[Photo: Ritchie Valens by Gil Rocha]
By LARRY ROHTER
NY Times
In the mid-1990s the documentary filmmakers Elizabeth Deane and Adriana Bosch would sometimes meet in the cafeteria and offices of WGBH in Boston to talk about programs they might make together. Ms. Deane had just finished producing the 10-part “Rock & Roll” series for PBS and wanted to do more about music. Ms. Bosch, a Cuban-American, was interested in making mainstream audiences more aware of Latin culture.
After more than a decade, during which they struggled to raise production money and worked on several other projects, the outcome of those brainstorming sessions is about to go on the air. “Latin Music USA,” a four-part series that most PBS stations will begin broadcasting on Monday, is an effort to bring those two different perspectives together, in much the way that Latin music itself is a fusion and hybrid.
“Our twin objectives were to engage the widest possible audience while also doing justice to the music for a more knowledgeable Latino viewership,” Ms. Deane said. “For people like me, this was a wonderful discovery. But for Latinos, this is the music they live and breathe, with artists they have known all their lives.”
Each hourlong segment in the series, produced in association with the BBC, focuses on a particular style, place or time. The first two programs concentrate on Latin jazz and salsa, genres that developed mainly in New York. Part 3, “Chicano Wave,” looks at forms of Mexican-American music that have emerged in the Southwest. The final episode, “Divas and Superstars,” features recent pop-oriented singers and producers mostly out of Miami or New York.
“We make documentaries about American history, and what we wanted to do was place this music as part of a history that we all share,” Ms. Bosch said. “We were trying to find the connections, find uniting factors, so that anybody anywhere in America can look at and identify with this story.”
Often, the series demonstrates, those linkages are almost subterranean. At one point in the first program, “Bridges,” snippets of hits by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Young Rascals and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, including “Satisfaction” and “Day Tripper,” are juxtaposed with identical cha-cha or mambo riffs recorded years earlier and all but forgotten.
But the series shows that the influences don’t flow in just one direction. The accordionist Flaco Jimenez, for example, explains how German polka bands in Texas influenced his Tex-Mex style, playing riffs that illustrate his point. And the Tejano star Little Joe recalls a childhood picking cotton in Texas alongside African-Americans, who gave him a love for the blues.
“Latin Music USA” also includes rare and unusual archival footage. There are home movies of Ritchie Valens with his mother shortly before he died in the 1959 plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly; of a young Celia Cruz singing with a full orchestra in Cuba; and of musical performances tied to Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ union rallies.
Even stories familiar through movies and other parts of mainstream culture take on a new coloration thanks to the filmmakers’ efforts to track down supporting players. In one particularly moving vignette, Bob Keane, Valens’s producer and manager, remembers driving a Thunderbird to San Francisco from Los Angeles with Valens in the back seat playing his guitar and stumbling across the riff that powered the rock classic “La Bamba.”
In another, the producer Huey Meaux tells how he rescued the future country-music star Freddy Fender from a job in a Houston carwash that Mr. Fender, born Baldemar Huerta, got after serving a prison term in Louisiana on a questionable drug charge. That name change and Mr. Fender’s troubles with the law underscore some broader points the filmmakers wanted to make about the role of music in defining identity and enduring prejudice.
“It was hard to find original footage” of Mr. Fender, Valens and Little Joe “because we Mexican-Americans are almost like phantoms of history,” said John Valadez, who directed the “Chicano Wave” episode. “This film doesn’t pull any punches in terms of racism and struggle, but it’s not a bitter or angry film.”
All four programs are narrated by the actor Jimmy Smits, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York and Puerto Rico. For him too, the project’s appeal was as much emotional and personal as intellectual: his parents, he said, met at the Palladium Ballroom, the hub of the Latin music dance scene in Manhattan during the 1950s, and he has vivid memories of hearing the boogaloo sound as a teenager.
In four hours “Latin Music USA” cannot possibly be comprehensive, and does not pretend to be. Mr. Smits said he was “already getting e-mail messages from friends asking why so-and-so was left out,” and each director and producer expressed regret about some favorite artist who did not make the final cut.
“We know there is so much more than one could do,” Ms. Deane said. “This is such a universe of great music, and we hope this series and the DVD and CD that go along with it will spur more thinking about programming in this area.”
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment