‘Take Me to the River: New Orleans’ is a sequel to Bluff City documentary
A music-and-more documentary titled “Take Me to the River: New Orleans” opens Friday at the Malco Paradiso.
If that sentence inspires a moment of deja vu, here’s why: A music-andmore documentary titled “Take Me to the River” opened on another Friday at the Malco Paradiso, eight years ago.
The new New Orleans feature film is a follow-up to the Memphis-focused original. Created and produced by Memphis musician Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars and California-based filmmaker/musician Martin Shore, the first “Take Me to the River” united musicians from across generations and excavated Memphis history to explore the legacy and influence of the Bluff City’s blues, soul, rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop.
Again directed by Shore and coproduced by Dickinson (with Memphis writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon as a co-writer), the new movie offers a similarly comprehensive appreciation of the scope and importance of New Orleans, the destination that alongside its upriver counterpart, Memphis, can make a claim to being the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll and America’s most significant music city.
The first movie engineered such soul-meets-rap partnerships as Otis Clay and Lil P-nut, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Yo Gotti, and Bobby Rush and Frayser Boy, all of whom collaborated on new recordings in various Memphis studios.
Years in the making, the new movie similarly showcases Crescent City legends — the Neville Brothers, Irma Thomas, the late Dr. John — along with younger performers, including Cheeky Blakk and Big Freeda, with the result being another original soundtrack (and accompanying album) of new recordings.
Some performers are in both films, including Stax soul great William Bell and hip-hop grandmaster Snoop Dogg, who also is a producer.
Shore calls the “Take Me to the River” movies “living documentaries,” because they “incorporate new, original and unique art that evolves during the film,” he said, in a statement.
“It focuses on making new history, on the here and now, on what is happening in real time,” he said.
Such a method is, if anything, more urgent in the case of New Orleans than in the case of Memphis due to the Louisiana city’s continuing adjustment to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. If the civil rights struggles of the 1960s discussed in the first “Take Me to the River” felt somewhat historic, the wounds of Katrina still feel fresh.
Also unique is the New Orleans “gumbo” of influences. Shore said the city’s “cultural foundation” represents “a perfect blend of African, French, Spanish, Caribbean, Haitian, Cuban, and Native American Choctaw.” The result is “a musical gift to the world, giving birth to multiple genres while inspiring popular culture and the musical landscape on a global scale.”
Representing the “gumbo” effect, the “New Orleans” movie is arguably more diverse than its predecessor, thanks to the presence of brass bands, jazz musicians, Mardi Gras Indians and even punk-folk-d.i.y. label pioneer Ani Difranco.
For Shore and Dickinson, however, the most important aspect of these “living documentaries” may be the way in which they live outside the movie screens, television sets and personal devices on which the films are watched.
Developed by the Berklee City Music Program of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the Take Me to the River Education Initiative provides free materials to teachers in schools in mostly economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, to enable them to use “River” documentary footage and recordings to introduce students to music history and composition.
For more information, visit takemetotheriver.org. For tickets to the film, visit malco.com.