`Musical Journey' jumps track, misses the blues

Martin Scorsese tries to trace roots of the blues, but series is rambling and disjointed

Television

But if you was to ask me

How de blues they come to be,

Says if you was to ask me

How de blues they come to be -

You wouldn't need to ask me:

Just look at me and see!

- Langston Hughes

It's the funkiness of life electrified in the notes on a guitar. It's the weariness of the daily grind distilled in the ache of a human voice. Over the years, some have embellished the blues with different flavors - horns, strings and things. But you really don't need all of that to feel the blues. The nuances are complex, but what resonates at the core is straight-up and real - a penetration into the soul, a cracked mirror held up to reality. When did the blues come into being? Where exactly were they born? Music historians have debated those questions for years. However, one thing is certain: Without the blues, there would be no American rock. Willie Dixon, the famed singer-songwriter, said it best: "The blues are the roots; everything else is the fruits."

Premiering tonight at 9 on PBS, Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey attempts to educate and connect the dots. The program is in seven parts and each film documents in personal and impressionistic styles the emergence, the resurgence and the worldwide influence of the blues - but not necessarily in that order. Although the intentions may be noble, the execution of the program misses the mark.

In this rambling, disjointed series, you don't really get an idea of what informed the art, how it germinated in the racist, post-Reconstruction South. How it was nudged into growth by a people dealing with political disfranchisement, systematic economic subordination and police brutality, day in and day out. Nowhere in the series do you get a breakdown of the blues' subtleties - how the lyrics, at times, thinly veiled seething rage at political injustices as the music echoed the tension and release. How the lyrics - unlike what you find in much of today's hip-hop, punk and alternative rock - could be slyly sexual in an often humorous way. Unlocking the clues and double meanings was part of the fun. It was, as Erykah Badu would say, "grown folks' music."

Like light through a prism, the human condition is reflected and refracted through the blues, a musical structure of three basic chords, 12 bars and lyrics that repeat and answer. But, of course, some of the best blues performances deviate from the form. On Feb. 1, Congress proclaimed 2003 the Year of the Blues, spurring record companies to raid their vaults and digitally re-master dusty blues tracks. Blues-concert DVDs are in the works. And museums such as the Experience Music Project in Seattle will prepare its own Year of the Blues series on Public Radio International.

All of this is fine. But it seems so overblown, as folks rush to resuscitate something that has never died. Like Motown and rock before it, the blues these days look as if they're being co-opted by aging baby boomers who discovered Muddy Waters in college and never got over the excitement of stumbling upon something so raw, so in-your-face and so primitive. At the time, they were surely oblivious to the jagged lives and deplorable conditions from which such music sprang. And judging from the seven documentaries on PBS (of which only one was directed by an African-American, Charles Burnett's Warming By the Devil's Fire), the tragic-comic stuff of black life, which pulsates through the music, is still largely ignored.

How can a grand woman with iron-strong eyes croon "I won't call no coppa/if I'm beat up by my poppa?" It's the way blacks and other excluded folks have endured for years. You laugh to keep from crying. You put on a brave mask when you feel like hiding. You add a little sugar to the salt and vice versa. The blues - most times indirectly - deal with such paradoxes. Unlike Ken Burns' mammoth 2000 series on jazz, Scorsese's program doesn't take the time to deeply explore the ugliness, the funkiness that imbued the lives of such blues people as Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House and Bessie Smith. So you walk away from this series with a few solid performances, some nice archival clips but little depth and information. There's hardly any context.

The blues ain't polite - they don't say please, though sometimes they say, "Good morning." The blues are loyal to a fault.

- Kevin Young