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New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money | Blu Notes | BLOUIN ARTINFO Blogs

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http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2015/05/new-orleans-the-ballad-of-the-trumpeter-the-library-the-market-and-the-money/

** New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money
————————————————————

http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/files/2015/05/20150508_IM.jpgBy Larry Blumenfeld

Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans recently for the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, I was handed a copy of “New Orleans Jazz Playhouse,” a coffee-table book full of reflections and ruminations, photos and memorabilia from trumpeter and bandleader Irvin Mayfield. It contained seven accompanying CDs of music featuring, among many fine musicians, Mayfield on every track.

The book draws its title from the name of the nightclub Mayfield founded in 2009 in partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which has hosted worthy gigs in a smart and swanky atmosphere on a storied French Quarter street that hasn’t seen much real jazz in decades. Its three guest essays—from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mayfield’s clearest mentor, and celebrated authors Walter Isaacson and Ernest Gaines—reflect the ease with which Mayfield—who was named to the National Council of the Arts by presidential appointment—negotiates a world of movers, shakers and big ideas.

Most of the book’s pages are devoted to cultural things, iconic and less well known, that Mayfield thinks define his hometown and, by extension, have shaped him. Page 103 is something of a paean to “three great institutions”: The University of New Orleans, where Mayfield once studied (he dropped out), and where he is now a professor teaching “New Orleans as Discourse”; WWOZ-FM, the listener-supported radio station that introduced him as a boy to quintessential New Orleans musicians like James Booker, and which helped build the audience for his own Grammy-winning music during the past 20 years; and the New Orleans Public Library System, which in Mayfield’s childhood offered him a free source of jazz LPs for pleasure and study, and for which he has, since Hurricane Katrina, leveraged his star power to help raise substantial sums from leading national foundations.

That book is big and bold and anything but humble. Yet the boldest manifestation of Mayfield’s outsized ambitions to date is The People’s Health Jazz Market, a new $9.6 million venue established by the nonprofit organization that supports Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO). The Jazz Market occupies the space of a long-abandoned department store at the corner of boulevards named for two 1960s civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Oretha Castle Haley, in New Orleans’ central city neighborhood.

With its inaugural public concert in late April, during Jazz Fest’s opening weekend, Mayfield’s Jazz Market joined Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and San Francisco’s SFJazz in the ranks of urban arts center buildings dedicated to jazz. The architecture is similar to SFJazz in appearance, right down to the lettering on its nameplate; as home for the orchestra Mayfield founded in 2002, the project draws obvious comparisons to Marsalis’ jazz center.

Opening night didn’t lack for star power. Soledad O’Brien, who serves on NOJO’s board, was in an orchestra-section seat. Up in a balcony box, small white dog on her lap, was Dee Bridgewater, for whom Mayfield named his concert stage; her forthcoming CD is in collaboration with Mayfield’s orchestra.

The Jazz Market provides, like those other centers, a concert hall designed with jazz acoustics in mind. The lobby area, which includes a bar named for Buddy Bolden and will house digital jazz archive, becomes a community center by day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. And despite the formality of his orchestra in suits and ties onstage, Mayfield began his opening concert by inviting audience members to “come hang out here during the day, use the wifi, do your business, have some coffee and hang out.”

By Tuesday, May 5, however, a dark cloud had gathered over Mayfield’s latest achievement, his much-lauded involvement with the city’s library system covered in mud.

The front- and back matter in his book, a mock-stamp from the public library, began to seem like a bad joke.

http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/files/2015/05/photo-18-e1431380690168.jpg

An investigative report (http://www.wwltv.com/longform/news/local/investigations/david-hammer/2015/05/05/mayfield-library/26955063/) by David Hammer for New Orleans’ WWL-TV alleged on Tuesday that Mayfield and Ronald Markham, NOJO’s CEO, had steered nearly $900,000 earmarked for libraries into the Jazz Market project and their own New Orleans Jazz Orchestra organization, while serving on the board of directors of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that supports the city’s library system. As Hammer reported:

Public records show that in 2012, the library’s foundation gave the city’s cash-strapped public library system $116,775, a typical annual gift from the earnings off its $3.5 million endowment. But that same year, the foundation also gave $666,000 to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra for the $10 million New Orleans Jazz Market… And in 2013, the library foundation gave the Jazz Orchestra, or NOJO, $197,000 more.

