Play Your Own Thing: Story Of Jazz In Europe [DVD]

For far too long, critics and historians alike have overlooked the contributions Europeans have made to America's sole indigenous art form. This new documentary by Julian Benedikt, aptly called "Play Your Own Thing," attempts to redress this injustice, examining the history of jazz from the perspective of the European artists that helped to pioneer and develop it. Utilizing rare stills, archive footage, concert recordings and dozens of interviews, Benedikt weaves a fascinating narrative mosaic that encompasses the music's beginnings from the 1910s up to the present day. While acknowledging the primacy of American jazz artists, "Play Your Own Thing" brings a reality check by noting the European heritage of several seminal jazz figures, including guitarist Eddie Lang and violinist Joe Venuti (both Italian), and gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt (Belgian). The film also points out how European critics were quicker off the mark than their American peers to recognize jazz music as a legitimate art form, and how Europe was, for many African-American jazz players, a far more welcoming environment, both professionally and personally. Benedikt underlines this particular theme with fascinating archive footage of pianist Bud Powell playing with the cream of European rhythm section players in a Paris nightclub, as well as tenor saxophone legend Dexter Gordon sauntering through the streets of Copenhagen en route to a gig, where he suavely introduces his Euro band mates. Another running motif is the importance of finding one's own creative voice, hence the film's title. Interviews with such European individualists as Albert Mangelsdorff, Palle Mikkelborg, Tomasz Stanko and Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen reveal their approach to creating jazz music on their own terms while respecting its traditions and heritage. German trumpeter Till Brönner perhaps sums it up best: "At some point I asked myself, must I be black and American to be allowed to play jazz? Or is jazz by now a language, a vehicle, a vocabulary which is accessible for everyone and which we should just use to orient ourselves in the direction we actually come from?" Director Benedikt first gained attention about 10 years ago with the documentary "Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz." But whereas that film felt kind of superficial and unequal to its subject, "Play Your Own Thing" resonates with depth, heart and soul. Most important, it makes an unimpeachable case that jazz has always been an inclusive, rather than exclusive form of music, and that this quality is the key to its ongoing survival and development.

PLAY YOUR OWN THING is a 90-minute documentary film by Julian Benedikt on the spread of jazz in Europe. There's a portion at the beginning of PLAY YOUR OWN THING that I think is an excellent proof of what jazz has become after going international: a furious montage of concert clips with musical accompaniment that shows the range of instrumentation these days -- alpenhorn, kazoo, cowbells, toybells -- played by people of myriad nationalities.

The history proper opens with several German and French musicians like Coco Schumann and Albert Mangelsdorff who speak of their joy at discovering jazz after the painful years of World War II. Though jazz had presumably visited Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the liberation and the accompanying influx of American soliders that sparked the continuous European jazz tradition that we've inherited today. The visit of Miles Davis to France in the early 1950s is fondly remembered by his lover, Juliette Greco. Palle Mikkelborg recalls how a visit by Dexter Gordon thrilled the Danish jazz world, while Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen remembers Bud Powell's residency in Copenhagen.

There are some brief portraits of jazz musicians from behind the Iron Curtain. Joachim Kuhn reflects on the musical poverty of East Germany and how liberating his encounter with Ornette Coleman was. Tomasz Stanko represents the Polish perspective. The next big part of the documentary, however, is a series of illustrations of Europe coming into its own as a source of original contributions to jazz with some wild footage of Arve Henriksen playing two trumpets at the same time and Steano Bollani playing piano with spiky harmonies. Trevor Watts and Louis Sclavis speak of how free jazz came naturally to European players in the 1960s.

PLAY YOUR OWN THING is a pretty entertaining and informative documentary. I watched it while I was exploring ECM, and it was quite helpful in understanding the motivations of some of the label's major figures and getting a feel for this community. Indeed, one of the last portions of the documentary is ECM head Manfred Eicher producing a Tomasz Stanko recording session.

If I'd make one complaint about the documentary, it's that it seems to go out of its way to deny African influence on jazz. As the voiceover at the beginning claims and Robert Wyatt backs up later on, jazz supposedly is all European, the instruments and the techniques just happened to fall into the hands of African-Americans, and the genre's return to Europe is only a coming home ("After two World Wars, jazz came back to Europe"). I found this denial that jazz began as a fusion of two cultures in the American south rather strange. On the other hand, I do like how the documentary shows that the American debate over late 1960s developments like free jazz and fusion, where figures like Wynton Marsalis seem to want to freeze jazz in bebop played by African-Americans, isn't even on the radar in Europe. This is a sense that simply delights in the music, no matter who is playing it or how distant it is from New Orleans tradition.

Good documentary from Denmark. Includes some priceless old footage of great artists performing in Europe: Bud Powell, Neils Pederson - when he was a teenager!, Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Louis Armstrong, Ben Webster, Kenny Clarke, Don Cherry, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, others. Many nice interviews and jams with European jazz musicians of all ages, including Joe Zawinul, Neils Pederson, and Jan Gabarek. Recommended.