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DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY (2005)



Dave Chappelle has a notoriously wary view of the trappings of fame. He walked away from his successful sketch show when he was afraid that he was empowering racists, rather than mocking them out of existence. He’s turned down his share of movie roles. After he went all Bartleby on his show, he had a bit of a reputation as an angry man, perhaps too angry for the bulk of his fans. However, in this project, Chappelle turns all of that suspicion into positive energy. He shares his wealth and fortune by hosting a huge block party in Brooklyn with performances by his favorite hip-hop artists, and what’s more, he is going to fly in as many people from where he lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio as he possibly can. Supposedly inspired by the positive vibes of Wattstax (where Memphis’ Stax Records hosted a big party in Watts in 1972), Chappelle’s Little Party That Could is actually quite a bit more fun. In Wattstax, the fear of violence kept the audience at a distance, up in the bleachers of a football stadium with a whole football field between the performers and fans. In one scene, Rufus Thomas encourages the crowd to leap the fence and take the field, but as soon as the song is over, he has to send them back up into the bleachers. Chappelle has no distance; his crowd is right up at the stage with Kanye West, Mos Def, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, The Roots, and the Fugees. In his fictional films, Michel Gondry typically takes a magical-reality view of the world, weaving dreams with real life. Here, he makes real life progress with the gossamer ease of dreamlife. Is it fun? Hell, yeah.

JANDEK ON CORWOOD (2003)



Jandek has completely revamped his persona since the release of this documentary in 2003. At the time, no one knew who Jandek was. He was the most enigmatic musician of our times. The typical story of the enigmatic musician has the veil of history to explain why the artist remains shrouded in mystery, but Jandek was all sorts of contradictions: prolific yet invisible, eager for coverage but unwilling to do interviews, among us and yet seemingly the product of another time or, perhaps, another culture that hears music differently. Jandek’s music is certainly not for the casual fan. One has to immerse oneself to understand his language and goals. On many of his first dozen or so albums, he seemed to lack the basic understanding of how to tune a guitar, how songs are structured, how to reach listeners. But his music isn’t exactly impenetrable, just difficult. His aims aren’t that far from other musicians of avant-garde vintage, even though it was unclear at first whether he was intentionally or accidentally flirting with the avant-garde. And because of his unwillingness to meet the public, his documentarians had to reach him through the meager evidence of his footprint in the world: the opinions of rock critics, a Texas Monthly columnist who hunted him down one day (he lives in Houston, which Jandek-seekers knew because of his return address), and his beautifully mundane album covers that hid the hauntingly eerie sounds within. The New Jandek, however, is still making his secretive music, but now he plays concerts. In front of people. I have been to one and it was great, but others have reported awful sound, awful performances, and being left cold. Contradictions: still the essence of Jandekia.

TOUCH THE SOUND (2004)



After making the profoundly gorgeous documentary Rivers And Tides in 2001 about the unique artist Andy Goldsworthy, who works with found objects in nature to create often-ephemeral works of incredible delicacy, director Thomas Riedelsheimer moved on to this documentary about the extraordinary musician Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist who is profoundly deaf. Please get your internal jokes about drummers who can’t hear out of your system now. OK? Alright, Glennie, who speaks with such ease that it seems impossible to believe that she can’t hear herself, at least the way that most of us hear ourselves, claims that she has trained her body to hear the sound. She plays barefoot to feel the vibrations. She feels the waves of sound in the very air. And for the first third of the movie, Riedelsheimer doesn’t even mention her deafness. It is like any other documentary about an extraordinary and accomplished musician. Then they casually drop the information about her condition and, well, this viewer’s jaw hit the floor. Riedelsheimer is an arty director, and his visuals match well with Glennie’s music. She collaborates with a few others during the film, including the avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith, most notably of the English art-rock band Henry Cow. It’s fair to say that this documentary manages to usurp many of my convictions about how music is experienced with an ease that belies just how stunning it is. Definitely see this movie. And see Rivers and Tides while you’re at it.

WE JAM ECONO: THE STORY OF THE MINUTEMEN (2005)



It’s a little-known fact that rocker scientists objectively proved that the Minutemen were the best band ever in the peer-reviewed journal The Politics Of Time in 1986. We Jam Econo is the story of this band, featuring interviews with, well, pretty much everyone who was involved in the U.S. punk scene in the early '80s. Plus there’s lots of footage where bassist Mike Watt, easily the most awesome human being alive today (and well deserving of the Nobel Prize for Being A Hell Of A Great Human Being), rambles about life while driving around San Pedro (that’s Pee-dro, neophytes). If you’re not a fan, you may not know that the band ceased to exist on the verge of greater mainstream success in December 1985, when guitarist/singer D. Boon was killed in a car accident. Given the greatness of the band and the tragedy of their conclusion, I think it would have been well-nigh impossible to screw this documentary up, but the filmmakers acquitted themselves admirably. As a longtime fan, I can tell you that the song in the clip above, an acoustic version of the band’s self-mythologizing “History of the World, Part II,” never fails to bring a tear to these cynical old eyes.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributor: Hayden Childs