Mayfield and his friend, Ronald Markham, each make six-figure salaries from NOJO, a nonprofit Mayfield founded. At the same time, they were also two of the five members of the library foundation board when it gave the majority of its grant money that year to the Jazz Market project. In 2012, NOJO reported paying two salaries: $148,050 to Mayfield and $100,000 to Markham. It also paid $109,441 to Mayfield’s publishing company for “concert productions.”

Some background: The library foundation and the city’s library system are not synonymous; the foundation is a private non-profit organization, and the library system is a public entity. From 2007 to 2011, Mayfield served on the city library board and the Public Library Foundation board simultaneously. He served on the five-person library foundation board alongside Markham, who ultimately became board president.

The overlapping layers of conflict of interests seem apparent enough. And yet one remarkable passage in Hammer’s report adds these details:

…the Library Foundation’s stated mission was to raise money “for the benefit of the New Orleans Public Library” and it gave between $500,000 and $900,000 each year to the city library system. But in June 2012, the three other library foundation board members – Gerald Duhon Jr., Dan Forman and Scott Cunningham – joined Mayfield and Markham to unanimously re-write the organization’s articles of incorporation, expanding its mission beyond just supporting the public libraries to helping other “literacy and community organizations.”

They also resolved to grant powers specifically to Mayfield to “sign any and all acts, agreements, contracts, and documents that he deems fit and appropriate, all containing such terms and provisions as he, in his sole and uncontrolled discretion, deems necessary ….”

The outcry was swift.

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a citizens’ watchdog agency, told Hammer: “Essentially, he is the dictator, he is the emperor that makes any decision and doesn’t require any type of board action.”

Tania Tetlow, a Tulane University law professor and former federal prosecutor who preceded Mayfield as chair of both the library system board said to Hammer: “However good an idea it might be, and I don’t see how it is, your fiduciary duty to the library foundation is such that you don’t vote to send the money somewhere that’s going to personally benefit you.”

Mayfield remained publicly silent, but according to Hammer’s piece, Markham played one of the Miles Davis jazz records the public library system had provided the Jazz Market and showed off the mostly empty area where he plans to install touch-screen computers that he said would connect visitors with the public library’s digital catalogue.

“I can appreciate the story you’re trying to tell,” Markham told Hammer, “but in addition to that story, what we have here is a very forward-thinking and aggressive way to expand the footprint of the actual public library system, at no cost to the public.”

On Friday, the Daily Beast published a piece by Jason Berry (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/09/did-a-jazzman-bilk-big-easy-s-libraries.html) , whose books have examined with seriousness and sensitivity both New Orleans jazz history and the ethical challenges and financial dealings of the Catholic Church. Berry is a native of New Orleans, where a jazz musician’s words can carry the weight of a sacred trust and where public money often travels down dark tunnels.

Berry framed the incident in the light of the prior week, when “voters showed their support for the city’s struggling public library system by approving a tax millage that will bridge a $3 million budget gap and likely provide $4 to $5 million for budget costs in the coming years,” and in the context of his own previous Daily Beast article positioning Mayfield as a civic hero.

He also wisely pointed a finger regarding fiduciary responsibility (and plain-old due diligence) at the boards of both the Library Foundation and NOJO. “Apart from Mayfield, how much did those people know about all that money?” he wrote. “And how will the NOJO board respond to the news?”

