[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Andrew Gilbert (Mission Native) critiques the documentary Santos: Pores and skin to Pores and skin (Searchlight Movies, 2022) directed by Kathryn Golden and Ashley James and specializing in neighborhood activist, percussionist, and seven-time Grammy nominee John Santos.
When he was priced out of San Francisco again within the early Nineties, John Santos needed to go away the Mission behind. However the tradition and ethos he absorbed rising up within the neighborhood continues to form his musical imaginative and prescient as a percussionist, bandleader, educator and activist who embraces the Afro-Caribbean rhythmic continuum.
A Latin jazz icon with seven Grammy Award nominations and an expansive, self-produced discography that encompasses grasp musicians from Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York, the Bay Space and past, Santos has thrived exterior of Latin music’s industrial area.
A brand new documentary movie, “Santos: Pores and skin to Pores and skin,” screens Sunday afternoon, Oct. 16, as a part of the forty fifth Mill Valley Movie Pageant at The Roxie, co-presented with SFJAZZ (an Oct. 30 screening on the SFJAZZ Heart, the place Santos has usually curated live shows as a resident creative director, is bought out). John Santos joins “Pores and skin to Pores and skin” filmmakers Kathryn Golden and Ashley James for a Q&A following the Roxie screening.
The movie covers quite a lot of floor, providing an intimate portrait of the percussionist on and off the bandstand. In some ways it’s a household portrait that situates Santos amidst a dense net of relationships, together with his spouse, award-winning creator Aida Salazar, and their youngsters. There is no such thing as a scarcity of musical friends singing his reward as an inspirational power liable for increasing the worldwide attain of the Bay Space’s Latin jazz scene. However one of many movie’s main pleasures is that it lets the drums do loads of speaking.
Filmed over almost a decade, “Pores and skin to Pores and skin” captures varied ensembles he’s led and particular company he’s showcased, like Havana’s late nice Ernesto Oviedo, a maestro of boleros Santos launched to the Bay Space.
“One of many issues I actually wished was to permit the music to be a part of the narrative,” mentioned Golden, who directed “Pores and skin to Pores and skin.” “Everytime you make a movie about an artist or performer, there’s nothing like a stay efficiency. There’s no solution to replicate that power. However John places the music in a broader context. He’s all the time been a really political artist, and as a performer he hyperlinks the music to world historical past, migration, and all types of points that have an effect on us.”
As companions in Searchlight Movies, Golden and James are not any strangers to exploring the methods by which historical past flows by cultural expression. James filmed and directed the 2001 movie “Bomba: Dancing the Drum,” concerning the Cepeda household, longtime standard-bearers of the percussion-driven Afro-Puerto Rican dance custom. And collectively they made 1986’s “And Nonetheless We Dance,” a movie detailing the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Pageant. As an artist embedded in a thriving neighborhood of musicians and cultural activists, Santos appeared like a great topic. [. . .]
With mentors like Cuban conguero Armanda Peraza and Panamanian timbalero Benny Velarde, each early Tjader collaborators, Santos soaked up all of the musical information he might and began drawing connections between varied African diasporic traditions that manifested throughout the Caribbean. [. . .]
His music isn’t on industrial radio, however it’s been heard the place it counts most. Legendary pianist, composer and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, often called the Solar of Latin Music, presents his benediction for his youthful colleague within the movie. “John Santos lives in my coronary heart,” he says, “hire free.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://missionlocal.org/2022/10/john-santoss-afro-caribbean-mission
The movie:
“Santos: Pores and skin to Pores and skin”
Kathryn Golden and Ashley James
Searchlight Movies, 2022
Documentary
1 hour quarter-hour
English and Spanish with English subtitles
https://johnsantosmovie.com
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpL46E23ZgA