JazzTown

What is jazz?  It’s difficult to say about any artform and more so about one born of improvisation and spontaneity.  The very difficulty in defining it also makes it almost impossible to make any firm predictions on where it is going, how it will change into the future.  That doesn’t stop director Ben Makinen from trying in JazzTown, his paean to the jazz scene of Colorado, but like the artform itself the answers he finds are frustrating and uncomfortable by design.

Part of that is because, as many of the musicians Makinen interviews explain, jazz is always evolving in a way few musical styles do.  Whatever it started as, it is not that way now and whatever it is now, it will not be tomorrow.  That uncertainty and surprise is part of what makes jazz what it is, not least because there’s no telling where it will emerge.  Colorado in general, and Denver in particularly, are not generally thought off in the list of major jazz hubs, but in his several years chronicle of the local jazz scene there Makinen a culture and history as deep and intrinsic to the artfrom as anything from Chicago or Kansas City or New Orleans.

More importantly, and frequently with more sorrow, it’s a scene with a keen idea of where it sits in the jazz firmament and where the art form itself is likely going.  Digging into the initial background of jazz in Colorado who is playing it there, JazzTown on its surface just seems like a series of interesting but brief interviews with local musicians offering up anecdotes about their time around the city and how they fell into form to begin with.  Each small story, however, builds to a more interesting whole, creating a mosaic that when viewed from a distance defines and shapes the history of the town and offers a view on it (and its music) quite different from the standard expectation.  In many cases artists just fell into it due to the draw of the rhythm and soon found themselves ensconced a life they may not have expected.

None of them, however, have any illusions about how that has been rewarded or what it means for those coming after them.  More than one old hand takes the moment of the film to let whoever comes after know that it wasn’t worth it and to find something else to do with their lives.  It quickly becomes a sad and depressing picture of cultural gentrification, one where the reality that there’s no way to make a living doing it leaves it only to future practitioners who don’t have to worry about making a living at it.  The foresee a world where jazz is no longer created for casual audiences who stumble upon it as they had in the past, but something created only by a select group of musicians for a select group of musicians, an ouroboros continually feeding on itself. 

Within that misery there are still seeds of hope.  Makinen takes some time to focus on the next generation of musicians coming up, fully aware of where the form came from and how it has changed.  A young drummer, not yet worrying about how to make money doing it, focuses more on how the sound has changed in reaction to other musical forms around it and reminding at the end of the day that it’s the sound that is heart of the form.  As long as that still exists, in some form, jazz will never die.

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The Country Club