Review: 'Up From the Streets' packs a lot of New Orleans history, and even more music, into one documentary
Someday, when we’re all vaccinated and can travel further than the grocery store, I want to go to New Orleans, and just soak up the music and the culture for a week.
Until then, we have filmmaker Michael Murphy and trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard providing a guided tour of the Crescent City’s musical history in “Up From the Streets — New Orleans: The City of Music.”
As Blanchard, who both performs several times in the film and serves as narrator, puts it, New Orleans is a place where the music emanates from every corner. “The beautiful thing about New Orleans is that you feel like you’re part of a tradition,” Blanchard says early in the film. “I can go down on Frenchman Street, and I can hear some young kids playing on the street. And I can hear Louis Armstrong in their playing. And they may not even realize it.”
Murphy starts even earlier than Armstrong, to the influences that created New Orleans: French, Spanish, Cuban, Native American and African — both free blacks and slaves, who were allowed to meet up on Sundays in Congo Square, something slaves elsewhere in the American South didn’t get to do, the historians in the film say.
New Orleans’ music was a confluence of those rhythms — from the drums of Native Americans, drums from Africa, drums from Cuba — blended with the call-and-response chants echoing from slaves in the fields to gospel music. And there were other unique elements, such as French opera, thrown into the mix as well.
Murphy pays due tribute to Louis Armstrong, the trumpet virtuoso and showman, and even Blanchard confesses that he had to come back home to New Orleans to appreciate Satchmo’s greatness.
The movie bounces from distant past to more recent past, stacking up vignettes of such icons as the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, proto-rocker Antoine “Fats” Domino, record producer and rock ’n’ roll pioneer Cosimo Matassa, songwriter Allen Toussaint, and two of the great families of New Orleans music: The Marsalis family and the Nevilles.
Murphy has collected a wealth of interviews from New Orleans musicians, both familiar and not-so-familiar, as well as a handful of admiring outsiders — Robert Plant, Sting, Keith Richards and Bonnie Raitt — who claim connection to the city’s traditions through collaboration or osmosis.
Toward the end of this sprawling documentary that hops from point to point at a ferocious pace, Murphy highlights the new generation of New Orleans musicians — such as Big Freedia and Tank & the Bangas — and suggests how they have carried the tradition forward.
“Up From the Streets” is engrossing as a documentary, if one can keep up with all the names and subgenres that are mentioned. But to get the full force, find the soundtrack album and listen to it on repeat, to immerse yourself in the feeling of New Orleans music without all the talk.
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‘Up From the Streets — New Orleans: the City of Music’
★★★
Available Friday, May 15, as a video on demand, including the SLFS@Home portal. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 104 minutes.