Volume 26 Issue 7 - May and June 2021

You did it, you did it. Horace and Kris Bowers
motivation to get out of there, and his arrival as a successful
L.A. businessman are similarly elucidated.
To me, this short feels like an antidote to the peripheral
placement of the classical pianist Don Shirley in Green
Book, or the limited vision accorded to Miles Davis in the
bio-flick Miles Ahead. The centralization of Bowers Sr.,
the Black musician and the tenderness of the relationship
between the two men is something that I have not seen
before, and that I do recognize.
Both Bowers and his grandfather somehow manage to
speak directly to the audience through the camera and
to each other at the same time. According to Proudfoot,
in a wide-ranging interview with POV Magazine, it’s an
approach to filming he has used before, notably in his
Almost Famous short film series for The New York Times.
Known as the Interrotron technique, it was developed by
award-winning documentarian Errol Morris – a method
of rigging the camera so that, in looking straight at the
questioner, the subject is also looking straight through the
camera at the audience.
As Bowers points out to Ava DuVernay, Concerto’s executive
producer, in an interview, most people now view media
on their phones and this Errol Morris technique creates an
uncanny intimacy with the interlocutor. With warm lighting
and soft voices, every flicker of emotion or almost imperceptible
flinch is revealed. The audience feels invited into
dialogue, into the skin of Bowers and his grandfather.
MOLLY CRANNA
BREAKWATER STUDIOS
from teachers, adjudicators, other performers and their parents,
who questioned her right to be in that environment. A piece by
composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, was recently decommissioned,
when Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma, decided one crucial word in the
lyrics of his work was offensive.
Granted, artist responses to this constant feeling of pressure can
be very different. Melbourne developed deep concentration, and the
ability to block out these experiences. Her recent short film, Where Do
I Go?, with Tapestry Opera director Michael Hidetoshi Mori, relates
her journey into resilience. The documentary Disruptor Conductor,
directed by Sharon Lewis, shows conductor Daniel Bartholomew-
Poyser transferring the discomfort by disrupting the conventional use
of space: taking a string quartet to a women’s prison in Kitchener,
Ontario; bringing drag queen and violinist Thorgy Thor into a Halifax
concert hall to play with the Nova
Scotia Symphony Orchestra; and
creating concert experiences
tuned to the needs of audiences
inclusive of anyone with any kind
of neurodiversity.
Kris Bowers (above), Ben Proudfoot
What film can be
I generally write about music,
dance, art and literature. Watching
A Concerto is a Conversation
reminded me how film (with its
vast vocabulary of pacing, angles,
framing and editing) has complex
and amazing possibilities for
storytelling. There has always
been within it, the potential to
expand the limited stories told to
date of Black people.
What comes to mind is Frances-
Anne Solomon’s full-length docudrama
HERO, where archival
black and white footage is spliced
in to fill our historical perspectives
of the pan-African movement.
In A Concerto is a Conversation,
Horace Bowers Sr.’s journey from
Jim Crow Bascom, Florida, his
The conversation must continue
As I said earlier, I often experience a cognitive disconnect when I
watch Black people on film. I must first de-centre myself in order to
engage with someone else’s limited vision of who we might be. Film
itself is not the culprit, though. It offers the full range of methodologies
needed to portray the infinite voices of Black artists. This includes
everything from Melbourne’s iPad-filmed, single-take creations, to
the multi-dimensional Where Do I Go? with Tapestry Opera that
combines lyrics, dance, poetry and improvised piano, to A Concerto is
a Conversation’s 13 brilliant minutes – which tells of the lives of two
Black men, with beauty and warmth, from loving angles, a perspective
that is deeply needed and rarely seen.
The men in the film experience racism, but racism is not solely what
the film is about. If it were, it would of necessity centralize the system
and the perpetrators. It is also about the capacity for excellence, about
living well, being happy, about transformation. It is about how we,
as humans, stand on the shoulders of those who went before us. It is
about how we can transcend. At time of writing this, the film is up for
an Academy Award in the short documentary category. By the time
this is published, we’ll know if it has won that award. Whether it does
or not, it is an outstanding remedy for our times, and the reward will
be that it will be more widely seen.
Throughout the score of the film (composed by Bowers, of course),
we hear what he calls “loose variations” of How Great Thou Art,
gospel music as familiar to Bascom, Florida as it is to Hollywood.
As the credits roll, the grandfather sings the full melody and lyrics
as Bowers accompanies him. “You did it, you did it,” the elder man
exclaims as they finish the piece. Perhaps he is talking to the man
he coached and mentored, no longer a boy, but a fully realized and
successful musician. Perhaps he is talking to himself.
I recall a children’s board book by Vera B. Williams that I used to
read to my daughter when she was very little. I’d carefully chosen it
because amongst the illustrations was one Black child doing perfectly
ordinary things. The baby, when tickled or hugged or given something
precious, would say, and we, my daughter and I, would repeat
together with great enthusiasm, “More. More. More.”
Gloria Blizzard is a non-fiction writer, poet and penner of songs,
whose wordsmithing has appeared in numerous literary
publications, magazines and sound recordings. She is currently
completing her first full-length book, a collection of essays, and can
be reached at www.gloriablizzard.com.
thewholenote.com May and June 2021 | 17