Bitches Whew

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2015)

If this is already diminishing in my estimation minutes after watching, it's because it's about subjects that are dear to me, music, concentration, meaning in life and placement of ourselves in the larger music, but it has no insights to impart, or none that I have any use for.
The whole is about ego pummeling away in the effort to be someone in the eyes of others rather than the joy of the craft itself, about clinging on to achievement than flowing on the creativity of the moment, about perfecting technique than cultivating soul, what Spanish musicians know as duende; the deep urge that rises from the body and cries to express itself as music.
Now I'm not a fanatic jazzist who thinks the music should be portrayed in this or that original light, the film may well be seen after all to be about confused individuals who miss the point, a bad teacher. But the bad teacher who hammers home a trivial point is the filmmaker.
We see how this clinging is more or less disastrous for everyone, how it derails them from expressing soul. It's also what puts them back on the stage. But I miss the deeper and softer insight here, for which jazz is a model, that we should indeed strive to perfect our craft, but that's so we can be able to use it freely and without obstruction, so that we can pierce through the sheet, the notation, to the real hum of music that spontaneously unfolds in the room where we play with others, become the instrument for music that plays itself.
The film is in the end as small as what it shows, unable to pierce from merely polished technique to wonder or let go of fixation with accomplishment to begin immersion in fulfillment.
It ends just as it would have to do that. It all builds up to a last scene of dueling between master and student for room in the stage that finally perhaps sublimates all the ego and hardship in music that sweeps both. In that scene we have a frantic display of ego as determination, but is his drum solo great music or merely an elaborate flourish apart from the music that the music has to stop for?
And this extends in a cinematic way, the scene is adroitly edited but is it anything more than a piece of mastered technique, mechanical?
(I wrote last year about a film called A Spell to Ward off the Darkness which has a much more spacious swimming of the cinematic eye, also incidentally between instruments on a stage, but faced the same conundrum, soul wasn't there, duende. This is bar none the most striking limit in expression with a camera since the beginning of cinema, one that every great maker strives to push back. Many have.)