Bringing back that ’70s vibe
Music not the only genre giving the period a revival; TV, movies channelling it too
Trend watchers should applaud the TD Toronto Jazz Festival’s decision to help launch its 30th anniversary with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings on the main stage Saturday.
Jones was news almost by default a few years back after the eight-piece, Brooklyn-based Dap-Kings backed Amy Winehouse, contributing their James Brown school of ultra tight horn riffs to the British singer’s Back to Black album. Looking cool and loose, the Dap-Kings might have been plucked from the set of an early Martin Scorsese movie.
The Winehouse connection received mixed reviews for a while from Jones herself, a 50-something gritty funk singer from the old school who did a stint as a prison guard to survive. “First I feel kind of angry about it,” she told one interviewer but added later, “I say it’s great.”
Jones and Co. have scored their own kind of hard-won greatness, working live gigs practically non- stop in Europe and North America while helping provide the unofficial soundtrack to the latest, least expected period revival in recent memory: the ’70s comeback.
This ’70s revival may mean a lot more to the jazz festival than the festival itself realizes. In drawing inspiration from ’70s funk, soul and experimental work, Jones and the Dap-Kings point to the last time jazz was in fact truly free.
It was jazz that mingled with soul, rock and whatever. It was jazz without adult record company supervision.
Television has already had That ’70s Show, which channelled the goofier side of ’70s nostalgia when it premiered in 1998. Yet “the television shows of the ’70s have themselves had a unique impact on the culture and are now touchstone titles ripe for remake as ‘new’ television and film,” says Rob Salem, former Toronto Star TV critic, in an email. “How else to explain the fall debut of a new television series based on The Exorcist?”
In movie houses, The Nice Guys, director Shane Black’s ’70s-period action buddy flick with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, has barely begun when the soundtrack starts sounding as if it’s been ripped from Shaft.
And just in case ’70s references go unnoticed in all the ensuing action — look, there’s a billboard for Jaws 2 — the seamy background to the buddies’ boozing and macho mayhem is the porno industry, a ’70s-defining phenomena if ever there was one. Now a billion-dollar business with industry-wide standards and state regulations, porno was as outrageously out in the ’70s as glam rock and punk.
“Sadly, I think the ’70s only exists today in style,” says Brad Deane, senior film program manager at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Films about the period are “more interested in the music, clothes and hairstyles than showing any interest in exposing corrupt institutions or trying to show any relevancy between the ’70s and now,” he adds.
Certainly, the gauze, glitter and flared pantsuits that walked the runways at last fall’s fashion shows signalled that the fashion industry was itself channelling the ’70s. Julie de Libran, Sonia Rykiel’s Paris-based artistic director, says, “It was about freedom. . . . People were going against the rules.”
With that in mind, TIFF’s Deane points to the remarkable generation of Hollywood rule breakers, from Robert Altman to Brian De Palma, “given the freedom to make the films they wanted and have them released on a fairly large scale.”
In channelling the ’70s, Jones and the Dap-Kings remind everyone of jazz’s last great unbridled moment of stormy, radical freedom. Maybe Wynton Marsalis rescued jazz from impending chaos with his superbly crafted solos and tailored suits. He helped make sure jazz has a future as a business, no mean feat.
But perhaps if jazz had embraced the funk of the time as did Miles Davis or hip hop or Sly and the Family Stone, the music may not have come to need festivals to survive.
“We get out there and get sweaty and sing . . . until they feel and you feel it,” says Jones.
Sounds like a fine old recipe. Peter Goddard is a freelance writer and former Star jazz critic. He can be reached at peter_g1@sympatico.ca.