May 10–17, 2001

movies

Street of Dreams

Calle 54 brings together the brightest lights of Latin jazz.

by Phillip Booth

Calle of the wild: Jerry González blows hot in Calle 54.

It’s a blazingly bright afternoon in late winter, and inside the intimate Bailey’s Club at the Sheraton Biscayne Bay, the joint is jumping. Octogenarian Cuban-born musicians Bebo Valdés and Israel "Cachao" Lopez are in the heat of an afternoon rehearsal. Cachao, the bass great and longtime Miami resident, plucks, strums and bows the strings, occasionally slapping the back and sides of his instrument for percussive effects. Bebo, a resident of Sweden since the early ’60s, expressively caresses his piano with long, lean fingers. Bebo, a soft-spoken, polite man, can hardly contain his enthusiasm. "Get it, Luis," he tells the conguero, in Spanish. And, a few minutes later: "We’re rocking."

A similar fervor infects every frame of Calle 54, an invigorating survey of the contemporary Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz scene. More of a concert film than a documentary, it mixes brief, hand-held expository sequences with sumptuously photographed and recorded performances, all caught at the fabled Sony studios on 54th Street in New York (hence the title). Rarely have musicians of any genre been captured on film with such vitality. The late Tito Puente is on hand, preceded by a short, colorful tour of his New York restaurant. So is Cuban piano giant Chucho Valdés, solo and in a sweet duet with his father (Bebo), and Chucho’s old Irakere bandmate, alto saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera.

The underappreciated pianist Elaine Elias represents Brazil, while the Panamanian-born pianist and composer Michael Camilo contributes one of the most thrilling, energetic pieces in the movie. Other contenders include an updated version of Chico O’Farrill’s "Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite," by his big band, or decidedly bohemian trumpeter-percussionist Jerry González’s version of "Earth Dance," with a quintet featuring his brother Andy González on bass. Argentinean-born hitmaker Gato Barbieri is here too, in all his hokey glory.

Director Fernando Trueba’s own passion for Latin jazz, as he relates in voiceover during the film’s opening moments, was ignited during the early ’80s, when he was given a copy of D’Rivera’s Blowin’ album by Nat Chediak, founder of the Miami Film Festival and author of the Spanish-language dictionary of Latin Jazz. For the onetime Bruce Springsteen fan, it was love at first hearing. "I think the sound that Paquito has, the way of soloing he has, makes you fly, throws you through the air," says the 46-year-old director of Belle Epoque, seated in a Sheraton banquet room overlooking Biscayne Bay, where he, Chediak, Valdez and Lopez were gathered to present the film to a wildly appreciative audience.

It was during the shooting of a Latin jazz show on Lincoln Road, for inclusion in the final scenes of Trueba’s 1996 Two Much, that he began to consider doing a music documentary; Camilo, D’Rivera and Cachao, among others, played on stage as the crew captured what’s described in Calle 54 as "the miracle" of music. "It was such a magical night," he recalls. "I could feel not only in me but also in every one of the crew that the music had that special contagious thing."

Chediak, the film’s associate producer, and a collaborator with Trueba on a weekly Latin jazz radio show, describes his friend’s decision to make Calle 54 as a form of repayment. "For Fernando, art is supposed to make life easier for you," he explains. "It’s supposed to celebrate the joy of being alive. And Latin jazz has rescued Fernando from many a blue funk. So I see the film as a valentine to the music." It’s a perfect film," Bebo says through a translator, "because it shows all over, not only to the United States but to South and Central America what this combination of music is all about." Adds Cachao through an interpreter: "People like Bebo and me hold on to the roots, the root of the culture, and if they don’t capture it on film it will be lost forever."

Calle 54 represents a golden opportunity to salute a group of unfairly neglected musicians, virtuosos on their respective instruments. Still, tough decisions had to be made. Chano Domínguez, Puntilla y Nueva Generación and the largely passé Barbieri are among those who made the cut. But Arturo Sandoval, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Ray Barretto, Poncho Sanchez, Mongo Santamaria, Pete Escovedo, and Brazilian jazzers Claudio Roditi and Airto Moreira were left out.

The decision came down to this: Which artists made it into regular rotation on Trueba’s CD player? "There are lots [of Latin jazz musicians] and some of them that I like very much are not in the movie," he says. "But I chose the ones who were close to me, the ones that I really listen to all the time at home."

Instead of the conventional performance-film strategy, Trueba summoned the musicians to Sony Studios, capturing what amounts to a private performance. "can’t make a musical movie and have everyone sound like a different thing," he explains. " It would be a mess. I wanted to [elevate] the music over the cinema. I wanted the music to be real, to be live."

There’s an affecting bit of reality programming, if you will, in Calle 54, which Trueba describes as "a fiction movie where the [musical] pieces were the script." It arrives with the reunion between Bebo and Chucho, their first meeting in five years. It’s a tender moment, a genteel musical conversation, as the masterful Chucho shows deference to his single greatest influence. "It’s like an epilogue for the movie," Trueba says, "to put together a father and a son, the old way of playing and the new way of playing. That was a beautiful love scene. I was watching that, how they smiled at each other, and I was in awe."

See Sam Adams’ review in Movie Shorts.