz, putting forward a compelling argument for it being America’s greatest contribution to the cultural landscape. As you would expect, some of the meat on the bone of the series was the incredible archive film clips incorporated into each episode, lacking in the earliest episodes simply because they centered on the late nineteenth, early twentieth century but from the 1950s onwards this is a jazz archive bean feast. It is the main reason to view a program of this nature for a jazz fan because the stories themselves are often well known and time restrictions, due to the sheer scope of the project, lead to only surface level commentaries. Key figures like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis are appreciated in greater detail than many others, the knock-on effect being the surprising absence of certain big names. I spotted a couple of photos of Lee Morgan but not an actual mention, Chet Baker was spoken about in passing as was Glenn Miller (who is almost totally dismissed as a commercial phenomenon only), whilst I do not think I heard the name Nina Simone even once.

All that said, it does remain a worthy watch. Some of the talking heads stitching the historical contexts together are very listenable and explain their points concisely whilst (then) modern day faces like Wynton Marsalis proves himself to be an absolute master student of the music. Historical music documentaries often struggle with contextualizing more recent events leading up to the present day and Ken Burns ‘Jazz’ is no different. The period 1970-2000 is speed-skimmed over and even though I get the point they are making about Jazz’s marginalization in the eighties, to imply that the music was all but dead is inaccurate. They also appear to believe that Wynton and his jazz revivalist peers were the key to the future of the music, but it is all too easy for me with all this hindsight to go picking holes in that, overall ‘Jazz’ is a superb visual document and precursor to a similarly deep series about country music that Burns would turn his attentions to later.

I also went to the cinema this month to watch the Bruce Springsteen biopic ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere.’ I approached this one with a little trepidation because the potential for a cliché-ridden rags to riches story of rock ‘n’ roll savior seemed like a possibility. However, lead actor Jeremy Allen White is a serious performer who gives the impression of some professional integrity, so I felt this alone was a bit of a safety blanket. The film is actually a thoughtful piece of accurately shot cinematography, set in 1981-82 when Bruce was on the cusp of the worldwide acclaim and success he would soon be indelibly showered with. Here we see Springsteen hit a mentally low ebb as he channels deeply personal background issues into the new music that would become the lo-fi ‘Nebraska’ album. He home records demos onto a cassette and the difficulties in recreating these songs in the professional studio environment is heavily focused on, as is the record company frustration expressed as Bruce holds firm about releasing the cassette demo as the actual record. We also see him capturing, during the same sessions, the first few tracks of what would become 1984’s mainstream smashing ‘Born In The USA’ album, which does point to the most obvious omission from the script. As Bruce’s manager defends his artist to the Columbia hierarchy, keen to support his acts artistic vision and holding firm that ‘Nebraska’ is to be issued with no promotion, no singles and no Bruce Springsteen face on the album cover, it is hard not to assume he also would have bartered “but don’t worry, if we indulge Bruce now and put this out, the record he’s nearly got ready to go after this is going to make us all millions, so let’s just play the long game and go along with him for now”. But the script did not include such a calculating line. Either way, a good film with impressively authentic audio performances in which the Bruce Springsteen legend remains intact.