Keeping Time: Milt Hinton
The Enunciator
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Posted on Mon, Apr. 11, 2005
PBS looks at jazz great who captured history on film
By Charlie McCollum
Mercury News
Every now and then, television comes up with a small gem of a show:
Nothing big or earth-shattering, just a nice, sweet bit of TV.
That's the case with Tuesday's ``Keeping Time: The Life, Music and
Photographs of Milt Hinton'' (11 p.m., Ch. 9). Airing as part of PBS's
``Independent Lens'' series, ``Keeping Time'' is a glowing portrait of
a true jazz giant: a bassist whose work spanned the decades from Cab
Calloway in the 1930s to Branford Marsalis in the 1990s.
Hinton, who died five years ago, is a fascinating figure. He grew up in
the Jim Crow South, started his career in the Chicago of Louis
Armstrong and Al Capone. He played behind artists ranging from Billie
Holiday to Barbra Streisand and easily weathered the evolutions in jazz
music, as comfortable with fusion as he was with big band.
What makes ``Keeping Time'' special, though, is that over the years,
Hinton chronicled his world with more than 60,000 black-and-white
photos. He was as creative with his camera as he was with his variation
on slap bass, capturing other musicians from Calloway and a young Dizzy
Gillespie to Miles Davis and Tony Bennett in candid moments. His casual
shots of a legendary 1958 gathering of jazz greats are as revealing as
the famous group portrait that appeared in Esquire magazine.
Hinton's photographs also evoke the changes in America that took place
during his life. The interviews with Hinton used in the film make it
clear that he understood he was watching history being made and took
every opportunity to capture it.
Produced by David G. Berger and Holly Maxson and narrated with flair by
actor Jeffrey Wright, ``Keeping Time'' owes more than a bit to
documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in terms of its style -- which is a
good thing. The film does a fine job of giving viewers a sense of
Hinton's music and his photography and benefits from an above-average
set of observations on the man from the likes of author Amiri Baraka,
journalist Nat Hentoff, jazz educator Dan Morgenstern and jazzmen Ron
Carter, Jon Faddis, Joe Williams and Joe Wilder.
All in all, ``Keeping Time'' is a lovely riff on a man who holds a
special place in a distinctly American form of music.
Stephen Tapp
"The Enunciator" <notafrai...@yahoo.co.jp> wrote in message
news:1113398696....@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
> Hope this comes out on DVD soon. Did anyone see this?
Yes. Very nice show.
guy f klose
>Yes. Very nice show.
I feel lucky to have twice seen Milt's travelling show (the story
is something along the lines of Berger calling the Smithsonian
and telling them that Milt had hundreds of great photographs, and
then the Smithsonian convinced Milt to take a slide show of about
75 images on the road). I bought "Bass Line" when it first came
out, and it was just as fantastic, since his entire story is
filled in.