Rating:
Genre:
Blues
Release Date: 09/09/2003
Clint Eastwood's chapter in
Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues centers around the piano's role in the development of the
blues. In typical
Eastwood fashion, he goes not for the easy or common associations of the instrument with the music, but looks expansively at how the restricted sonics of the piano as a melodic instrument and its possibilities as a percussion instrument created a spiralling and deep-rooted bottom for the music in all genres of popular music as it developed in the 20th century. Here is
Jimmy Yancey's primitive and profound version of
"How Long Blues" juxtaposed against the harmonically sophisticated read of the song by
Count Basie and his orchestra. The
New Orleans blues are celebrated in their modern incarnations -- as they contributed to the architecture of
rock & roll by the inclusion of
Fats Domino's
"Fat Man" and
Joe Turner's
"The Ladder." The
blues as exemplified in
soul music as it came from
R&B are revealed by
Ray Charles'
"What'd I Say" -- both parts -- and as they informed modern
jazz in the glorious trio recording of
"Backwards Country Boy Blues" by
Max Roach,
Charles Mingus, and
Duke Ellington, and in
Thelonious Monk's
"Blue Monk." What
Eastwood is trying to show in the film and on the
soundtrack is how the 12-bar
blues was not only a platform, but a devil's playground for experimentation, rhythmic invention, and harmonic extrapolation. And he succeeds in this aural document by creating the most provocative of the series'
soundtracks.
~Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
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