Friday brought clear responses from others. Markham—who admitted no wrongdoing, just “outside-the-box” thinking—nonetheless resigned from the New Orleans Public Library Foundation board. Bob Brown, the former managing director of the city’s Business Council, was named president of the Library Foundation board, replacing Markham. (He pledged to look into concerns raised by the WWL-TV investigation, but also stood by the foundation’s investment in the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra’s Jazz Market.)

Later on Friday, WWL-TV reported a statement received from New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, calling for the Library Foundation to go back to solely supporting the city’s public libraries and for NOJO to return any money that was “not spent on Library purposes.”

“I have spoken to the Chairs of the NOJO Board and the Library Foundation Board,” Landrieu wrote. “I fully expect the following to occur as soon as possible:

– A complete separation between NOJO and the Library Foundation;

– A complete rewriting of the Library Foundation’s bylaws to require that Foundation funds are spent solely on the Library;

– A full auditing and accounting of the Foundation funds;

– A full refund of all Foundation dollars that were allocated to NOJO and not spent on Library purposes; and,

– A complete reorganization of the Foundation Board in keeping with the best practices of transparency and accountability.”

Through the years, Mayfield’s confidence has brimmed easily into an egotism that has seemed to some off-putting, especially in his hometown. (Still, no crime in that.) His ambitions and achievements have required the sort of fundraising and politicking that has brought backlash to Marsalis in some quarters.

I first interviewed Mayfield for an essay in Salon (http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/10/12/jazz/index.html) , in the Fall of 2005, after a Jazz at Lincoln Center benefit concert for New Orleans hosted by Marsalis. Mayfield had played the hymn “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” in dedication to his father, who, he said, “is still missing down there.” (His father’s remains were found a few weeks later.)

“I’ll tell you, in terms of the response to this hurricane, the local government gets a big F,” Mayfield told me then. “The federal government gets an F. The country gets a big fat F. When the levee was breached the culture was breached, and not that many people seemed to care.” He had resolved himself to making people care.

I last interviewed Mayfield a few months ago, in his New Orleans home. I was reminded of how smoothly he has negotiated corridors, the politics at hand notwithstanding. On one wall hung a photo of him alongside Pres. George W. Bush, who nominated him to the National Council of the Arts. On another wall, he was pictured with a similar smile, alongside Pres. Barack Obama, who subsequently appointed him to that post.

I asked Mayfield about his days as a young man in search of direction, living temporarily in Marsalis’ Manhattan home as Marsalis built his institution at Lincoln Center. He’d drawn inspiration, even taken notes, he’d said.

“But I had a different philosophy in one important respect,” he explained. “Jazz occupies rarified air in New Orleans. It occupies a ceremonial place, too. A trumpeter can move things in a different way in New Orleans. A trumpet player can call the mayor… That could be leveraged.”

Irvin Mayfield didn’t end up mayor of New Orleans, though he’d publicly toyed with running in 2010. He could, and did, call a mayor. Mayor Ray Nagin appointed Mayfield, then still in his twenties, as the city’s “cultural ambassador,” and it was Nagin who first appointed Mayfield to the city library board.

Then again, Nagin now sits in a federal penitentiary, serving ten years for bribery and corruption.

Mayfield would be wise to call the current mayor, Landrieu, who understands well the value to his city of not just the library system but also of NOJO and of the Jazz Market.

As do I, Landrieu probably buys the idea of a fundamental synergy between a nonprofit jazz organization and a nonprofit library foundation—especially in New Orleans, where one could reasonably argue that the language of jazz is fundamental to some sense of basic literacy. Other trumpeters born and raised in New Orleans, from Louis Armstrong to Terence Blanchard to Kermit Ruffins, have sincerely and successfully sold the world that notion with sincerity. Yet not for nearly a million bucks, nor under a cloud of impropriety.

