Boogie Woogie Articles

Decisions, Decisions
In which we find out the wheres the whys and the hows of the beginning of a documentary

I want to tell you the story of the beginnings of a documentary.  But in order to do that I'm going to have to frame it with my own personal entry into the picture.

Early in 1999 I was out of work and looking for a new direction.  My wife, Carol, and I had just returned to Michigan from a couple of months of traveling, looking for another place to live; forced back into the cold North by back injuries and dwindling funds.  I was on the recovery from 10 years of government work.

Looking in the newspaper want ads, Carol found an ad for a lighting company looking for a marketing person.  It was the weekend, so I faxed my resume to the company and crossed my fingers.  I'm a public relations guy by training.  As well as a sometime professional musician, road manager, roadie, tour manager, record producer and sound engineer.  The idea of mixing a couple of the disciplines I had spent my life working in was exciting.

The following Monday morning I got a call from the owner of the company, saying, "I got your fax, but all I can read of it is the phone number.  And that was hard to decipher.  How did you send it?  Via Russia?"

"Ah," I thought to myself.  "That's an interesting reaction.  Just the right amount of humor.  Just the right amount of curmudgeon.  Interesting."

I was invited to interview. I did. I got the job.

"What," you may ask, "Has any of this to do with Boogie Woogie or a documentary?"

Once we'd decided to do the thing, we had to talk to Mark about it.  And that's where my duties really began to take off, because at that point the project became my major responsibility.

Mark was very enthusiastic about the idea of a boogie documentary, and also very concerned that his audience would not be distracted from the music by a load of video lunatics running around and obscuring their vision.  So, on condition that the videographers' approach would be done in the least disruptive and most tasteful fashion, he agreed to let a company hired by Ron and Illuminating Concepts shoot the Second Annual Blues and Boogie Piano Orgy on April 3rd and 4th, 1999.  And all the artists involved in that concert agreed to become a part of any resulting documentary.

We decided we would video April 3rd and do digital audio recordings of both nights.

We also decided to get some candid stuff and interviews of each artist.  So on April 2nd we followed the group of players (Mark Braun, David Maxwell, Axel Zwingenberger and Bob Seeley) around as they did a publicity push at local radio stations.  And we also got some great footage of all of them talking, generally, about boogie and its influence on modern American music, down on some abandoned railroad tracks at the Detroit river.  Later, that night, we filmed everyone at a private party Mark threw at his farmhouse.  Everyone played.  The house rocked.  People danced.  We resurrected the spirit of rent-parties.

So our modus operandi were established and we proceeded, from the Orgy, to continue to get players on video in both interview format and performance format. As of today, we have Axel, David, Bob, Mark and Charlie Booty, Johnnie Johnson, Uncle Jessie White (the only man I ever met who actually knew blues legend Robert Johnson) and Big Joe Duskin in performance and interview.  And we have Harold McKinney, Liz Pennock, Ken Saydak, Rob Rio, David Keyes, Renaud Patigny, Rudi Blue Shoes, Tom McDeromott, Arthur Migliazza, and Ricky Nye in performance only (both in concert and in a party setting), and Charlie Castner, Dick Mushlitz, Phil Keilly, Phillip Lemming, James Crutchfield and Henry Townsend in interview mode only.

Plus, in the process, we have established a new boogie venue, The Motor City Boogie Festival which will be held over the Labor Day weekend every year in Detroit.  That's where we captured the great Johnnie Johnson, Harold McKinney, Uncle Jessie White and Big Joe Duskin in a concert setting last year.

We also shot at the boogie stage of the Queen City Blues Festival in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati festival is extraordinary.  It's a full day of boogie piano on a stage nestled under a huge archway supporting the highway that crosses from Cincinnati into Kentucky.  It's run by two doctors, Phil Lemming and Rob Cody, who do it for the love of the thing.  It is definitely worth a visit.  This year it'll be on July 8th.  

The documentary ground to a slow halt at the end of last year because of funding issues.  It is not going away, however.  And it is not permanently stopped.

We are establishing a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization to raise corporate funds for the project, and we have some serious donors lined up.[Editor's note: This article was written early 2000. Since then, the American Music Research Foundation has been established for the purpose of producing this documentary, among other things.]   Once that is done and the IRS (and state treasury) give us the go ahead we will be up and running, again, collecting what we hope will be a definitive video and audio-archive of living boogie players, as well as a collection of artifacts and interesting boogie- connected sheet music and piano rolls etc.,