SONG OF LAHORE (Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Andy Schocken). Subtitled. 83 minutes. See listing. Rating: NNN
You haven’t heard Dave Brubeck’s jazz classic Take Five until you’ve heard it played by Pakistan’s Sachal Jazz Ensemble, complete with sitar and tabla.
Song Of Lahore, directed by Andy Schocken and this year’s documentary short Oscar winner, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, is a feature-length doc about the group, many of whose members are descended from old musician families.
Lahore was once the art capital of the Subcontinent, but after president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq established an Islamic republic in Pakistan in 1977, music was forbidden.
Decades later, the repressive climate relaxed, a dozen or so musicians band together, but now there’s no audience for their music. So they experiment with American jazz, and their version of the Brubeck song goes viral, which leads to an invitation to play with Wynton Marsalis’s big band at Lincoln Center.
The lead-up to that gig provides the doc with tons of nail-biting excitement. The sitar player’s not working out, and Marsalis isn’t happy. Meanwhile, the Pakistani musicians, who have little status at home, gain confidence playing in the West.
The first third of the film is cluttered with too many people and lots of information without much to look at. But when East meets West in the concert hall and produces glorious music, none of that matters.