It’s up to the boards of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation and NOJO to determine how to clean up this mess, and to do it in sync with the Landrieu administration, who have much to gain or lose in the handling of both the public libraries and the Jazz Market. Both are important civic resources funded by both private and public money: New Orleans residents deserve the fruits of these efforts. And since so much of real culture in this country now requires a public-private partnership, it’s important to keep such arrangements clean.

There’s also a larger point that’s important in a New Orleans that is quickly developing, and in which musicians and other culture-bearers are fighting for seats (http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2014/08/marking-time-and-making-time-for-smart-cultural-policy-in-new-orleans/) at the policy and planning tables. It’s a point that’s important well beyond New Orleans. It’s the idea that jazz musicians hold knowledge and power and community ties that command much more than just applause and kind words—that inspire trust, that deserve resources and that form the infrastructure required in a smart, compassionate, and multicultural city. Such is true in any city where jazz has roots and reach, like my hometown, New York. It can be sensed clearly in, say, Chicago, which this year celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM (http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2015/04/at-50-the-aacm-keeps-collecting-individuals/) ), an organization
that started with a bunch of jazz musicians sitting around a kitchen table and grew into a movement of aesthetic and political empowerment.

It is perhaps truest in New Orleans for reasons that should be clear through any reading of the history of this country and its culture, via deep listening to the music born in New Orleans, and from any sense of meaning conveyed by the simple statement on the last page of Mayfield’s “Jazz Playhouse” book: “Jazz is a way of being.”

What will Mayfield do? How will he be? Only he can tell us, whenever he chooses. He has the power to live up to his stated ideals. What will NOJO do? Its board is set to meet today.

One hopes that in the end, after the dust settles, once funds are directed where they must go, the Jazz Market continues to host live music and becomes a community-gathering place, even perhaps a digital outpost of the library system. That building is standing, so let’s have it serve its city. And, once the clouds have cleared, let’s have it stand for something.

Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images

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$14,000 turntable won’t wear out your vinyl. What a deal. | Cult of Mac

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http://www.cultofmac.com/321881/14000-turntable-wont-wear-out-your-vinyl-what-a-deal/#lbYt0WW0HpBJFvvf.99

** $14,000 turntable won’t wear out your vinyl. What a deal.
————————————————————

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/LT-Master-2.jpg

Does this look like an old Betamax player to you? Photo: ELP Japan

If you’ve got an extra $14,000 to $18,500 sitting around, you might consider grabbing yourself one of these bad boys from Japanese manufacturer ELP.

The ELP Laser Turntable promises the best in fidelity when playing your precious vinyl records because it uses a laser, not a needle, to decode the music that’s been cut into your LPs.

This, says the company, allows the audio device to read information deep in the grooves of all your old and new records, something a needle alone can’t do. An added bonus is that a laser will never scrape your record like a needle does.

“Audio information read by the laser is 10 microns below the shoulder,” says the ELP website. “Therefore, the laser is picking up audio information which never been touched or possibly damaged by a needle. It plays the virgin audio information on the groove without any digitization.”

So, basically, you’re buying a big CD player. Wow.

There are three models of the ELP Laser turntables, with the low- and mid-range versions running $14,000 and $17,000, respectively. These will play 7-, 10- and 12-inch records. The high-end model supports 8-, 9- and 11-inch records as well. The higher-end models also support 78 RPM speeds, a must if you’re an audiophile record collector of older discs.

The laser only reads from black vinyl records, unfortunately, since lasers are made of light, and transparent or colored discs tend to let light pass through.

However, using a non-needle to listen to old or damaged recordings might be just the ticket. Plus, the laser tech lets you skip tracks, go forward and backward, and shuffle your music off a vinyl disc the same way your CD player does. Only this one costs way more and takes up a ton more space. Hmmm.

There’s more detail at the ELP website (http://elpj.com/) , so if you’re seriously into audio geekery, give it a look.

For me, these are seriously interesting to look at, but not to touch. I wouldn’t want to have to buy one.

