NOTES FROM THE ROAD

A documentarian revisits the funkiest musical byways in this scintillating memoir.

Mugge, a documentary filmmaker, offers production narratives of 25 of his nonfiction movie depictions of musicians and their performances, shot from 1976 through 2015. His subjects include headliners like saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who broke his foot after jumping from the stage but kept playing while lying on his back; soul singer–turned-minister Al Green, who gave a riveting performance of gospel tunes at his Sunday church service and regaled Mugge with the story of being scalded with hot grits by a lover who then shot herself with his gun; and Sun Ra, leader of the celebrated jazz group “Sun Ra Arkestra” and an Afrofuturist who claimed to be immortal and to hail from the planet Saturn. “Slowly, quietly, like a hurt child, he asked me how he could work with someone who did not believe the things he said,” Mugge recalls of a conversation during which he asserted that Sun Ra would die someday. Equally fascinating are Mugge’s accounts of less-known performers, including a musical battle between Beau Jocque and Boozoo Chavis for the title of King of Zydeco and the journey of blues band Scissormen through white-bread Indiana, where frontman Ted Drozdowski “dropped his guitar onto a young woman’s outstretched arms and momentarily played it there, only to have her male companion…pour beer on the bridge of [his] guitar.” Mugge’s vivid prose mixes piquant sketches of musicians with atmospheric evocations of the music. (“What the three played was…elemental but with a droning, modal quality, and a drive that set the crowded and increasingly inebriated locals to dancing or gyrating in place, with a glow on their faces and electricity crackling through the room,” he writes of a set by Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough and his band.) The book is also a master class on the director’s craft. Music fans and indie film aficionados will find here a beguiling homage to both art forms.

A vibrant, entertaining panorama of music-making and the picaresque struggle to capture it on film.