123: Feel Like Going Home, by Martin Scorsese, dir.

Martin Scorsese, dir. (USA)
Feel Like Going Home (2003)
110 minutes
I’m having trouble finding anywhere to watch this online in the UK – legally or otherwise – but if you know anywhere, please let us know. Americans can probably watch it on the PBS Vimeo page, and non-Americans can watch the trailer there instead. However, it is really cheap to buy on DVD second-hand on Amazon.

Okay, controversial: this isn’t an album. It’s a film. But it’s a film about music, with tons of great music in it that you’re not gonna be able to hear elsewhere, so I’ll allow it. Because it’s my blog and I get to allow things like that.

Feel Like Going Home is the first of seven films collectively known as Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, where different directors – from Wim Wenders to Clint Eastwood – were drafted in to look at different aspects of the blues, and they all have their different methods, with historical documentary, contemporary interviews, reconstructions and even a fiction screenplay. For the first of the series, though, Scorsese took the reins himself, for a dive into delta blues and its roots.

The film follows bluesman Corey Harris as he travels around the Mississippi delta getting to grips with the story of the blues, from his own contemporary take, to the delta guitar styles and even further back to fife and drum music and field hollers. And then even even further back, with a trip to Mali, where he meets Salif Keita, Habib Koité and Ali Farka Touré. It’s interesting and entertaining as it should be, but the reason I’m including this film on an album blog is really because of the music. There’s a bunch of cool archive footage of blues legends such as Son House, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but the real draw is the performances recorded especially for the film, and Harris is often involved too. We see and hear him jamming with old bluesmen Sam Carr and Willie King in Mississippi, with Otha Turner and his fife and drum band, and, most thrillingly, with Ali Farka Touré in Niafunké in Mali. You can watch a little bit of that section here, where they play a beautiful mash-up of the classic ‘Catfish Blues’ and Touré’s song ‘Mahini Me’:

The idea of West African music – especially Malian music – being the starting point for the evolution of the blues is a really attractive one, although a literal ‘Malian music → blues’ timeline, such as is presented in Feel Like Going Home is a little too over-simplistic. Nevertheless, collaborations between the two never cease to be intoxicating for me, as long as they’re done well, and this jam between Harris and Touré most definitely is. I wish I could have been there under those trees with them! Makes you wonder what other stuff they played together that never made it into the film.

There are absolutely tons of music documentaries out there, covering every sort of music you can imagine, but Feel Like Going Home is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The story it tells is fascinating and touching, and the arguments are compellingly made (even if I don’t wholly agree with them), but the music is something else. If there ever was a film that you can listen to as you would an album, it would be this one.