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$14,000 turntable won’t wear out your vinyl. What a deal. | Cult of Mac

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

http://www.cultofmac.com/321881/14000-turntable-wont-wear-out-your-vinyl-what-a-deal/#lbYt0WW0HpBJFvvf.99

** $14,000 turntable won’t wear out your vinyl. What a deal.
————————————————————

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/LT-Master-2.jpg

Does this look like an old Betamax player to you? Photo: ELP Japan

If you’ve got an extra $14,000 to $18,500 sitting around, you might consider grabbing yourself one of these bad boys from Japanese manufacturer ELP.

The ELP Laser Turntable promises the best in fidelity when playing your precious vinyl records because it uses a laser, not a needle, to decode the music that’s been cut into your LPs.

So, basically, you’re buying a big CD player. Wow.

The laser only reads from black vinyl records, unfortunately, since lasers are made of light, and transparent or colored discs tend to let light pass through.

There’s more detail at the ELP website (http://elpj.com/) , so if you’re seriously into audio geekery, give it a look.

For me, these are seriously interesting to look at, but not to touch. I wouldn’t want to have to buy one.

This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

May 12, 2015 / No Comments / More

$14,000 turntable won’t wear out your vinyl. What a deal. | Cult of Mac

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

http://www.cultofmac.com/321881/14000-turntable-wont-wear-out-your-vinyl-what-a-deal/#lbYt0WW0HpBJFvvf.99

** $14,000 turntable won’t wear out your vinyl. What a deal.
————————————————————

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/LT-Master-2.jpg

Does this look like an old Betamax player to you? Photo: ELP Japan

If you’ve got an extra $14,000 to $18,500 sitting around, you might consider grabbing yourself one of these bad boys from Japanese manufacturer ELP.

The ELP Laser Turntable promises the best in fidelity when playing your precious vinyl records because it uses a laser, not a needle, to decode the music that’s been cut into your LPs.

So, basically, you’re buying a big CD player. Wow.

The laser only reads from black vinyl records, unfortunately, since lasers are made of light, and transparent or colored discs tend to let light pass through.

There’s more detail at the ELP website (http://elpj.com/) , so if you’re seriously into audio geekery, give it a look.

For me, these are seriously interesting to look at, but not to touch. I wouldn’t want to have to buy one.

This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

May 12, 2015 / No Comments / More

Queen Latifah Stars in ‘Bessie’ on HBO – NYTimes.com

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/arts/television/queen-latifah-stars-in-bessie-on-hbo.html?smid=li-share

** Queen Latifah Stars in ‘Bessie’ on HBO
————————————————————
Photo
“She was not afraid to be wrong or afraid to fight or afraid to tell someone just like it is, and that’s a gift,” Queen Latifah said of Bessie Smith. “She gave me all the work I could handle.” Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

Within the first 10 minutes of “Bessie,” HBO (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/home_box_office_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org) ’s new biopic of Bessie Smith, we see the blues legend sing, cry, dance, cut a man and kiss, lustily, both men and women. The drinking comes later, but not much. At a party at the home of Carl Van Vechten, the Harlem Renaissance patron and gadfly (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/white-mischief-2) , a soused Bessie, played by Queen Latifah, belts the anthem “Work House Blues,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fwEUsIi4C0) to an audience including Langston Hughes, then throws a drink in the host’s face when he uses a racial epithet.

“It was every emotion I probably could have asked for,” Queen Latifah said dreamily. “She was a very busy woman.”

The movie is a passion project for Queen Latifah, 45, who first auditioned for the part in 1992. She had always hoped that playing Bessie in the film, which has its premiere May 16, would introduce the pioneering but lesser-known singer to a new fan base, inspiring people to “draw from who she is and flip her style for today’s music.” Over the years, she watched the screenplay bounce from person to person, while she grew to lead a mini entertainment empire, eventually landing in a position to help develop the film herself.
Photo
Bessie Smith in 1936.Credit Carl Van Vechten

Now a singer, actor, executive, TV personality, cosmetics spokeswoman and author, Queen Latifah may have developed a signature brand of feel-good feminism. After waiting for more than two decades she is able put a stamp on Bessie’s unruly but powerful life.

