Series Spotlight: Jazz Musician

The lights are low enough that you notice hands before faces. A bow drags across a string a beat longer than it needs to, a piano note hangs in the air, and somewhere off camera someone claps before the phrase has technically resolved. That is the room this series wants to put you in. Not a soundstage. Not a rehearsal hall with folding chairs and fluorescent light. A club, with a crowd close enough to breathe on the musicians, where a small mistake and something close to a miracle can happen four bars apart.

John Powers directs and produces Jazz Musician, a documentary series built around a simple bet: that the performance only makes sense once you know what built the person playing it. Family. Education. The years nobody was watching. “Musicians add much to the quality of our lives by the creation of music, but we seldom know anything about these artists,” Powers said. “I thought that it was important to understand where their artistry began and how it was nurtured.”

Where it actually started

Powers didn’t set out to make a music show. “The series began with a desire to share the personal stories of several jazz musicians whom I knew,” he said. “In developing the series, I thought that their personal stories would be enhanced by the addition of their live performances.” The performance came second. The person came first, which is backward from how most music documentaries get built, and it shows in how much room the series gives its subjects to talk before they ever pick up an instrument on camera.

Three instruments, one city

The first season centers on pianist Richard Turner, Jr., violinist Yvette Devereaux, and bassist Kevin O’Neal, three players Powers came to by way of a shared history and a deliberate eye for range. “Richard Turner Jr. and I worked on a separate project, so I began with him,” Powers said. “I then moved to pursue other artists with whom I became acquainted and who played instruments different from one another. I thought that the variety of instrumentation would be appealing to the series’ audience.”

Los Angeles isn’t incidental to any of it. Powers grew up there, listening to jazz in clubs and off records and the radio as a teenager, long before he had a camera pointed at anyone. “While many of the jazz greats came from across the country, I knew that this city had a wealth of musicians whose stories and music were little known,” he said. “Through this series, I want to share that wealth with people everywhere.”

Discipline dressed up as ease

Jazz gets sold as pure spontaneity, and Powers wanted the series to push back on that a little without losing the magic of it. He asked each musician to walk through their early development, the unglamorous years of practice that precede any of the effortless-looking stuff. “With these skills in hand, they have the ability to improvise capably and to communicate in performance with their fellow musicians,” he said. “They make it seem effortless, but it derives from a lifetime of dedication.” That tension between ease and labor is most visible in the live-venue footage, which Powers considers non-negotiable. A studio interview can get you the biography. It can’t get you the room. “Live performances capture the interplay among the musicians and the immediacy of the audiences’ response,” he said. “I don’t think these benefits are possible in a studio.”

A conversation, not a debate

One question Powers kept returning to in interviews was whether what happens on stage during a live set is a conversation or an argument. “To a person, they all said that it was a conversation,” he said. “They all want to play with others with whom they are in alignment. In doing so, they are happy to share the stage with fine players.” It's a small detail that reframes the whole show: collaboration isn't a byproduct of jazz, it's the point of it, and the musicians in the series treat listening as seriously as they treat playing.

The title itself carries some friction Powers is aware of. “Some of the artists embrace the title. It defines them,” he said. “There are others, who will be seen in upcoming episodes, who prefer to define themselves simply as musicians because they make their livelihoods performing a wide variety of musical forms.” What surprised him most, after all the interviews, wasn't talent. It was the pattern underneath it. “Hard work paid off,” he said. “Although different artists, different backgrounds, different instruments, each of them were seemingly plucked from obscurity at an early age to perform on stage and on tour with some of the most renowned musicians.”

What to know before you press play

Powers put it plainly when asked what a first time viewer should carry into the series. “Not all music is computer generated,” he said. “Some music is made by real people who come from real families and real communities that know and love them. That music is like nothing you have ever heard.”

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.