A celebration of a festival and a city

   

  When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, contrary voices emerged. Perhaps, some thought, this much-celebrated but increasingly vulnerable coastal city shouldn't exist at all. 

   Why rebuild when another Category 5 storm was sure to strike again, creating fatalities in the thousands and property damages in the billions? 

    The documentary Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story uses food, music and cultural pride to answer that question. A noble presumption underlies this somewhat scattered and perhaps over-reaching film: The world needs a place where musical approaches mix, mingle, and inform one another. 

    That place must also be located in the spot that gave birth to the uniquely American art form of jazz.

      Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern combine to direct a history of Jazz Fest, a musical gathering which began in 1971 when George Wein, founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, was asked to create a festival in New Orleans. 

     Musician Ellis Marsalis added his considerable wisdom to the effort, along with Quint Davis, a young man who Wein involved because of his enthusiasm for the music. Davis still serves as Jazz Fest’s producer.

     Ellis Marsalis, by the way, is the father of Winton and Bradford Marsalis, musicians who appear in the film along with two other Marsalis musical brothers.  

     Any understanding of Jazz Fest begins with the idea that jazz is the father of many children. The festival includes everything from rock to R&B to hip-hop to traditional jazz,  bounding from the infections rhythms of Pitbull to the country sway of Jimmy Buffett and onto a Bruce Springsteen appearance. Springsteen sang My City of Ruins at Jazz Fest after Katrina. The song works well even though it originally was written about Asbury Park, New Jersey.

     Not surprisingly, music becomes the film's best feature. The directors include snippets of performances from throughout Fest's history, highlighting numbers by Katy Perry, Al Green, Pitbull, the Revivalists, Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville, Buffett, and many more.

     These days, some 7,000 musicians perform on 14 stages throughout Jazz Fest's eight-day run.

     If Jazz Fest has critics, you won't hear them in a film that's wholeheartedly committed to the idea that the festival and its host city are nothing less than essential. 

     Covid shut the festival down for two years but it resumed in 2021. It’s not difficult to imagine that if all of New Orleans were destroyed by the next violent storm, Jazz Fest would continue to rock the ruins.

     

A love of Springsteen changes his life

Blinded by the Light takes an upbeat, energetic look at how a young Pakistani man awakens to life.

At its best, Blinded by the Light is the exuberant movie that Yesterday should have been. In director Gurinder Chadha's lively look at the influence of popular music on an impressionable young man, a Pakistani student (Viveik Kalra) finds his life transformed when he discovers the music of Bruce Springsteen. Timid and dutiful, Kalra's Javed opens the door to what he regards as a richer life and begins to live in what you might call "The World According to Bruce."

Springsteen's music does what only music can do: It awakens Javed's dormant sensibilities and tells him that the world contains much more than he knew or imagined. He's not just listening; he's experiencing a revelation.

Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) brings a light touch to the movie's developments as she sketches in Javed's romance with a young woman (Nell Williams) he meets at school and his friendship with the young man (Aaron Phagura) who turned him onto Bruce in the first place.

Based on a memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor, Blinded by the Light uses Springsteen's music to help Javid fully understand the limitations of life in the bland town of Luton where he's sometimes bullied by neighborhood toughs and where his stern father (Kulvinder Ghir) has difficulty finding his footing after being laid off from the GM plant where he toiled for 16 years.

Ghir's Malik has no use for the poetry that Javed begins to write. He wants his son to arm himself against deeply ingrained British prejudices that he believes must break Javed's heart. But one of Javed's teachers (Haley Atwell) encourages the young man to keep searching for his voice. The year: 1987.

Kalra holds the screen with Javed's new-found avidity and his unshakable faith in the vision that Springsteen's music -- liberally used throughout -- opens for him. It's refreshing that Javid doesn't aspire to be a musician. He doesn't want to be Bruce; he wants to see like Bruce. He aspires to reach the level of feeling that he hears in songs such as Born to Run. Music empowers him, almost as if he's riding a wave created by Springsteen's liberating energies.

It's all very naive, of course, but this kind of naivete is precisely what the movie's remembering and, ultimately, celebrating.

Before Blinded by the Light ends, Chadha kneels too deeply at the altar of sentiment and she sometimes indulges a level of corniness the material doesn't require but Blinded by the Light survives those impulses and asks us to share its appreciation for Springsteen's music and, by inference, the magic music can work in the hearts of the young.