You should already know if you’re the target audience for Fire Music, Tom Surgal’s loving documentary profile of the free jazz scene and its prime movers. With generous footage of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and Sun Ra, this is a no-brainer for anybody who listens to experimental music. But the film’s success isn’t just about content; it’s about how this challenging music is translated to a visual medium. Fortunately, with ambitious editing, appropriate vintage footage and lively interviews, this fires on all cylinders.
An eye-catching pre-credit sequence sets a tone that might be shocking to the uninitiated: an ‘80s Sun Ra Arkestra performance with band members in regal space garb wailing in full free mode, some musicians flat on their back on the stage honking like they’re possessed. One might wonder, how can this spectacle be anything but chaos?
But as a dizzying collage indicates, the artistic progress is part of a continuum – one that contradicts the Marx epigram that follows the Arkestra footage: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Clips from abstract experimental films play over footage of jazz lions like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, then moving to Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker. The sequence seems to suggest that, starting with bebop, jazz movements came along merely to destroy the past. But as often as not, the artists who developed the form built upon the past; Sun Ra came up in the Fletcher Henderson big band, after all, and he brought that discipline to the Arkestra.
Conceptual quibbles aside, there’s so much good music – and conversation – here that it’s hard to resist. Surgal interviews critics like Gary Giddins and musicians like Carla Bley and John Tchicai, but the director cleverly varies the presentation. Surgal occasionally cuts between different interview subjects to tell a story, which to some degree helps to vary the talking head format; it also helps that these are such colorful storytellers – and candid ones. In one of the film’s most moving sequences, Ingrid Sertso and Karl Berger talk about finding Eric Dolphy on the night he died from a diabetic coma.
Surgal also varies the format with multi-paneled screens that convey the visual equivalent of musical interplay. As musicians explain the migration of avant-garde players to New York, Noah Howard, among others, single out one block of E 3rd Street in the East Village where a lot of major players lived; this sequence starts with Howard’s interview, full frame, but as he describes the neighborhood’s musical geography, different figures, some represented by old footage, others by recent interviews, begin to populate an animated map of the area.
The sequence is a reminder that, however forbidding free jazz may be to some listeners, it was just as much about community and communication as any other musical form. And, as the loft jazz scene emerges in New York in the ‘70s, the story momentarily turns into one of gentrification. Revolving largely around saxman Sam Rivers, musicians took advantage of cheap real estate downtown. But as drummer Warren Smith explains, the scenes success led to its own downfall; he notes that a real estate lawyer friend told him, “You artists come in and you civilize a place with your talent, be it visual arts, theater arts, musical arts … then the whole area becomes unaffordable to those who brought this activity about.”
Much of Fire Music concentrates on the American musicians that developed the scene, but the greater acceptance of this music in Europe leads to a section on players in the UK, Germany and Holland. So anyone aware of Jimmy Fallon’s recent mocking of Peter Brötzmann’s landmark album Nipples will be happy to see the German saxophonist make an appearance.
Fire Music could well be made for a limited audience. But the personalities and visual flair just might make a few converts.
Photo courtesy of Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos, via Submarine Deluxe
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