After The First Slam Dunk which represented the frenzy of basketball or even the original – nevertheless burdened with heavy clichés – Komada: A Whisky Family which placed narrative at the heart of a distillery, animation continues to explore less fanciful worlds, closer to reality. Adaptation of the eponymous manga Shinichi Ishizuka, Blue Giant traces Dai Miyamoto, a young man who aspires to become the best jazz musician in the world.
In the vein of the great
Coming of age form, Blue Giant accompanies the spectator as close as possible to the Dai band then in full exploration of the possibilities. Faunished but passionate about jazz, Dai exercises every day with a saxophone, literally whether it rains whether it sells or snows. As in Sonny Rollins who was training sax on the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Dai did the same. He must perfect his art, by rigour and self-denial. Decline of the American dream in the heart of the Tokyoite capital, Blue Giant shows the ascent of musicians out of time. While he meets a talented young pianist, Dai offers him to work together. More technical but less enthusiastic and exuberant, Yukinori will have to deal with this young mad dog, overwhelmed by the ambition and energy of the possessed. They will soon be joined by Tamada, drummer in full learning.
Unlike other musical genres, jazz grammar is different. From the beginning, the band was destined to dissolve more than in any other musical style, with the members taking advantage of each other in an opportunistic way, carried by overtaking and pride, an integral part of the device. Solos and improvisation occupy a central place. Aware of his talent but above all of his working strength, Dai does not only want to play jazz, he wants to transform him like all the great artists who left their signature. « Jazz is not dead, it's just that it has a funny smell » Frank Zappa said. Director Yuzuru Tachikawa, totally foreign to the world of jazz, managed to transcribe his hardness in our time with a very large space left for rehearsals.
Live concert scenes represent a quarter of the film with a challenge: to make believe the technical progression of the trio until the emergence of a real legend. And how can you find your own style? If Golden age jazz dates back to the last century, this kind difficult to define has evolved by adapting to specificities of each era. The Worksongs from the songs of cotton, from slavery to the negro spiritual then to gospel, jazz finds its roots as close as possible to the black exploitation and the Lumpenproletariat. It was only after the abolition of slavery and in the warm quarters of New Orleans that the ragtime, an ancestor of jazz, was born that rhythmized the nights of the Luisian dancers. It is only much later that whites will appropriate this Afro-American culture.
It was in Storyville around 1890 that the first bands would represent themselves in clubs before spreading across the United States during the crazy years when jazz acquired its nobility letters and a sulphurous reputation in full prohibition. Swing, Bebop, Cool jazz, Hard bop the genre will never stop soaking up heteroclite influences until Free Jazz (paradoxically the most anarchist and the most worldly of subgenres) which leads to the abolition of any rule. The saxophonist John Coltrane, who will be the avant-garde, was first thought of as having to work young in a sugar refinery to finance his studies. More restrictions like an ultimate revenge of history suffered by pioneers of this kind who were exploited in sugar cane fields.
Unpublished musical and visual illusion
This ability to survive and this flame that only demands to consume the world, we find it directly in the figure of Dai who sleeps on the couch of a childhood friend and squats a bar once popular with jazz lovers but now sadly deserted. Love letter to the genre, Blue Giant is the story of a musical resurrection. From a sound point of view, the insolent music of the film was composed by Hiromi Uehara, a pianist is a leading figure in the Japanese scene which also doubles the piano score of Sawabe Yukinori. While the United States and, more particularly, New Orleans are the birthplace of jazz, Japan remains with Ethiopia One of the strongly preserved bastions where production proliferates.
On the saxophone we find Tomoaki Baba. To show Dai's imperfections, the composer even had to ask her to play less well during the recordings! Where attention to detail is most remarkable, it is for the third luron of the band: Tamada who discovers the battery but is driven by the most sincere desire to improve. To mimic the game of a beginner, the professional musician Shun Ishiwaka even changed his way of holding the sticks.
For the visual part, there also Yuzuru Tachikawa's teams had to be full of malice to transcribe the performance of the musicians on screen. The band's music was filmed and the motion captured has been used for 3D which allows to stick perfectly to the rhythm breaks and the sharp movements of the artists. Anecdote original, the director also had to adapt a series of mangas into a single film, which was not a small deal. If he originally planned to produce a series, the mangaka Shinichi Ishizuka pointed out to him that it would be difficult to perceive the sound on television while in the cinema it would be easier to feel the vibrations of a concert. Like Dai's character, Yuzuru Tachikawa attended a show at the famous Blue Note of Tokyo in 2019. Then he became aware of the energy of jazz:
« I was in the front row, I heard the artists breathing, and the water trembled in my glass. Incredible energy! I felt the pressure of sound on my body and realized that the powerful and intense jazz that is spoken of in manga was the basis of this work, and that it needed to be experienced in cinema. »
And one can only give him reason; This vibration deserves to be widely shared with a large sound system and a canvas worthy of this name. The more history progresses, the more the frame emerges as if the sound and graphic parts were each seeking to improvise and emulate each other. This becomes glaring in the second part of the anime where the cameras free from gravity to turn around the characters as Gaspard Noah did in the hypnotic Enter The Void. The strokes and colors are then released until the lines vibrate. Almost psychedelic, these chromatic sequences represent with intelligence the personality that finally manages to express itself during solos and improvisations.
Like the painting that will seize the subject of jazz in all its plastic forms, the graphic style of Blue Giant is not limited to realism. Here again, this choice is all the more relevant as it addresses in a sensitive and applied way the neurological phenomena of synesthesia and chromosthetic. It's the question of seeing music. The synesthetes (from Greek) « syn » and « aesthesis » meaning respectively « together » and « meaning ») have another perception. They can taste a word, smell a color or see a sound. Only 4% of the population would be affected and many artists would be suspected of being like Duke Ellington.
In musicology, music has been described for centuries with a colorful language with the terms « brilliant », « clear », and « Dark » For example. In an article on the fascinating subjectLeopold Tobisch explains the complexity of this perception which may differ from one individual to another. For example, composer Olivier Messiaen saw colours when he listened to the song of birds and summarized his synesthesia during an exchange with journalist Claude Samuel:
« I try to translate colors through music »
It is therefore the expression of a self-identity which appears through this marriage of meanings during the fulgurations of improvisations of Blue Giant. « In jazz, twenty arms push you. We're a noise god. » explained Jean Cocteau, fascinated by this booming music since 1918, the essence of a simplicity and purity that was lacking, he says, in French music (read the critical musicologist Philip Tagg on stereotypical dichotomy between « Black music » and « European music »). These flights where the torments of the soul liberate the body of the carcan of the partition, Blue Giant Show it to the best. Like the self-taught poet Jean Cocteau, who tried to use drums, Tamada can stand out by his work and his willingness to improve at all costs, despite his technical shortcomings. Personality and mastery are the two qualities necessary for anyone who wants to embody jazz.
Currently in the cinema, you are strongly advised to be carried away by this unusual sensory experience. Blue Giant is a film paying tribute to the genre and to those who have inscribed themselves in its mythology: Art Blakey, Bill Evans, John Coltrane and so many others who have marked each in their own way the living heritage of jazz, the fruit of a rigorous but instinctive, poetic and improvised approach, whose performers write a story that is always in motion.
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