[Dixielandjazz] Bruce Ricker--Jazz Documentarian dies--

[Norman Vickers]

To: DJML & Musicians and Jazzfans lists

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz society of Pensacola

 

I didn’t know Bruce Ricker’s name but was familiar with his film “Last of
the Blue Devils”  and the T. Monk “Straight No Chaser” documentary on which
he assisted.

Worked with Clint Eastwood and would hang out at KC Mutual Musicians Hall,
black musicians union building.  He was a lawyer who sought a “higher
calling!”

 

 

 

 

  _____  

May 18, 2011  From NY Times


Bruce Ricker, Who Made Jazz Documentaries, Is Dead at 68


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/margalit_fox/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> MARGALIT FOX


Bruce Ricker, a lawyer turned filmmaker who made jazz resoundingly visible
in a series of highly regarded documentaries, died on Friday in Cambridge,
Mass. He was 68.

The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Kate Gill, said.

Mr. Ricker was known in particular for his first film, “
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnQz6K0rdOE> The Last of the Blue Devils,” a
feature-length portrait of Kansas City’s old-time jazzmen released in 1979.
Shot in cinéma vérité style — he was so green a director, he later said,
that he simply turned on the camera and let the men talk and play — it
features luminaries like Count Basie, Big Joe Turner and Jay McShann.

That film brought about Mr. Ricker’s long professional association with a
prominent jazz fan, Clint Eastwood. Mr. Eastwood first saw “The Last of the
Blue Devils” while researching “ <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094747/>
Bird,” his 1988 biopic about Charlie Parker. “I thought he must have had a
deep affection for the art form to have done that,” Mr. Eastwood said in a
telephone interview on Wednesday. “It deserved better exposure than it had
received in the early days.”

Mr. Eastwood arranged to have the film more widely distributed; he was later
a producer or executive producer of several documentaries Mr. Ricker made
for television, including “Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends” (2007),
“Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me” (2009) and “Dave Brubeck: In His Own
Sweet Way” (2010).

Mr. Ricker was a music consultant for “Mystic River” (2003) and “The Bridges
of Madison County” (1995), both directed by Mr. Eastwood. He produced and
directed two television documentaries about Mr. Eastwood, “
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05BfJ8LA9jU> Clint Eastwood: Out of the
Shadows” (2000) and “Eastwood After Hours: Live at Carnegie Hall” (1997).

Bruce Thomas Ricker was born on Staten Island on Oct. 10, 1942. As a student
at the City College of New York, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in
American Studies, he haunted New York jazz clubs, hearing the likes of John
Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

“He said he’d take a date out in New York City and he’d take her to hear two
or three sets in a row of Thelonious Monk,” Mr. Eastwood recalled. “And by
the time it was over, she didn’t want any part of him.”

Mr. Ricker would later help produce the well-received documentary
“Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser” (1988), directed by Charlotte Zwerin,
with Mr. Eastwood as executive producer.

After earning a law degree from Brooklyn Law School, Mr. Ricker taught urban
law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City; he was also briefly an
assistant city prosecutor in that city.

It pained his New York soul that Kansas City bars closed at 1 a.m. Then he
discovered the after-hours jam sessions at
<http://www.thefoundationjamson.org/> the Mutual Musicians Foundation, a
historically black union hall where many aging lions, veterans of the city’s
explosive jazz scene in the 1930s, still gathered to play till dawn.

Keen to preserve their words and music, Mr. Ricker began work on “The Last
of the Blue Devils.” The film took its title from
<http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/B/BL012.html> the
Oklahoma City Blue Devils, a barnstorming band of the 1920s whose members
included Basie and Lester Young.

Reviewing the documentary in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “a
public service as well as a musical delight.”

Mr. Ricker, who lived in Cambridge and Manhattan, also ran
<http://www.rhapsodyproductionsinc.com/catalog/> Rhapsody Productions, which
distributes his jazz films and those of other directors.

Mr. Ricker’s first two marriages ended in divorce. Besides his wife (a
daughter of Brendan Gill, the longtime writer for The New Yorker), his
survivors include their daughter, Emma Gill; a son, Jason Ricker, from his
first marriage, to Barbara Mautner; his mother, Estelle Van Pelt; three
brothers, Kenneth, Carl and Robert Ricker; and two grandchildren.

His other films as a director include “Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That,”
a 2005 television documentary about the Hollywood filmmaker. Part of the
appeal of “The Last of the Blue Devils,” Mr. Ricker came to believe, lay in
its relaxed, unstaged approach to its subjects as they came together in the
union hall for music-making and reminiscence.

“If this kind of thing had been done according to the conventional wisdom,
the reunion would have taken place at Radio City Music Hall, with everyone
in tuxedos,” he told The New York Times in 1980. “That would have been very
sterile.”