In
twenty years of patronizing New York jazz clubs, I have heard live a lot of
great musicians who are no longer with us. Yet, there are a handful of nights
that haunt me, because I passed up what turned out to be one of the final
opportunities to hear someone of stature before they passed on. Joey Grover
does not want to make that mistake with Pope Dixon. He is determined to hear
the jazz pioneer’s set at one of the few surviving Central Avenue clubs.
However, he has even more personal reasons for wanting to hear his idol in
Gregory Caruso’s Flock of Four (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Considering
it is the early 1960s, Grover is a pretty hip kid with a real touch on the
piano. It all goes back to his late father Joe Sr., who was his first piano
teacher and passed along his love of Dixon’s music. He now leads a decent high
school combo, but alas, the girls are more interested in rock & roll—a fact
their obnoxious drummer Louie Walsh is keenly aware of. On this fateful night,
Joe Jr. is determined to venture from Pasadena to LA’s storied Central Avenue,
so he can finally hear Dixon in the flesh. Walsh would prefer to stay a
be-clown himself in front of college coed way out of his league, but he
reluctantly falls in with the rest of the group.
Of
course, the lily-white kids are nervous about making the Central Avenue scene,
but a talented young vocalist named Ava Moore takes them under her wing. Her
drummer brother Clifford is not as gracious, especially when she allows Bud
Garby, Grover’s bass player, to get a little flirty. However, he starts to
respect their earnestness, especially when Grover and Garby keep up on a jam of
Mingus’s “Better Git it in Your Soul.” Unfortunately, Grover’s control freak
brother is determined to drag him home, while Walsh’s bad attitude constantly blows
their cool.
Flock is an effectively
nostalgic jazz drama, because it never tries to do too much. That might sound
like faint praise, but the truth is an elegant three-minute trio recording
beats the heck out of a twenty-minute, ten-piece train wreck. In this case,
Caruso and co-screenwriter Michael Nader clearly have solid understanding of
where jazz was in the early 1960s and how Central Avenue fit into the history
of the music.
You
can just hear the “Own Voices” Culture Cops gearing up their outrage machine to
condemn Flock for the sin of
following white protagonists into the world of Central Avenue jazz, but the
hard truth of it is, during the 1960s, a Louis Armstrong-figure like Dixon
would primarily attract white fans—and that would be especially true for teens.
Of course, jazz has always been intertwined with issues of race and
authenticity (if you really want to understand that dynamic, read Nat Hentoff’s
sadly out-of-print YA novel, Jazz Country).
In
fact, the character of Clifford Moore plays an important role in Flock, keeping things real and in
perspective. Yet, at some point, you have to ask yourself, do you really love
the music, or what you think it represents? Regardless, Nadji Jeter is terrific
as Moore, subtly bringing out his humanity and empathy, as well as his understandable
intensity and prickliness.
Vocalist-thesp
Coco Jones has the chops for his sister Ava, as well as a warm screen presence.
She develops some necessarily understated but still potent chemistry with Isaac
Jay’s Garby. Frankly, Braeden Lemasters is almost too nebbish as Joe Jr. and
Shane Harper is almost too scoldy as his big brother, but they come together
quite poignantly down the stretch. Obviously, it will take a long time before
Dixon appears, but the late Reg E. Cathey makes it worth the wait.
In
many ways, Flock is a love letter to
Central Avenue and the musicians who played there. The music also sounds great,
mostly ranging somewhere between swing and bop, but always with a smoky after-hours
vibe. Bittersweet and elegiac (in keeping with the outlook for jazz at the time), Flock of
Four is recommended for getting so much right in the narrative,
setting, and general mise-en-scene. Recommended as a very good jazz coming of
age drama, in the tradition of Warren Leight’s Broadway drama Side Man, Flock of Four opens this Friday (4/13) in New York, at the AMC
Empire.
