Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense (Larson, Rivoira, Vogt, 2009): USA

Reviewed by Zach McClellan.  Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, part of AFI Fest 2009.

Icons Among Us is a documentary about the current state of jazz and the musicians who continue to perform and change jazz today.  Several musicians of both the older days of jazz and the recent days of jazz are interviewed on their opinions on the history, current state, the music, and where the genre of jazz music is going.  What is documented is both highly entertaining and educating.  I always knew of and appreciated jazz music, but had never seen it in the light that this film represents it as.  I came out of the theater both happy and disappointed.  I was happy that I had been educated musically with music that I would never listen to on my own and that I got to see real live concert footage, which was incredible, but I was disappointed mainly with myself for the same reason.  I consider myself fairly musically educated and the doc shed light on bands and music I had never heard before, reaffirming to me that my musical education is just the tip of the music world iceberg.  I was also slightly disappointed at the length of the film.  I felt it was a bit too long and repetitive when it came to hitting their message home.  I could have left the film 20 minutes before the ending and would have felt the same way about the film as I do now, albeit missing a few live performances, which really are the unique, beautiful sequences of the film.

The filmmakers were blessed with so many awesome performances to showcase in the film and really make the film unique.  The doc followed a fairly strict pattern of interviews book-ended with live performances of the musicians previously discussed and then sometimes the performances and the interviews were juxtaposed together in a split-screen, which was distracting at first, but I grew used to it as it was used repeatedly.  It was one thing to have the interviews with these musicians and then another to know exactly what they were talking about while seeing the live performances.  It made the doc fun and helped educate the audience more than any interview could.

One of the questions presented in the film is “what is jazz?”  Most if not all of the musicians answered that the question could not be answered in any true sense the way a word has a definition.  They all seemed to say that any music anyone considers jazz is jazz.  They understood and I learned after seeing the film that this answer is nothing closer to the truth.  Jazz like all music genres has changed over time and has blended with many other types of music.  Although, highly entertaining, the film seemed to lose its luster over time as the message of the film had already been presented.  If it weren’t for the musicians introduced throughout the film and their live performances, I would have grown very bored with the film.

Overall, I recommend this film to any film and/or music lover.  The performances and interviews are gems in the rough of today’s music.