Brian Whistler on „Music For Black Pigeons“

I bought my copy of „Music for Black Pigeons“ a number of months ago, watched it and was very moved by it. But it wasn’t until I revisited it yesterday during a break in a session of free playing with a talented percussionist that I really fully appreciated it. Seeing it with a fellow artist allowed me to see it with fresh eyes and ears. 

After viewing it a second time, I realized just how artfully this film is executed. It is more than merely just another music documentary, it is really a humanistic art film that focuses on aging, love and the shared passion for artist collaboration. And of course, always the beautiful music.

While the film centers of guitarist Jakob Bro, the beating heart of this film is in the elder players who recognized his talent and wanted to play with the young Danish maestro. Structurally, the film takes its time, setting the scene for each location, lingering on buildings or street scenes, giving the viewer a sense of place and atmosphere before diving in to the more intimate scenes.

The brilliant direction and editing takes advantage of the nearly 15 years of filming, exploring the themes of aging and the deepening love between collaborators and lifelong friendships. All of this moves back and forth in time, revealing the personalties of each player through fly on the wall moments in the recording studio and on stage. 

Punctuating these vignettes are revealing interviews with many of the players. Unlike many such films, the questions are probing, the answers provocative and often profound. As a lifelong musician with a long career in music, I found the artists’ struggle to answer these questions relatable and incredibly insightful. 

There are so many highlights it’s hard to pick just a couple. I loved every moment Lee Konitz is onscreen. He is painfully honest and real, and his humbleness is completely genuine. Here is a guy who has been a part of so many scenes in several important eras, and still demonstrates a childlike beginner’s mind in relation to Bro’s contemporary approach to modern music, and even though he admits to not fully understanding what’s going on, nonetheless embraces the moment and throws himself into the music wIth spontaneity, imbuing every note in each solo with meaning, great heart and wisdom. Just watching the love and recognition amongst his peers, especially the look on Jakob Bro’s face as Lee overdubs a brilliant solo that can only come from a lifetime of dedication to his craft, is worth the price of admission. 

I also loved the portrait of nerdy bassist Thomas Morgan as we watch his morning regimen, getting on the PC (programming in DOS no less,) to cue up an incredibly diverse program of music while he performs his morning stretches and his own peculiar variations on yoga postures, then selecting his clothes for the day. Delightful as is his quirky interview, which starts off with one the longest pauses in documentary history.   

There are a great many musicians featured in this documentary. From memory and in no particular order: Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan, Joe Lovano, Joey Baron, Paul Motian, Jorge Rossy, Craig Taborn , Palle Mikkelborg, Arve Henricksen, the late John Christiansen, Mark Turner, Andrew Cyrille and several others. A number of these artists are also interviewed, as well as the ones I mention here.

I don’t want to give too many things away here for those who haven’t had the pleasure of viewing this film, but I will also add that the beautiful  scene with Manfred Eicher in the studio with Bro and compatriots recording Bro’s tune dedicated to Tomacz Stanko, really touched my heart. The camera wanders around the control room and rests on a picture of a younger Eicher and Stanko and other photos from a decades long association. In his interview, Manfred Eicher tries to express his feeling about his many years in the recording studio with Stanko, finding himself at a loss for words, before he is finally overcome with emotion and unable to continue.

In the end, this film is a poignant portrait of elder musicians with really young hearts meeting with a younger generation of open creative artists, who are still willing to exploring the edges of creative boundaries, even towards the end of their lives. The film also makes it clear that it’s the music that transcends the disparities of race, age, gender and cultural origins. All of these differences are ultimately superficial when artists come together with a common purpose. 

I want to add that this film looks absolutely gorgeous; even though it was released on DVD, it looks as good (and sometimes better) as many of my BluRay discs. I honestly don’t know how they pulled that off, but they did. Also the sound, which is in Dolby Digital, sounds equally amazing, as good as many uncompressed Master Audio HD soundtracks in my Bluray collection.