“It’s always been important to play strong female characters,” Queen Latifah said, as she did in her ’90s sitcom “Living Single” and her turn as Matron Mama Morton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoDS1lWdpjw) in “Chicago,” which earned her an Oscar nomination in 2003. When she got approval to make “Bessie” as a star and a producer, after HBO came on board in 2009, she chose, with the network’s support, to give the task of writing and directing to another black woman, Dee Rees.

“It wasn’t a requirement,” Queen Latifah said, over coffee at a Midtown hotel, but it was an ideal. “Whenever I’m No. 1 on that call sheet and I’m a producer, I’m always actively trying to make sure that my crew looks like the world.”
Photo

Queen Latifah, left, and Mo’Nique as Ma Rainey in the film. Credit Frank Masi/HBO

She was makeup free (sorry, Covergirl), dressed in fancy sweats, an Army jacket and pristine white sneakers, sleepy-eyed after an early morning flight from Los Angeles, where she lives. “No disrespect, I love white dudes,” she continued, warming to the subject of her hiring philosophy. “But I want to see a diverse group of people who are just as qualified for each position that they’re in. And I realized a long time ago that if I did not intentionally do that, it wouldn’t happen.”

Bessie Smith, too, took care to create a world she felt at home in. Nicknamed the Empress of the Blues, Smith, who died in 1937, was for a time the highest-paid black entertainer in America, rising from impoverished roots in Chattanooga, Tenn. She was boundary-less: bisexual, trysting even through marriage; the head of a traveling show that employed dozens; and a brazen personality who played to both white and black audiences. Though she wasn’t quite the raucous guest the movie depicts, she did sing at a Van Vechten party that Hughes attended. He later wrote that, after the opera star Marguerite D’Alvarez performed an aria, Smith offered a compliment: “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t sing!”

“She was not afraid to be wrong or afraid to fight or afraid to tell someone just like it is, and that’s a gift,” Queen Latifah said. “She gave me all the work I could handle.”
Photo

The singer Ma Rainey with a band in an undated photo. Credit Columbia Records

Putting Bessie on screen required a new level of intimacy from Queen Latifah, born Dana Owens. In bare skin and bedroom scenes with men and women, she is vulnerable one instant; sexy and bombastic the next. “I’m not worried about what people think in any way, shape, or form when it comes to this movie,” she said. “This is Bessie’s story, and it needed to be told.”

Separated by generations, Bessie, who influenced the likes of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, and Queen Latifah, one of the first female rappers to earn a gold record, are part of a continuum of women in music who made their own opportunities and expanded, against some odds, their circles. A foremother might be Ma Rainey, the blues woman who helped teach Bessie about stagecraft, and in the film is played, as a mentor and a sexual libertarian, by Mo’Nique. “The issues they were dealing with then are the same things we’re dealing with right now, gender equality and wage equality,” Mo’Nique said. “Those women were right on time to show us, today, those blueprints” for action, she added. “They took charge of their image.”

The script for a Bessie biopic was initially adapted from the music writer Chris Albertson’s biography “Bessie,” published in 1972. Melvin Van Peebles wrote a draft, Mr. Albertson said, then Horton Foote, the playwright who wrote the screenplay for the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Still, it languished in development, through the deaths of Mr. Foote and the producer Richard D. Zanuck (who owned the rights with his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck).
Photo

Queen Latifah onstage as Bessie Smith. Credit Frank Masi/HBO

At the suggestion of HBO, Ms. Rees, 38, got the call to write her version of the script in 2012, a year after she broke out in the indie filmmaking world with “Pariah,” an autobiographical lesbian coming-of-age story. She grew up in Nashville, and her grandmother introduced her to Bessie’s music, so she had an emotional bond. “She was a queer black woman from Tennessee,” Ms. Rees said. “I felt a kinship.”

