- Martin scorsese presents the blues jimi hendrix series#
- Martin scorsese presents the blues jimi hendrix tv#
Who the hell is Muddy Waters to the average black kid? But I can go to a twenty-five-year-old white kid, and they might know Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf.” In The Road to Memphis, directed by Richard Pearce, Ike Turner and the late Sam Phillips alternate between tension and affection as they debate whether black musicians were properly acknowledged and compensated in the Fifties. A kid might not even know A Tribe Called Quest today. I look at rap music the same way I look at the blues or jazz. “And then it doesn’t mean anything until somebody else goes to the gutter and picks it up and shines it off. “It’s that whole aspect of how blacks create the beginnings of the music, and then we toss it away,” Chuck says. The appropriation of the blues by white artists and businessmen gets addressed as well. The most meaningful result of that culture clash? “Robert Johnson is a household name now,” Clapton says. The film restores the strangeness and exhilaration that artists such as Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, John Mayall and Mick Fleetwood felt when they heard the music and encountered legendary performers including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. That international perspective lends a freshness to British director Mike Figgis’ Red, White and Blues. You can be in the desert, but ODB is on your TV.” “The point is that things are global now. He was like, What is this shit?’ So we explained to him, ‘Have you ever heard of Wu-Tang?’ ” Harris laughs at the incongruity.
Martin scorsese presents the blues jimi hendrix tv#
He has satellite TV and suddenly Ol’ Dirty Bastard comes on. “Me and Jamal Millner were hanging out with Ali Farka Toure. “There are cats over in Timbuktu who listen to James Brown, Bobby Bland and Otis Redding,” he says. Harris, too, was surprised by the linkages that he found. That seemed like two great incentives: I could pay homage to them and find out more about them at the same time.”
“I didn’t know much about their lives myself. “Some of my all-time heroes from the history of the blues had remained in the shadow of public acceptance,” he says. Lenoir, for example, Wenders teases out connections between spirituality, obsessive love and social consciousness. In relating the stories of Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J.B. While responsible to the facts of blues history, these films are also idiosyncratic, a testimony about the impact of the blues on the directors’ lives. Chris Thomas King, who played Tommy Johnson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and who has long explored the links between blues and hip-hop (his most recent album is called Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues), takes the role of holy bluesman Blind Willie Johnson in Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man, which includes historical re-creations as well as archival and contemporary footage.
Martin scorsese presents the blues jimi hendrix series#
In Feel Like Going Home - directed by Scorsese, who is executive producer of the series - guitarist Corey Harris travels to Mali to tie the binds between African and American musicians. In Godfathers and Sons, Chuck D and Marshall Chess, the son of Leonard Chess, one of the founders of the Chicago blues label Chess Records, orchestrate a jam between Chuck, the rapper Common and the musicians who backed Muddy Waters on Electric Mud, the bluesman’s controversial 1968 venture into psychedelia.
This series not only examines how and why that happened, it is determined to rectify it. In the course of that journey, the audience for the blues shifted from black to almost exclusively white. Most provocatively, they look at the music’s complex racial history - its African origins, its rural roots in slavery and share-cropping in the American South, its urban electrification after World War II in Chicago, its key function in the creation of rock & roll in the Fifties and its revival by British musicians in the Sixties. Just as Jimi Hendrix transformed the blues into genre-shattering psychedelic rock, these films attempt both to honor the history of the music and to demonstrate its ongoing life and significance. That statement could serve as the guiding principle for these movies. “You don’t copy his techniques, you copy his mind-set.” Hendrix was able to take the blues and put them on steroids,” says Chuck D in Godfathers and Sons, one of seven documentaries that are part of Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, which will air on PBS beginning Sunday, September 28th.