Blues Make a Comeback

["Richard Kraus" <rdkraus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I cut the info below out of a Bob Herbert column in
the NYT today (first time I ever read him without
snickering !!!).  Anyway, he says the blues are about to make
a comeback with some big media names helping out.  I
hope he's right.  Anyway, I'm sure some of you are interested:

===================================================

"...Now hold onto your hats, folks, because that music [the
blues] is about to make a comeback.

The filmmaker Martin Scorsese and some of his associates are raising the
curtain today on a dandy project. "This is special," he said in an interview
last week.

Mr. Scorsese and six other directors, including Wim Wenders, Mike Figgis and
Clint Eastwood, are nearing completion of seven feature-length films about
the blues. Excerpts from five of the films will be shown today at the
Sundance Film Festival.

All seven films will be shown on PBS next fall as the centerpiece of an even
bigger project called "Year of the Blues." This will include a 13-part
public radio series on the history of the blues, a companion book of rarely
seen archival material, and a traveling blues exhibition and education
program that the sponsors hope will reach up to five million children.

The "Year of the Blues" will begin more or less officially with a benefit
concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Feb. 7.

The film project began about five years ago when Mr. Scorsese was the
executive producer on a concert film with Eric Clapton in which footage of
blues musicians from the past was used. From that, said Mr. Scorsese, "came
the idea of doing a series of films that would honor the history of the
blues."

The films are not straight narratives, or documentaries, but rather what Mr.
Scorsese calls "interpretive, personal looks at the blues."

"The idea," he said, "was to take the archival footage, and then to take
journeys, interpretive looks at the blues, and create an awareness for young
people that, first, this is an art form, and then to understand how it
happened, where it came from and how it continues."

Mr. Scorsese's film, "From Mali to Mississippi," is not yet finished. "I
hope to complete it by March," he said. It goes all the way back to the
antecedents of the blues on "the banks of the Niger River in Mali" and then
follows the progression of the music to the cotton fields and juke joints of
the Mississippi Delta."


The full article is at:


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/20/opinion/20HERB.html?pagewanted=print&posit
ion=top


  Regards to all      Rich K