Wilfried Hippen, taz-Bremen, April 10, 2008:

Blue Notes on the Silver Screen

Cinema 46 is showing “Calexico Next Exit” by Dagie Brundert & Gabriele Kahnert as part of a jazz film series.

Finding the right images to go along with a certain sound is always a difficult task for those who make music films. The most simple but surprisingly still most effective solution is, of course, the concert film; “Shine A Light” – which can now be seen on screen – is an almost perfect example of the genre. With “My Name is Maceo” by Markus Gruber, Cinema 46 will show a similar concert appearance within the scope of a film series in conjunction with the “Jazzahead” music expo. The public will also have the rare opportunity to compare the image with reality; on April 20 the souljazzer Maceo Parker will actually perform at the convention center. Musician portraits are also popular: The Danish film “Marilyn Mazur – Queen of Percussion”, about the Danish percussionist, will be shown in the last week of April and have the same double effect, as her performance also coincides with the expo.

Jazz musicians occasionally appear as the protagonists in movies, as fostered by Clint Eastwood’s “Bird”, which dramatized the impressive life of Charlie Parker. But the Afro-American director Spike Lee so resented this and similar productions by his “white” colleagues – which, in his opinion, do nothing but reduce black jazz musicians to the cliché of freak junkies living in the demimonde – that he made a scathing response with “Mo’ Better Blues”. The result of this effort, unfortunately more boring than cool, can be seen this week in Cinema 46. Jazz can also be wonderfully used as film music to create atmosphere: This is the case with Roger Vadim’s rarely shown “Dangerous Liaisons”, which used the music of Thelonious Monk for a refining touch.

From an artistic standpoint, however, the most interesting film is the documentary “Calexico Next Exit”; it is simply impossible to categorize it into any of these sub-genres. And that is because it is not the American German Tex-Mex band that is the film’s main focus but rather the attempt to trace the effect of their songs. The idea that pop music is the new universal language and that we all live in a global village has by now become a platitude, but the film impressively shows just how true it really is.

The German film makers Dagie Brundert and Gabriele Kahnert have found Calexico fans in even the small, provincial towns of the Ural and China who, in the best of romantic tradition, are captivated by the band’s fiery yet plaintive sound. The Russian tells of the odyssey he had to go through to see the band at least once live, which included several failed attempts; the university lecturer in China complains how unavoidably meaningless his experience with music must be, since it can only be taken from the Internet. A couple from the former GDR is constantly in search of the perfect concert, while a collector proudly shows off the 192 burned CDs he owns of the band’s various performances. A Berliner philosophizes about which t-shirt should be worn to which concert and for the first time, the band performs in the Californian-Mexican border town of Calexico. All these stories are wrapped in the calm, comfortably melancholic rhythm of the band, who only comes seldom to the fore and appears that much more impressive on screen.

[Translation: Dayna Sadow]