[Dixielandjazz] FW: "The Last of the First" reviewed

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
Another interesting one from the Australian Dance Bands list.
Kind regards,
Bill.

'The Last of the First': Life and All That Jazz
by Wil Haygood
Washington Post, April 15, 2005

Anja Baron's film "The Last of the First," about the Harlem Blues &
Jazz Band, is an ode to musicians in their seventies and eighties.
As such, it is melancholy, sweet, and not without painful insights
about ageless dreamers.

The band members have marvelous pedigrees, having played with the
likes of Fats Waller, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Louis
Armstrong, among others. They're old men and a stylish woman, Laurel
Watson, who once was compared to Billie Holiday herself. Baron's
film chronicles several recent trips the band members made -- to cities
in Europe -- and their regrets at being better appreciated abroad than
at home. 

Singer Watson takes the filmmaker to some of the old Harlem haunts
she once played. Small's Paradise used to be a lively joint, jumping
and swollen with talent. Now it's boarded up. "I pay my bills, thank
God," Watson offers in a voice-over.

The jam sessions are overlaid with bits of archival footage from the
1930s and '40s. As one band member relates, their fortunes changed
after World War II, when nightclub owners could get away with
smaller ensembles. 

In the course of the film, a band member has a stroke, one dies,
another, Al Casey, goes to visit the home of Fats Waller out in
Queens and begins crying. In the end, the band loses its long-
running gig at a New York nightclub. The fundraiser at the church is for
singer Watson, who has suffered a stroke. It's a tender jam session
in a movie as much about time as music itself.
_____

"The Last of the First" is 88 minutes long
  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439667/plotsummary