Up from the Streets - New Orleans: The City of Music
If you don’t already believe that New Orleans is the most important city in the history of American music, the new documentary Up from the Streets may convince you with just the density of the information it packs into an hour and 45 minutes. It’s like a 10-part Ken Burns series squeezed into one jam-packed — and jam-filled — episode. And not only is it replete with information and interviews, it has the wisdom to pause rather often to let some great jazz performances unfold — by Aaron Neville, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and others.
Some on-camera numbers are archival, but many were beautifully staged for the film, and the interviews span an equally expansive time frame. There’s fairly recent commentary from many music legends who have since passed on, including Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, and others. Director Michael Murphy seems to have been working on this film for 10 years or longer, and it’s clearly a passion project.
Up from the Streets asserts the primacy of New Orleans as the melting pot chiefly responsible for the development of jazz — in its many incarnations — from a combination of Cuban, African, spiritual, and other influences. It’s also a roll call of the well-known and lesser known geniuses along the way, too many to begin to list here. Rest assured even jazz aficionados are likely to learn a lot, and those of us who are mere dabblers will be amazed at the richness of the many traditions intertwined in the Big Easy. “Jazz” here encompasses everything from the city’s characteristic street brass bands to early rock and blues to the many varieties of soulful singing and instrumental virtuosity you would expect.
Hosted by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the documentary keeps its focus chiefly on the African-American experience and on black artists, but as if to win the attention of Boomer viewers more in tune with the blues and rock ‘n’ roll, Murphy also has interviews with Robert Plant, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, and Sting, to namecheck a few. New Orleans native Harry Connick Jr.’s boyhood stories of hanging out with musical legends are especially fun. On the other hand, don’t expect much acknowledgement of chart-friendly R&B, swing bands (save for frequent mention of Louis Armstrong), or New Orleans legends Al Hirt and Pete Fountain, dismissed here in about 30 seconds with evident distaste for their popularity with unsophisticated tourists.
The documentary has its blind spots, but it never ceases to be revelatory and fascinating, perhaps too much to digest at one sitting. It’s loosely organized into chapters, each beginning with a title card, and it proceeds more or less chronologically. But it has so much ground to cover, it inevitably jumps around. The impact of Hurricane Katrina is considered smartly toward the end, but for a movie with a city in its title, the film is surprisingly silent on the geography of its location. Many historic locations are noted and visited, but where anything is relative to, say, the French Quarter or the Ninth Ward or the Garden District remains a mystery. (The occasional map graphic would have been nice.)
Still, if Up from the Streets has flaws, they are the result of an ardent filmmaker who perhaps knows and loves just a little too much. Fortunately, that enthusiasm is communicated in the film’s upbeat and always engrossing tone, and viewers will be smiling and tapping their feet more often than not.
Grade: B-plus. Not rated but PG equivalent. Available for to watch at home May 15 via the Grail Moviehouse’s Sofa Cinema streaming program.
(Photo courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment)
