MOVIE REVIEW
“Keep On Keepin’ On”
Grade: A
Starring Clark Terry, Justin Kauflin, Arturo Sandoval and Bill Cosby. Directed by Alan Hicks.
Rated R for some language. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 24 minutes.
Bottom line: An affectionate and moving look at the relationship between teacher and student
By A.O. Scott
New York Times
Alan Hicks’ “Keep On Keepin’ On” is an affectionate and moving look at the relationship between the great trumpeter Clark Terry and Justin Kauflin, a talented young pianist.
Terry, who celebrates his 91st and 92nd birthdays in the course of the film, is an artist whose rigor is matched by enthusiasm and generosity. Born in St. Louis in 1920, he started out in Count Basie’s band, which he fondly recalls as his “prep school for the University of Ellingtonia,” a reference to the Duke Ellington Orchestra, where he was a mainstay through the 1950s. He also did a stint in the “Tonight Show” band, becoming the first African-American musician hired full-time to play on the air at NBC.
But “Keep On Keepin’ On” offers something much richer and more unusual than the biography of an eminent musician. Terry was a pioneer in jazz education, and his first student was a 12-year-old horn player named Quincy Jones, “so skinny he could ride a rooster,” in Terry’s words. Now in his 80s, Jones is a producer of this film and also, especially toward the end, a crucial on-screen presence. He is one bookend of Terry’s career as a teacher, and Kauflin, a quiet young man with an irrepressible smile and evident talent, is the other.
Kauflin, who was born in 1986 with impaired vision, lost his eyesight completely when he was 11 and became serious about the piano around the same time. At the start of the movie, he is living in New York, trying to break into the professional jazz scene and having a hard time. We follow him through various setbacks and triumphs — a move back to his parents’ home in Virginia Beach, a tense appearance at the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition — but the one constant is his friendship with Terry.
The older man, meanwhile, suffers the effects of age and diabetes, sometimes struggling to hold on to the optimism that is the dominant feature of his temperament. The audience visits him and his wife, Gwen, at their home in Pine Bluff, Ark., and accompanies them to a hospital as his health declines. Kauflin is also a frequent visitor, receiving instruction from his teacher even when Terry is too weak to sit up in bed.
The old-timer and the young striver are a wonderful pair, and the privilege of their company is not something you should refuse. At one point, Terry and Kauflin muse on what separates the amateurs, of whom there is never a shortage, from the masters, a vastly smaller company. It’s the drive to be better than anyone else, Terry says, acknowledging both a general truth about art and the specific competitive ethos of jazz, where the motive is often to play a rival off the bandstand. Like other stories of musical tutelage, “Keep On Keepin’ On” is ultimately an examination of the pursuit of greatness. It is a grueling and demanding endeavor, for sure, but also, for Terry and anyone lucky enough to enter his orbit, a source of unending joy.
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