Word: ricker
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Patricla P. Ricker assistant professor of the Social Medicine and Health policy, found from investigations of family histories that 43 percent of 188 hospitalized psychiatric patients studied had been abused as children...
...SETTING OF Blue Devils--a series of "reunion" jazz parties Ricker organized at the Musician's Mutual Foundation, Kansas City's old Black union hall--recalls No Maps On My Taps, which revolved around a similar reunion of old jazz dancers, but Blue Devils has little of the sadness and sentimentality that are at the heart of Taps. As Ricker is quick to point out, the golden years of Kansas City were good, happy times for jazz musicians, and the surviving Kansas City jazzmen have learned how to deal with the disappointments of the intervening years; when they get together...
...Ricker uses vintage Kansas City material sparingly enough to leave his audience hungry for more. Sublime recordings of "South" and "Moten Swing" by the Benny Moten Orchestra, descendant of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils and ancestor of the Count Basie band, play under the opening and closing credits; the only other period music accompanies the brief snippets of antique footage--Basie, Turner, Young, Parker--that pepper the body of the film. These are truly gratifying. "We were doing rock and roll before anybody heard of it." Turner grumbles. We have all heard this sort of talk before...
...film's contribution to jazz mythology will be modest. Eddie Durham tells of how Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" was renamed when radio censors vetoed the original title, "Blue Balls." McShann provides yet another anecdote about how Parker came to be called Yardbird. Ricker's 24 hours of rough footage doubtless contained many more interesting stories, but as a movie, not an oral history project, the film's wonderful sense of pace easily offsets an occasional choppiness in cutting from one bull session to another...
...real spirit of the era. The Last of the Blue Devils is no substitute for the films that a more perfect world would have made in those days. Most of the Kansas City players have passed their prime, and much of their music has become cliched and formulaic. But Ricker's affectionate tribute does afford a fleeting glimpse of long friendships, shared joys, and proud memories, that must soon cease to exist...