Her research started in the library, poring over Smith’s lyrics. But her script was less biographical than character-driven; she was influenced by Jamaica Kincaid’s work, especially her novel “Autobiography of My Mother,” and Angela Davis. “I saw Bessie as a radical feminist,” she said.

Part of that was her unapologetic sexuality. In the film, Bessie has a girlfriend (a composite character called Lucille, played by Tika Sumpter), a husband (Jack Gee, played by Michael Kenneth Williams, of “The Wire” and “Boardwalk Empire”) and a lover (Mike Epps). Though there was little time for rehearsal before the shoot, in Atlanta last year, Ms. Rees ran relationship workshops with the actors. Queen Latifah had her first nude scene, which didn’t faze her. “My friends call me naked girl, anyway,” she said.
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Dee Rees and Queen Latifah on the set. CreditFrank Masi/HBO

For anyone who would use her performance to peer into her off-screen relationships, Queen Latifah, who officiated the same-sex and straight group wedding (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/fashion/weddings/you-cant-beat-these-wedding-singers.html) at the 2014 Grammys (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , was sanguine. “I know people will see that opportunity,” she said. “That can’t be my concern. That’s why they call it a private life, because it’s something I get to enjoy to myself.” As for requests to discuss it, she said, “Turn that radio right on off, you know what I mean?”

Like many biopics, the historical picture “Bessie” presents is smudgy. (Her death, at 43, in a car crash that generated many lurid and inaccurate articles, is not depicted.) But Mr. Albertson praised its treatment of the music. “This is the closest I’ve heard anyone come to Bessie Smith,” he said of Queen Latifah’s vocals.

Queen Latifah worked with a singing coach — “I don’t have blues syncopation naturally,” she said — a choreographer, who trained her to find the movement in Bessie’s notes, and her longtime acting coach, who helps her, she said, learn “how to separate my Latifah’s.”

In person, the most animated Queen Latifah is the producer and the entrepreneur — the one who gamely discussed the return on investment of her projects, with her longtime producing partner Shakim Compere, which include a streaming deal with Netflix; the reality show “The Star Next Door”; and the drama “Single Ladies (http://www.centrictv.com/shows/single-ladies.html) ” on Centric, a Queen Latifah-endorsed network for black women. “Some of our investors have gotten 30 percent return — that why I’m investing in my damn self,” she said, floral tattoos peeking out around her white T-shirt.

Her activist outlook was forged growing up in Newark, with an art teacher mother and a police officer father. “They were all very conscious people,” she said, “and this is kind of what you did, you discussed life and the future and how to change things for the better.” Among her family friends was the poet Amiri Baraka; after the interview, she headed to a birthday party for his son Ras J. Baraka, a childhood pal and now mayor of Newark. The political education that helped lead her to Bessie was that “you don’t just accept everything that you learn in school as the only history,” she said, “especially when you don’t see much of yourself in that book.”

Though Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey are part of the musical canon, their contributions have sometimes been slighted, said Lauren Onkey, the vice president for education and public programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. For years, “the important blues singers were male singers and guitar players who ended up influencing people like Clapton and the Stones,” she said. The hall inducted Smith (https://rockhall.com/inductees/bessie-smith/) , in the category of “early influencers,” in 1989. “It’s important to recognize her artistically, but also as a tremendously popular figure, as a star,” Ms. Onkey said. “The records hold up,” she added. “The humor of her phrase, the double-entendres. She could really deliver a song.”

For Queen Latifah, the turbulent life of Smith was still “hard to watch” on screen, she said. But the experience of playing her was unparalleled. “You have to take the seatbelt off,” she said. “With this role, I have to be free.”
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May 11, 2015 / No Comments / More