Colorado-produced “Keep on Keepin’ On” joins the running on the short list of feature documentaries

OSCAR HOPEFUL

Alan Hicks’ “Keep On Keepin’ On” portrays the relationship between blind pianist Justin Kauflin and mentor Clark Terry.

666 ¼

Documentary.

86 minutes. Sie FilmCenter

Rated R.

“I believe in choosing one’s own savior, and this year, like it or not, I choose you.” So begins renowned jazz critic Gary Giddins’ open letter to trumpet/ flugelhorn legend Clark Terry. “Since your phoenix-like recovery from serial ills... I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what you have meant and continue to mean to jazz.”

Giddins wrote those words in 2002. They can be found in the very fine collection “Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of the Second Century.” The occasion was Terry’s 82 birthday.

That year, Justin Kauflin was all of 16. He had been blind for five years and playing piano for as many.

“I just kind of gravitated toward the piano, “Kauflin, 23, says in “Keep On Keepin’ On,” “And I fell in love with it that way.”

Earlier this week, director Alan Hicks’ inspiring documentary about Terry and Kauflin made the Academy ofMotion Picture Arts and Sciences’ short (and very competitive) list of the 15 documentary features vying for the five Oscar-nomination slots.

This is great news for the Coloradoproduced film, but hardly surprising. Since a work-in-progress sneak at the Boulder International Film Festival back in February, the movie has been generating sincere festival love.

A great deal of “Keep On Keepin’ On” unfolds in a two-story brick house in Pine Bluff, Ark.

An old man lies on a bed, oxygen tubes going into his nostrils. One of his eyes is cloudy. He often speaks a language that only the young man— or countless young musicianswho’ve come under Terry’s brilliant tutelage— grasps.

“Oodle, oodle,” Terry sing-says to Kauflin, who is listening, eyes closed, and then repeats the rhythms on a nearby keyboard.

If this sounds a bit too jazz-specific of a film, it’s not. “Keep On Keepin’ On” has something for everyone. And, no, not in a lowest-common-denominator way, but in a broadest humanity kind of way.

It is a tale of many loves supreme: that of student and teacher; of parent and child; of musical greats for an as-