Dream week it remains.
During my weekend I caught up with more of 'The Blues' (PBS). Without the Blues, there'd be no Heather Nova,
no 'South' on standby, no nobody, meaning most of the women on the log ... but there might be a lot of "monkey junk". That's different.
 "'She called me her lover and called me her beggar too'," Clint Eastwood's saying. "I know those words, I've used them many times."
Jay McShann (home), the Kansas City bluesman who's just amused Eastwood so much, goes way back. When he enjoys his 89th birthday this very week, on January 12, he should be in good company. His life is steeped in the sound that has since influenced almost every songwriter on this site. When it got a name, it was uniquely American.
The snap too good to resist comes from 'Piano Blues', Eastwood's contribution to a shared dream realised when Martin Scorsese found the fellow film-makers to bring it to the screen in 2003 with a landmark centenary set of movies. If they're all as good as his own -- known in France as 'Du Mali au Mississippi' -- and this one, they're a must-have for a musical wishlist.
Films about music are almost invariably at their finest when modest without being humbled by the art and those who make it. Eastwood pulls this off both sides of the camera. He has an easy manner with musicians like McShann and Ray Charles, content mainly to share a piano stool and ask where they started and listen, dropping in an occasional anecdote of his own and a few names to nudge memories and encourage some wonderful playing.
The enthralling outcome provides only a fleeting chance to hear Eastwood himself at the ivories, but he has no such pretensions in this film, a family affair. The sequence of piano duets at the end is a treat.
Ray Charles died in 2004, the year before a terrible tragedy befell New Orleans. We're fortunate memory is harder to drown today than any paper archive. The seven documentaries are widely available online, including from the enterprising French Wild Side project (video; Fr, see "collections").
Women were involved from the start, Marcia Ball (home) tells Eastwood part of their story, looking composed and sober about it until she starts playing. Marcia caught the Blues from her grandmother, a ragtime pianist, in New Orleans. In 1970, her car broke down in Austin, Texas. She didn't but decided she liked the place.
Technology cuts both ways. It makes 'The Blues' possible, like Marcia's new 'Live! Down the Road', but orchestral musicians rarely talk as they did about the richness and warmth of the Vienna string sound, the bite in Berlin's brass, the flair in Chicago and the mellifluous woodwinds of Paris. Never mind since the sense of place and people remains an important part of the "global village", while many musicians use today's tools to shape the traditions.
Marcia has
"a theory about how towns develop musically, that maybe there's a person who's a foundation. Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters in Chicago established a theme that inspired other great traditional blues guitarists and harmonica players. Therefore, to me, Chicago is kind of a guitar and harmonica town. New Orleans with its old horn tradition, starting with Buddy Bowlin and Louis Armstrong, is a strong horn town - brass and saxophone. Then the keyboards came up - there were great keyboard players to begin with, who were often included in Dixieland bands, but Professor Longhair is a foundation person as far as keyboard is concerned, and he invented a style that was carried on in the next two generations and is still going.
"So New Orleans is primarily a keyboard and horn town. There's (pianist) Ellis Marsalis and his horn-playing sons. Toots Washington, who was in his eighties when 'Fess was in his sixties, definitely had an influence on 'Fess, although he was much more traditional than 'Fess was," she told Michael Parrish for Dirty Linen a decade ago.
McShann speaks of music as a big family. So does Scorsese when he says the centenary "series is more about an art form seen emotionally, not in a chronological way. It's a series that came out of my trying to discover more about this music and also primarily to share this with the younger people, the people who had been asking questions and haven't gotten the answers to have a kind of continuity."
The 13 companion radio programmes made to mark the Year of the Blues, where those words come from, remain available online in a true public service.
So what is monkey junk? Before anyone could leap to tell me, young Susan Tedeschi saved them the trouble when she said why she's got the Blues:
"There's just so many people that have passed away in the last few years. But I do know that there are still some that are alive. And those are the guys I'm, you know, that’s why I’m out here doing it. I’m trying to pay homage to them. And also 'cause I love the music and I want to keep the history of it alive. And the Blues, you know, is basically like Son House used to say, 'The Blues is about a man and a woman, everything else is monkey junk.' That’s what he used to say. But, uh, but he, you know, he basically believed that all songs, you know, in Blues comes down to a relationship. And that's what I sorta think about when I'm writing songs, is relationships, either between people or between situations."
No singer-songwriter can limit such a feeling to the Blues any more than I'd usually capitalise the art form, but this is a special week. Like Martin Scorsese in a capital achievement, I'm less interested in chronology than the relations between people and the music of their lives. My own took a turn today of the kind I write up in The Orchard, since that's where I've got anything to say, if at all, on asking my own dreams to pinch me when they come true.
11:15:04 PM link 
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