Review

Keep On Keepin' On

1. Justin Kauflin and Clark Terry in KEEP ON KEEPINí ON
1. Justin Kauflin and Clark Terry in KEEP ON KEEPINí ON

If you see more than a couple of movies a month, you likely see patterns developing. In the past few days I've seen Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and James Marsh's The Theory of Everything, two very different films that nevertheless have in common blackboards scribbled up with equations, quantum mechanics and talk about the slippery notion of time. And if we're talking about movies about time, then maybe we should add Damien Chazelle's Whiplash to our string -- though that movie is more about how sticks and skins may precisely chop up the dimension rather than the rubbery qualities it displays when one goes really fast.

But Whiplash is also about a jazz protege and his master, about instructive sadism and the inadequacy of encouragement as a tool for avoiding mediocrity. As exhilarating as the movie is, in thinking too hard about the pedagogical methods of J.K. Simmons' maestro you might draw the conclusion that Whiplash is about the failure of kindness.

Keep On Keepin’ On

Grade: 89

Cast: Documentary, with Clark Terry, Justin Kauflin, Quincy Jones, Gwen Terry

Director: Alan Hicks

Rating: R, for language

Running time: 84 minutes

So we can can be thankful for Keep On Keepin' On, Alan Hicks' nonfiction examination of a much different sort of mentor-student relationship -- the one between Arkansas-based trumpet great Clark Terry and a young pianist named Justin Kauflin.

When the film begins in 2010, Kauflin -- who was born with impaired vision and lost his eyesight completely when he was 11 -- is a self-described "nobody" living in New York and trying to break into the jazz scene.

"When I finally lost my sight, I didn't have video games anymore, I didn't have basketball ... that went away," he says. "After that ... I kind of just gravitated toward the piano, I sat at the piano and fell in love with it that way. ... Learning a new song was like acquiring a new toy."

Terry, who was born in St. Louis in 1920, started playing trumpet after he heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra. His first instrument was fashioned from material he found at the dump -- he used a funnel for the bell, a piece of hose and a piece of lead pipe as a mouthpiece. ("Of course I didn't know lead was poisonous at the time," Terry says.) His neighbors, horrified by the sounds he was making with the makeshift horn, pooled their money and bought the kid a pawn-shop trumpet. He was hired by Count Basie in 1947, and he considers his time in the group "prep school for the University of Ellingtonia." He was with the Ellington orchestra through the 1950s and joined The Tonight Show band in the '60s, becoming the first black musician hired to play on-air by NBC.

But Terry is much more than his resume. Dizzy Gillespie said he was the best trumpet player ever, and Quincy Jones -- who was Terry's first pupil and later hired him for his band-- claims Terry was Miles Davis' idol. One of the chief pleasures of Hicks' film is the archival footage of Terry blowing (and scat singing, which becomes an important tool in his tutelage of Kauflin) on stages through the '50s, '60s and '70s. His tone and attack are unmistakable; it's not hard to see why his trumpet has been described as "the happiest sound in jazz."

Terry met Kauflin when he was instructing a small group of students at New Jersey's William Patterson University in 2005. Terry's sight was starting to fail, the result of diabetes that he'd first developed in the '50s. They bonded and Kauflin says he still spends several weeks with Terry and his wife, Gwen, in Pine Bluff every year. The affection and respect between the pair are palpable -- at one point Terry calls Kauflin "one of the greatest pianists to ever walk the earth" -- and the best scenes show them in interactions that feel more like collaborations than tutorials.

They film is part biography of a musical legend -- there's a parade of talking heads to testify to Terry's cultural contributions -- and part portrait of a nascent career. We follow Kauflin through various ups and downs -- he's forced to move back home to his parents' house in Virginia Beach; he is selected for the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition -- but the meat of the film is the ongoing conversation between these two remarkable artists whose superficial differences are dissolved by a genuinely encouraging love.

Which, come to think of it, was also one of Interstellar's themes.

MovieStyle on 11/21/2014

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