Pat Martino, Unstrung, the Documentary

[ott...@hotmail.com]

Don't know if this has been posted before, enjoy.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDtorIxR_4k>

Bg

[Tim McNamara]

I've got that on DVD. As a psychologist in real life it is quite
fascinating to watch from the clinical perspective, as a jazz fan it is
exhilarating and from the human perspective very inspiring. Should be
broadcast on public TV here in the States.

My only complaint is that it made his wife come off as a flake. Maybe
she is and maybe she isn't, but Pat credits her with saving his life on
several occasions and vastly improving his health through nutrition,
yoga, etc.

Well worth a watch. If nothing else it demonstrates the gulf between a
mediocre jazz guitarist like myself and a top drawer musician like Pat.

[thomas]

On Tuesday, March 24, 2015 at 12:22:45 AM UTC-4, Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> My only complaint is that it made his wife come off as a flake. Maybe
> she is and maybe she isn't, but Pat credits her with saving his life on
> several occasions and vastly improving his health through nutrition,
> yoga, etc.

Haven't seen it yet but--nutrition and yoga don't seem inherently flaky to me. (Although I get that you can certainly do both in extremely flaky ways....)

[Tim McNamara]

Aya is Japanese and her command of English is idiosyncratic. They get
into some discussions with her but they're cut short and I felt showed
her in at least an awkward light. When Pat tells the story of his life
in the past decade or so, Aya is front and center in actually saving his
life (due to acute health problems) and over the longer term improving
his health dramatically. While the story of Pat's arteriovenous
malformation is well known, he also had years of smoking tobacco and
other things to great excess, drinking heavily, doing other drugs,
eating very poorly, getting no exerise, etc. At one point his weight
was down to something insane like 80 lbs, he had pneumonia and has COPD,
etc. With Aya's help- per his reports, anyway- he is healthier than
he's been in years and was even able to stop having to use inhalers for
his COPD. Only a little of that came across in the movie although I
suppose that was not really what they were focusing on- the focus was
much more narrowly on the Pat Martino mythology and how accurate that
was.

[J毫localhost.invalid]

Listen to this part of the above doc:
"The brain of a musician..."
https://youtu.be/hDtorIxR_4k?t=3881