Watching blues movies

Muddy Waters joins the Rolling Stones onstage.

Pianist Georgie Fame is reflecting on some of the legendary names he worked with back in the early 60s; blues legends like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson.

They weren't easy characters to get along with, he says, they had no idea of chord changes, and certainly wouldn't give young keen British blues musicians like himself any clue where the songs were heading.

"But that's the magic of the original Delta blues," he says. "They changed whenever they felt like it, they weren't limited to structure."

"It was quite frightening," adds Eric Clapton as he remembers playing with Williamson 40 years ago.

For those who only occasionally listen to the blues, the songs can often sound the same - the lyrics about a mean-hearted woman or cheatin' man, hopping a freight train, something about a mojo - but blues songs are the singers' responses to their world. And their world, especially the US south, was scored with poverty and prejudice, and they were usually itinerant and poor.

It is a world largely gone now, but blues provided the bedrock for jazz and rock (the blues had a baby and they called it rock'n'roll, as the song says), and songs by John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and Skip James provided source material for artists as diverse as Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt and Nick Cave.

Two years ago it was The Year of the Blues in the United States and the original artists were celebrated and their songs dusted off. They might have been voices from the past, but their concerns were still relevant.

Martin Scorsese acted as executive producer for a series of films, often idiosyncratic and personal, which explored the blues in its many and varied forms.

German director Wim Wenders was a blues fan: "These songs meant the world to me. I felt there was more truth in them than in any book I had read about America, or in any movie I had seen."

His free-flowing documentary The Soul Of A Man is one of the highlights in the series.

"I tried to describe," he says, "more like a poem than a documentary, what moved me so much in their songs and voices."

The Soul Of A Man includes recently discovered archival footage of the great JB Lenoir in performances, and of Skip James, who recorded a series of classic songs in the 30s (and got $40 for his trouble) then disappeared into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in the mid-60s.

Elsewhere in these remarkable films is Godfathers and Sons by Marc Levin, which brings together Chuck D of rappers Public Enemy with Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records label boss Leonard, who recorded too many classic Chicago blues artists to mention.

The project has Chuck D using Muddy Waters' quasi-psychedelic album Electric Mud as source material to bring the blues to a younger audience by inviting back some of the original players and hip rapper Common.

Throughout we see great musicians like Koko Taylor, Willie Dixon and Magic Slim, and hear from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Bob Dylan.

What leaps off the screen is the vibrancy and vitality of this music, not only the hands of its creators but also in its contemporary interpreters. In Red, White and Blues by Mike Figgis, Van Morrison, Tom Jones and Jeff Beck get together in Abbey Rd studios.

In Soul Of A Man there are thrilling performances of blues standards by Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and JB Lenoir from Lucinda Williams, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Garland Jeffries, guitarist Marc Ribot and Nick Cave.

By its very nature - film-makers pursuing their own passions and visions - this series doesn't have the coherence or linear structure of Ken Burns' excellent television series Jazz.

But the stories about poverty and survival, the space between men and women, and man and the devil, are brought to life in rare archival footage where this elemental, deceptively simple but often complex, music speaks from the heart straight to the soul.

* Lowdown

WHAT: The Blues series of docos, produced by Martin Scorsese

THE FILMS: Feel Like Going Home, directed by Scorsese; Soul of A Man (Germany), directed by Wim Wenders; Red, White and Blues, directed by Mike Figgis; Godfathers and Sons, directed by Marc Levin

WHERE & WHEN: Now showing at World Cinema Showcase at the Academy

INFO: www.academy-cinema.co.nz