“I believe in choosing one’s own savior, and this year, like it or not, I choose you.” So begins renowned jazz critic ‘ open letter to trumpet/flugelhorn legend Clark Terry. “Since your phoenix-like recovery from serial ills… I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what you have meant and continue to mean to jazz.”
Giddins wrote those words in 2002. They can be found in the very fine collection “Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of the Second Century.” The occasion was Terry’s 82 birthday.
That year, Justin Kauflin was all of 16. He had been blind for five years and playing piano for as many.
“I just kind of gravitated toward the piano, ” Kauflin, 23, says in ” “And I fell in love with it that way.”
Earlier this week, director Alan Hicks’ inspiring documentary about Terry and Kauflin made the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ features vying for the five Oscar-nomination slots.
This is great news for the Colorado-produced film, but hardly surprising. Since a work-in-progress sneak at the Boulder International Film Festival back in February, the movie has been generating sincere festival love.
A great deal of “Keep On Keepin’ On” unfolds in a two-story brick house in Pine Bluff, Ark.
An old man lies on a bed, oxygen tubes going into his nostrils. One of his eyes is cloudy. He often speaks a language that only the young man — or countless young musicians who’ve come under Terry’s brilliant tutelage — grasps.
“Oodle, oodle,” Terry sing-says to Kauflin, who is listening, eyes closed, and then repeats the rhythms on a nearby keyboard.
If this sounds a bit too jazz-specific of a film, it’s not. “Keep On Keepin’ On” has something for everyone. And, no, not in a lowest-common-denominator way, but in a broadest humanity kind of way.
It is a tale of many loves supreme: that of student and teacher; of parent and child; of musical greats for an astonishing American art form; and perhaps most touchingly, of the abiding affection of Terry and wife Gwen.
For decades Terry has lived with diabetes. When we meet him here, he is suffering some of the disease’s more decimating symptoms: loss of vision, limb-threatening circulatory problems. And the scenes of the couple facing medical treatments and tough diagnoses is rending but also uplifting.
More than one person in the film says that blindness is one of the things that initially bound Kauflin and Terry to each other. But the movie captures so much more.
Director Hicks, along with editor and co-writer Davis Coombe, do impressive work balancing two differently rich life stories.
After all, Terry received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Not a bad kudos for a kid who fashioned his first horn out of junkyard refuse when he was growing up in St. Louis. Terry played with Count Basie, with Duke Ellington. He was the first black musician for NBC, playing 10 years in Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” house band. He brought up a slip of a thing by the name of Quincy Jones, who in turn offered him a place in his band.
“He was my idol, man,” says Jones, who along with , produced the documentary. “He was Miles’ (Davis) idol.” Jones’ visit to the Pine Bluff home makes for tender, “greasy” going.
Indeed, the jazz luminaries gathered by Hicks to testify to Terry’s genius and generosity are no slouches: Jones, Herbie Hancock, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and Denver’s divine gift to the music world, Dianne Reeves.
Kauflin’s story is just as edifying and efficiently told. He’s humble, yet ambitious for his craft.
Kauflin’s mother, Phylis, describes a descent into blindness that began at infancy. (Kauflin’s black Labrador Candy serves more than a supporting role here.) His rare eye disease didn’t seem to cloud her young son’s optimism, she recounts. When he migrated to jazz, he told her, “I wish something bad would happen to me, so I could play like that.”
There’s amused wonder to that recollection. After all, Justin was a teen who’d lost his sight.
Tension builds as Terry faces more treatments and Kauflin competes in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition, but there’s nothing like their wee-hour sessions.
With this week’s news from the Academy, “Keep On Keepin’ On” now finds itself in heady, tremendously diverse and deserving documentary company, including: about film critic Roger Ebert; “CitizenFour” about Edward Snowden; and “Virunga” about gorilla poaching in the vast national park of the title.
From its screening in Boulder to its prize-winning premiere at the to a red-carpet fête at last month’s Starz Denver Film Festival, “Keep On Keepin’ On” has built audience affection and critical admiration.
Positivity can feel in dire supply these days: The adjective “feel-good” might sound cheap or lazy. With its consistent and benevolent vision, its dance of ache and joy, “Keep On Keepin’ On” insists otherwise.
That it does so gently, swingingly, is just one more testament to Clark Terry.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
