Michael Murphy’s UP FROM THE STREETS—NEW ORLEANS: THE CITY OF MUSIC
A beautiful and admirable film — a collection of moments of joy and solidarity.
My wife Karolyn and I make at least one or two trips to New Orleans every year. What attracts us, more than anything else, is that town’s endlessly fascinating culture, history, and traditions. One way this culture is chronicled is in the music, and it’s through that prism that we view the city in Michael Murphy’s UP FROM THE STREETS—NEW ORLEANS: THE CITY OF MUSIC, a life-affirming and exhilarating documentary. Our tour guide is Terrence Blanchard, the consummate trumpeter. We meet him down by the Mississippi River, and soon we’re off to the birthplace of jazz and funk, Congo Square—where, in the 1740s, the French allowed their slaves to dance, sing, and play drums on a Sunday afternoon: an expression of freedom that still echoes, as Wynton Marsalis says — all the way up to bounce.
Murphy shows how the unique New Orleans street culture—Mardi Gras Indians and second line parades—grew out of these celebrations, these preservations of West African cultural expression. As drummer Herlin Riley puts it, “The street has the beat, the beat embodies the rhythm, the rhythm embodies the culture.” Co-writing with Cilista Eberle, Murphy wisely abandons chronology, more or less, and instead approaches the music as a kind of Möbius strip of connections and inspirations between songs and performers—a bit of a Greil Marcus approach. It’s a canny organizing principle that allows him to tie in contemporary performances, showing how these old spirituals and field songs continue to speak—to live—in different historical contexts.
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Along the way, we get the obligatory interviews with rock stars, mostly British (Sting, Robert Plant, Keith Richards), which makes sense: after all, it took the Brits to reawaken us Americans to the treasures of our own culture. Murphy does a good job of making the most important point: that this music is a multicultural fusion, a mix of ingredients from French and Spanish colonialists, Native Americans, escaped slaves, Creoles. It moves fast, but only occasionally did I feel rushed, as if I were being hustled through a Hall of Fame museum where I might wish to linger.
At its best, each segment is a marvel of research and elegant concision. In just a minute of two, for example, he demonstrates the influence of Caribbean-Latin American music—the Afro-Cuban rhythms you hear in Fats Domino and Professor Longhair. I especially appreciated his take on the towering Louis Armstrong—occasionally today, you’ll come across the wrongheaded notion that Satchmo was a sellout. The film reclaims Armstrong as a courageous, cutting-edge musical revolutionary who invented solo improv, showing his subversive side—how he snuck the line “when it’s slavery time down South” into a recording of the famous song where the word “sleepy” would have been.
Ben Jaffe of Preservation Hall makes the case that New Orleans music is about finding a new language as well as preserving tradition—the New Orleans pioneers were the punk rockers of their day. On the one hand, the film offers “NOLA music 101,” a history in a list of names: guitar legend Danny Barker, Cosimo Matassa, whose J&M Studio was one of the birthplaces of rock ’n’ roll, piano genius James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, great drummers Earl Palmer and Ziggy Modeliste, gospel’s Mahalia Jackson, songwriter/bandleader Dave Bartholomew, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, saxophonist Lee Allen, Earl King, Irma Thomas, the Meters/Neville Brothers, and on and on, all the way up to the next unknown kid playing on the corner of Frenchmen Street.
On the other, it offers enough well-chosen details, interviews, photographs and clips to enrich the understanding of the connoisseur. Murphy sees the music as a unified cultural expression that links the town to its history, but also shapes and unites its citizens as a family; after Hurricane Katrina, it offered them a living symbol of resilience, and fuel for rebuilding. UP FROM THE STREETS documents the fearless spirit of the New Orleans that Karolyn and I know, and for that I find it a beautiful and admirable film—a collection of moments of joy and solidarity. (2019, 104 min) SP
