[Dixielandjazz] Milt Hinton documentary on PBS

[David Richoux]

Hi all,

This was in my local paper today - check your local listings!

Dave Richoux
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> PBS looks at jazz great who captured history on film
>
> By Charlie McCollum
> Mercury News
>
> Every now and then, television comes up with a small gem of a show: 
> Nothing big or earth-shattering, just a nice, sweet bit of TV.
>
> That's the case with Tuesday's ``Keeping Time: The Life, Music and 
> Photographs of Milt Hinton'' (11 p.m., Ch. 9). Airing as part of PBS's 
> ``Independent Lens'' series, ``Keeping Time'' is a glowing portrait of 
> a true jazz giant: a bassist whose work spanned the decades from Cab 
> Calloway in the 1930s to Branford Marsalis in the 1990s.
>
> Hinton, who died five years ago, is a fascinating figure. He grew up 
> in the Jim Crow South, started his career in the Chicago of Louis 
> Armstrong and Al Capone. He played behind artists ranging from Billie 
> Holiday to Barbra Streisand and easily weathered the evolutions in 
> jazz music, as comfortable with fusion as he was with big band.
>
> What makes ``Keeping Time'' special, though, is that over the years, 
> Hinton chronicled his world with more than 60,000 black-and-white 
> photos. He was as creative with his camera as he was with his 
> variation on slap bass, capturing other musicians from Calloway and a 
> young Dizzy Gillespie to Miles Davis and Tony Bennett in candid 
> moments. His casual shots of a legendary 1958 gathering of jazz greats 
> are as revealing as the famous group portrait that appeared in Esquire 
> magazine.
>
> Hinton's photographs also evoke the changes in America that took place 
> during his life. The interviews with Hinton used in the film make it 
> clear that he understood he was watching history being made and took 
> every opportunity to capture it.
>
> Produced by David G. Berger and Holly Maxson and narrated with flair 
> by actor Jeffrey Wright, ``Keeping Time'' owes more than a bit to 
> documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in terms of its style -- which is a 
> good thing. The film does a fine job of giving viewers a sense of 
> Hinton's music and his photography and benefits from an above-average 
> set of observations on the man from the likes of author Amiri Baraka, 
> journalist Nat Hentoff, jazz educator Dan Morgenstern and jazzmen Ron 
> Carter, Jon Faddis, Joe Williams and Joe Wilder.
>
> All in all, ``Keeping Time'' is a lovely riff on a man who holds a 
> special place in a distinctly American form of music.