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Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey.

Article Excerpt
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. Edited by Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Christopher John Farley. New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2003. [288 p. ISBN 0-06-052544-4. $27.95.] Illustrations.

One of the highlights of the fall 2003 Public Broadcasting Service television season was Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (henceforth The Blues), a series of seven films broadcast on consecutive nights in late September. There had never been such an extensive television presentation of the blues, so the series was notable even to viewers familiar with this music. The group of films did not attempt to give a chronological account of the blues, perhaps partly due to the scarcity of film footage of blues shot before 1960, and perhaps also due to criticism of the 2000 Ken Burns series Jazz (see for example Steven F. Pond, "Jamming the Reception: Ken Burns, Jazz, and the Problem of 'America's Music'," Notes 60, no. 1 [September 2003]: 11-45). Rather, the director of each of The Blues films concentrated on one aspect of the music: Martin Scorsese on African antecedents of the blues; Charles Burnett on blues and its associations with social concepts of sin; Richard Pearce on the chitlin circuit blues in Memphis and north Mississippi; Wim Wenders on Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J. B. Lenoir; Marc Levin on Chicago and Chess Records; Mike Figgis on the British blues scene of the 1960s; and Clint Eastwood on piano blues. Celebration, not documentation, appeared to be the mission, and on assuming that, I found each film at least watchable, a few enjoyable, and the Pearce, Wenders, and Figgis offerings the best.

The occasion for producing the film series, its companion book, and other related materials is the Year of...

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