Walking and Strolling Down "Calle 54"

It seems far too easy. Simply assemble a stunning array of talented musicians, allow them to play, roll cameras and magic should result. That's what director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) was hoping for, as he embarked on his documentary-cum-music video effort, Calle 54. Trueba titled the film (54th Street) after the address of the Sony Studio where he gathered Latin music giants such as Gato Barbieri, Paquito d'Rivera and Tito Puente over 12 days in March 2000 to visually and aurally document these aging Lions of Latin music. The project proved timely, because two short months after production finished, Puente passed away, and the footage remains one of the last recorded performances the legendary percussionist and bandleader ever gave.

Calle 54, however, does not only survive as one of Puente's last moments, nor does it suffer from the stigma of being released in the shadow of Wim Wenders' wildly popular Buena Vista Social Club . Wenders' simple and similar premise of filming an American guitarist's effort to congregate the aging legends of Afro-Cuban music spawned a CD and an international concert, and Calle 54's American release seems to coincide with waning interest in BVSC. Miramax needn't have bothered, because the two are markedly different in intention, tone, texture and substance. The two films, while achieving the same goal of glorifying musical forms hereto marginalised by North American audiences, execute in noticeably different manners.

In promotional material, Trueba quipped that the film "wasn't approached in [an]academic manner," which manifests itself in the way he treats his musicians. Commentary remains minimal, and is generally established in no more than one or two minutes. With a general context for their past lives and current conditions, the film delves right into the music, leaving the studio performances as the true embodiments of emotion and personality. Eliane Elias expresses understated elegance with deft and shimmering touches of twinkling piano, contrasting with Puente's cheeky, overt showmanship as he, impish and seemingly carefree, works magic on the timbale. Trueba masterfully mixes styles and personalities; he conjures up a spread of sensations from the jarring fiery rhythms of the flamencos to the infectious, but more restrained and contained passion of samba and bossa nova.

Trueba transports artists into the studio, playing them up against iridescent background screens, with colors ostensibly chosen (even if they don't always fit) to reflect each piece's prevailing moods, bathing the musicians in an almost aggrandizing glow. The effect is to catapult these artists to mythic, elevated status, which befits their talents, but not their music's spirit. The studio appears too sterile, too clean compared to the art, which has its roots as a dance music and involves a long history of Dizzy Gillespie's blazing, sweat-soaked solos or Mongo Santamaria's pulsing congas. Just as jazz only truly manifests itself in front of an audience, its "cousin" (as Paquito d'Rivera dubs it), Latin music needs interplay with spectators. Especially when contrasted with the grainy, blurred handheld video footage that trails the musicians' everyday lives, crisp steadicam film underscores the fact that even though the musicians do deliver stellar performances, they appear slightly detached and removed from their collective element.

That removal, however, is stunning-absolutely stunning-in its execution. With soaring, fluid cinematography, Trueba takes the studio, normally a confining space cluttered with microphones and bulky sonic equipment, and opens it up, creating a free arena for artistic expression. Trueba's camera is sensual in its gaze as it caresses Elias' form on the piano. He lovingly traces down her slender figure, caressing her bare feet as they touch the pedals, thus turning her playing into a corporeally total experience, rather than a nexus between limbs and the mind. Alternately, when not gliding around the performers, Trueba breaks his musicians down into their component parts, focusing on agile fingers and tapping nimble feet. He savors the contradiction inherent in the great hulking character that is pianist Chucho Valdes. Valdes is an imposing, giant of a man both in height and in sheer solidity, not to mention musical reputation in the jazz community. His playing is an incomparable mixture of Cuban and North American impulses. Trueba reels in close on his mammoth hands, as they span octaves and meld with the piano's keys in ponderous strokes. Trueba then cuts to a low angle shot down the length of the keyboard as Chucho's hands leap tarantula-like over one another in a frenetic flurry of shaking intensity. His long, hound-dog face remains neutral, almost sullen, (ironically so) in the face of the energy put into his playing. Chucho then settles down again into his previous mode, with a wry smirk to share his musical joke with the audience.

The scene is absolutely overwhelming in its contrasts, but at the same time, the spectacles presented are also slightly unnerving. Scenes of these now somewhat naturalized Latin expatriates bundled in bulky coats on a Manhattan midwinter day, are troubling because, just as the performers seem out of place without an audience, these people seem out of place away from their native homes. Once revered in their homelands, these musicians are relegated to the periphery of the cultural conscious in North America.

At times, Calle 54 has the feel of a music video sampler-brilliantly performed but somewhat contrived-but in the music's margins, when father and son Bebo and Chucho Valdes play a piano duet or when Chico O'Farril wanders aimlessly in the New York City night, the film becomes intensely real and touchingly personal. Calle 54 may indeed be Trueba's "way of repaying a debt of gratitude to Latin jazz," but for novices and the well-versed alike, it also serves to educate and foster a love of the music. Trueba has succeeded, for all the spectacle, and the cracks in between.