CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

DEPARTMENTS

BLACK LIKE ME

Bring On The Night (A&M Films)

John Mendelssohn

Several years ago, in his infamous Outspoken Period, Elvis Costello allowed as how Sting ought to be cuffed mercilessly about the ears until he quit singing in a Jamaican accent. Presently, it�s his record company that�s in for a good cuffing for having bankrolled Bring On The Night.

Following Sting and his D/eam Of The Blue Turtles band from rehearsal hall (actually, chateau) to its first public performance, the film falls on its face on every level—it�s a disaster as a vicarious concert experience and fails, its star�s expectations notwithstanding, to illuminate how musicians somehow become more than the sum of themselves when they form a band.

But it sure does succeed in enhancing Sting�s image as The Thoughtful Rock Superstar. While the eminent (and, as jazz fans will tell you, woefully squandered) eminent young black jazzmen and embarrassingly sycophantic women singers who make up his band are interviewed in brilliant daylight, Sting himself speaks to u$, most warily, from deep in shadow. In what appears to be someone�s personal library, for Pete�s sake.

Actually, thoughtful would finish a very distant second in the list of things you might call Sting on this film�s basis— imperturbable and dour being frontrunners for the first. Even perpetrating a Beatlesque hi-jinx in a fountain, he wears the same pleasureless smirk he wore while cutting up in the dreadful early Police videos, is grim even as he humors the eminent young jazzmen at an early rehearsal by singing the theme from The Flintstones. The birth of his son Jake (we see it!) seems to please him about as much as might word that Dream Of The Blue Turtles had just passed the 719,323 sales mark—he snips the boy�s umbilical cord with as much palpable sense of excitement as he might tune the A string of his Stratocaster.

It isn�t as though director Michael Apted doesn�t try desperately to illuminate Sting�s lighter side. At a press conference, a young Frenchwoman (both rehearsals and concert take place in France) with an impaired sense of the English double entendre asks Sting if he�s interested in playing (rather than working, don�t you see) with a French director. When he smirks slyly and pronounces the question a leading one, Apted shows us no fewer than three other journalists beaming delightedly, as though at great wit. It�s that Sting apparently doesn�t have a lighter side.

The concert footage is dismally photographed (as ugly, in fact, as Brian de Palma�s �Dancing In The Dark� video was gorgeous) and edited both too much and in such a way as to detract from, rather than enhance, our pleasure. As witness the great moment in �Demolition Man� when our hero, briefly transported, suddenly takes to hopping exultantly. Apted�s cameramen and editors capture it only from afar, and only for a split second.

There are a few interesting moments, only one of which involves Sting himself. First, you have co-manager Miles Copeland�s joltingly candid explanation of how he browbeat the eminent young jazz musicians into joining the band for a lot less than we gather they had in mind. Then you have the irresistibly forthright saxophonist Branford Marsalis cheerfully revealing that the trappings of pop stardom make him want �...to barf.�

Sting himself is never more likable than when asked when he first got a sense that he�d get as big as he�s got. He recalls hearing a window-cleaner at a hotel in the north of England whistling �Roxanne� (no mean feat!) while he worked, and, later, a hospital orderly humming another Police hit, and describes such experiences as �a great privilege.� Both most graciously, methinks, and most aptly.

SAX ll\l AMERICA

ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA (Caravan of Dreams Productions)

by Cynthia Rose

Since his New York debut at the Five Spot in 1959, Fort Worthier Ornette Coleman has generally been considered the most influential individual to have emerged in Afro-American music since Charlie Parker. Most critics regard him as the first truly �free� player: a musician whose work rejects previously established harmonic structures and barlines in favor of sheer invention.

For these reasons alone, documentarian Shirley Clarke�s 90-minute film was bound to provoke fascination and curiosity. Also because the avant-garde guru (Shirl filmed The Connection in �61, and her latest works were Sam Shepard-Joe Chaikin collaborations), spent 20 years on the project.

The combination of Clarke�s inventiveness and Coleman�s idiosyncrasies weaving in and out of performance clips can be stunning. And many relationships on many levels are suggested. There�s past to present, native geography to artistic growth, the interdisciplinary influence of one artist upon another (here it�s Buckminster Fuller, to whom Ornette pays homage at length). The most touching of all is that between Coleman and son Nardo: for 20 years his father�s drummer and now his manager also.

There is footage of legendary players: Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry and Dewey Redman circa �60-�75; Jamaladeen Tacuma, Bern Nix, Charlie Ellerbe and Albert McDowell from the later Prime Time. And there are reminiscences of more; in a barbecue joint, Coleman recalls how, when he got to Manhattan, he found fellow Fort Worther King Curtis �driving a Rolls and opening for the Beatles.� But therein lies the quibble with this historic docudrama: it should have stuck longer with the orally-delivered history-and-mystery of its subject. I�d gladly have sacrificed long animated sequences of Ornette in outer space to hear from the man or his pals how cousin James Jordan first encouraged him to play.

Or maybe some mention of Coleman�s famous schoolmates, such as Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett. Downtown and ghetto-side Cowtown (Fort Worth) are also heavily visualized, yet we hear very little of Ornette�s actual experiences there. Since he spent half his days in school and half his nights in clubs where the musicians were underage and the competition intense, this seems like it would have been relevent.

The film is also dogged by an �artist-comes-home-to-thePhilistines� bent which is unfortunate, albeit familiar. Yet, Made in America offers a wealth of well-crafted material, it�s valuable viewing...and even holds its own with the soundtrack by its subject.