Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Feel Like Going Home [DVD]

ok

Brill...

Great value DVD and the music speaks for itself!

A good introduction to the blues mythology

Scorcese splits his movie into two parts. The first is a straight forward attempt at tracing the development of the blues from its origins in slavery through field hollers, work songs, songsters, Charlie Patton and Son House , through Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters. As you'd expect this is as entertaining as it is rushed. There are great stills and clips, sad to see the late great Johnny Shines look so ill, even sadder to subject him yet again to reminisce about his times with Johnson when the brief clip of him playing gives a glimpse of his power as an artist in his own right. As Scorcese explains in the brief extras interview, the thesis here is that the music originated in Africa and continues there in the tradition of the griots. So in the second part we have Corey, Harris arrive in Mali and interview Ali Farke Toure etc. Now I've seen Corey a couple of times and excellent musician though me is, he's no interviewer. There's a lot of smiling and nodding, a little musical collaboration and not much else. Toure's assertion that J.L. Hooker and his ilk were a product of the need to commercialise the true African sound strikes me to miss the point that Harris and Keb Mo make earlier in the movie, when mocking those who tried to reproduce every nuance of the old 78s, namely that each musician worth their salt brings his own interpretation to the form, which of course is how it survives. Scorcese tries rather awkwardly to link the above with quite a lot of the fife and drum music of Otha Turner. This is ok but I couldn't help thinking that the likes of Jim Dickinson and his sons' band the North Mississippi All Stars,(who do contribute to the book)would have broadened the scope. Willie King does make a great appearance in a funky juke joint which looks authentic enough to me and Corey and Keb have a couple of numbers together in the extras.All in all this disappoints. The new material is completely swamped by the quality of the old, and there isn't enough of either to whet new appetites.