#Buddy movies movie
#Buddy movies tv

Somehow or other he got ahead of himself or something.

“When they got to the end of the thirty-two-bar chorus, he was in the second bar on that next chorus. “Bird had gotten up there and got his meter turned around,” Ramey remembered. It happened in 1936, and Parker (whose nickname was Bird) was sixteen: Here’s the real story, as related in Stanley Crouch’s recent biography of Parker, “Kansas City Lightning.” Crouch spoke with the bassist Gene Ramey, who was there. After that humiliation and intimidation, Parker went home and practiced so long and so hard that he came back a year later and made history with his solo. In Fletcher’s telling, Parker played so badly that Jones threw a cymbal at his head, nearly decapitating him. Fletcher levels an ethnic slur at Andrew, who’s Jewish he insults his father, smacks him in the face repeatedly to teach him rhythm, hazes him with petty rules that are meant to teach military-style obedience rather than musical intelligence.įletcher justifies his behavior with repeated reference to a long-repeated anecdote about Charlie Parker, who, while still an unknown youth, was playing a solo at a jam session with professionals-one of whom was the great drummer Jo Jones, of the Count Basie Orchestra, more or less the inventor of classic jazz drumming, and even of the four-four glide that persists as the music’s essential pulse.

#Buddy movies movie

The core of the movie is the emotional and physical brutality that Fletcher metes out to Andrew, in the interest (he claims) of driving him out of self-satisfaction and into hard work. As I heard his name in the film, I spoke it in my head as dubiously as Leonardo DiCaprio says “ Benihana” in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”) Teller is a student at New York’s fictional Shaffer Conservatory, where he catches the attention of Terence Fletcher (Simmons), the authoritarian leader of the school’s concert band and an ostensible career maker.

#Buddy movies tv

(Buddy Rich? A loud and insensitive technical whiz, a TV personality, not a major jazz inspiration. Teller is a terrific actor, and he does a creditable job of playing the protagonist, Andrew Neiman, who’s nineteen and idolizes Buddy Rich. The movie’s very idea of jazz is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature. The mediocre jazz in Damien Chazelle’s new film, “Whiplash,” the story (set in the present day) of a young drummer (Miles Teller) under the brutal tutelage of a conservatory professor (J. (Dexter Gordon, in “’Round Midnight,” is perhaps the best Jackie McLean and Freddie Redd, in “The Connection,” don’t do as much acting, but their music is brilliant.) Most good music in movies is played by musicians playing themselves, whether it’s Little Richard in “The Girl Can’t Help It,” Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton in “A Song Is Born,” the Rolling Stones in “Sympathy for the Devil,” or Artur Rubinstein in “ Carnegie Hall.” Yet I’m not bothered by musical approximations and allusions in dramas, as long as the drama itself has the spirit of music. Few, if any, fictionalized musicians are played onscreen by real-life musicians of their calibre. Movies about musicians offer musical approximations that usually satisfy in inverse proportion to a viewer’s devotion to the actual music behind the story. Photograph by Daniel McFadden / Sony Pictures Classics / Everett In Damien Chazelle’s new film “Whiplash,” the very idea of jazz is turned into a grotesque and ludicrous caricature.