DOKUARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
Oct 4-21, 2018

Milford Graves Full Mantis

For Free Jazz-pioneer Milford Graves, who helped to release the percussion from its reputation as mere “beat-generator”, music is much more than a listening experience; it concerns physics, chemistry, biology, and even cosmology. At eye-to-eye level, Jake Meginsky’s musical artist’s portrait guides us through the complex universe of his long-time mentor.

The film is set in Grave’s “World Garden” with plants from all over the planet, in his house, jam-packed with African masks, Egyptian statues and anatomical models, in his martial arts studio, and in his basement laboratory, where he studies the human heartbeat and its intricate relationship with rhythm – just a stone’s throw away from the dismal apartment buildings of his childhood in the New York neighbourhood Queens.

Meginsky’s documentary plays jazz in pictures. Everything is turned into rhythm – spider webs and grass moving in the wind, subways on their steely stilts, low-flying airplanes, and not least the hypnotic melody of Grave’s own speech. Just as rhythm and melody unite in a musical composition, Grave’s art and his inspired artistic life coalesce in the - sometimes surprising - pictorial solutions, the precise insights into Grave’s creative workshop, the seamless alternation of temporal levels, and the partly unpublished concert recordings.
In this way, the film reaches down to the roots of a highly sophisticated art form, which emerged from a clash of African tradition and African-American experience.

(sh)