Filmmaker explores legacy of her father
Calgary filmmaker explores father’s musical genius and unsolved death
Emily Hughes can’t always predict how she is going to react when hearing her father’s music.
It doesn’t take much: just a taste of Lenny Breau’s delicate, sophisticated genre-defying guitar playing can set her off.
“It kind of comes in waves in my private times, when I might be listening to his music,” says Hughes, in an interview with Postmedia from her Calgary home. “It’s happened a couple of times recently where I’m hanging at home. I listen to CKUA constantly and they will play a tune of my dad’s and I will just completely fall apart.”
Which is not surprising, of course. While Hughes has precious few direct memories of her father, she has spent the past couple decades documenting his life and legacy. First it was with the Gemini Award-winning 1999 film The Genius of Lenny Breau, which allowed Hughes to dig deep into her father’s life and get to know him for the first time.
But she wasn’t finished. A month ago she launched the website, lennybreau.com. On it, viewers can rent or buy a followup documentary, The Genius of Lenny Breau Remembered, an episodic film that explores Breau’s wide influence as a guitarist, his personality and sense of humour, his issues with drug and alcohol addiction and, finally, his tragic 1984 slaying.
For the latter, Hughes’ film does not pull any punches. In a chapter entitled Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the Calgary filmmaker interviews her father’s friends, admirers, an LAPD detective and members of his extended family, most of whom point the finger at Breau’s ex-wife Jewel as being responsible for the guitarist’s death.
His body was found in a rooftop swimming pool in Los Angeles. Police determined that he had not drowned but been strangled. Jewel was a suspect but was never charged. In the film, friends and family paint a grim picture of the relationship between the two, suggesting Breau was abused and terrorized and often feared for his life.
Most of those included in the film express outrage and sorrow about the injustice. Which begs the question: If simply hearing her father’s music can make Hughes fall apart, how did she prepare herself for these stories of abuse and killing?
“I think from working on it for so many years and hearing so many stories, the shock is not there anymore,” she says. “At first, it was like ‘Who does that?’ He was so sweet and he was a smaller man. Who would do that to him? But then after a while, I almost felt like an investigative reporter at times. I learned how to schedule mourning, somehow. I knew I had to hold it together or people are going to stop talking if I’m bawling and falling apart. I have to show that I can handle it. If I go into the LAPD and look at the file, I have to stay composed or it’s all going to fall apart and I might miss something. I had to learn how to control that.”
Breau’s slaying remains officially unsolved. Hughes says the initial investigation was deeply flawed because her father was largely viewed by investigators as an addict who had simply met a predictably violent demise. But the case has been reopened, she says.
“The cold case detectives of the LAPD have that segment and it’s really stimulated things,” she says. “That’s been a positive outgrowth. They are sort of looking at it with fresh eyes now. They are more informed now. I think they get what a huge loss it is for the music world. They are very motivated right now.”
Breau’s tragic death is just one of the aspects explored in The Genius of Lenny Breau Remembered. The film traces the Maine-born guitarist’s life from his early years in Winnipeg, to his time in Nashville and sad end in Los Angeles. Admirers and friends line up to talk about his genius on the guitar, an otherworldly talent that had most of his peers in awe. He gets highprofile praise from people such as guitarist Steve Vai and comedian-musician Tommy Chong.
Taking a page from the film Thirty-Two Short Films of Glenn Gould, Hughes divides her documentary into five chapters: Innovation & Influence, Humility & Humour, Drugs, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and Stories.
So, suffice to say, the film covers a number of tones, veering from pure reverence, to lighthearted storytelling to anger and outrage and finally sorrow over how Breau’s addiction continuously derailed what could have been a brilliant career. When it came to investigating these dark topics, Hughes steeled herself and acted like a documentarian.
“It’s painful to think of how he suffered in that way and the shame that’s associated with that lifestyle,” Hughes said. “It’s hard for me to envision the suffering he would have endured. But it needed to be addressed. At one time, when I was younger, I just wanted to talk about the good stuff. I just wanted to talk about the positives, the praise. But the drugs are part of the story. It’s a big part of why his career maybe didn’t blossom the way it could have. And it’s educational, too. It’s good for young players to see these examples of guys who used. It’s still sort of romanticized is some circles. So I think it’s educational for them to see what drugs and alcohol can do.”
Hughes was 15 when her father died. Her mother, singer Judi Singh, met Breau in the 1960s in Winnipeg when the two worked on CBC variety shows together. They eventually moved to Toronto, which is where Hughes was born in the late 1960s. When Breau’s drug use escalated, Singh took her daughter to Edmonton. There were reconciliations and at one time the two were even engaged to be married, but Breau’s addiction to hard drugs continued to haunt him.
Hughes’ memories of her father are few and far between. Some are good, like when he used to take her to the corner store to buy her junk food, which she otherwise wasn’t allowed to eat. Some aren’t as pleasant. When she was seven, she recalls watching her father nod off while on methadone. He held a lit cigarette in his hand, which had burned down to the butt.
“I remember just being horrified but not wanting to wake him,” she says. “Is this going to start a fire? Will it burn his fingers? It was kind of scary for me. But I also remember feeling from him a love and that he was grateful to be there with us at that time.”
After making the first film, Hughes said she continued to gather information about her father. Eventually, she realized she had only scratched the surface. For more than a decade, she continued to compile evidence of her father’s extraordinary talent and often sad life.
“It sort of gets better and better with this sort of thing if you wait,” she says. “I was getting goodie packages in the mail with new recordings, VHS tapes of a clinic Lenny taught somewhere in the States. All these little goodies came over time.”
She says she wants lennybreau. com to be an exhaustive overview of his career and life. It features not only the two documentaries, but an extensive bio and overview of his recordings. While he never achieved the popularity from the general public that many felt he deserved, his music continues to live on thanks in large part to the internet, Hughes says.
“I’ll hear from somebody from Serbia, then somebody from Paris and India,” she says. “All these places where he never went. He never toured extensively, or overseas at all actually. So it’s pretty amazing. His audience is growing. I don’t know that he is ever going to be a household name. It’s too much for most people. I don’t know if that’s important. Of course, I’d like for his audience to grow and to have as many people into him as possible. But at the same time, there’s just some things that aren’t meant for the masses. That’s just what history shows.”
The Genius of Lenny Breau Remembered is available to rent or purchase at lennybreau.com