While scrolling through YouTube recently I happened upon Mr. Flute – The Art Webb Documentary (2022) directed by Omar J. Pineda. I first heard about Webb from an old album by the band Guararé that I purchased in the 70’s. He was the in-demand flute player for many Salsa recordings in New York City. His flute playing was energetic, complex, and completely original, so I was eager to see the documentary. Webb’s story contains many joyful moments and some quite painful experiences as well. 

Pineda starts at the beginning, Webb’s childhood in West Philadelphia, and his first flute, paid for over time. Interspersed with this important information and throughout the film, we follow Webb taking public transportation to and from a gig at the restaurant El Floridita in Hollywood, first a bus and later the metro train. According to bassist and fellow Philadelphian Stanley Clarke, Philadelphia had a robust music education program in the public schools. Webb and Clarke are just a couple examples of the great musicians who emerged from that system.

Fast forward to New York City where Webb found a home in Ray Barretto’s band while living in Brooklyn. In order to dramatize the meeting between Webb and Barretto, Pineda decided to use animation. There are animated sections in recent films about musicians, for example, Omar Sosa’s 88 Well-Tuned Drums and Wayne Shorter Zero Gravity come to mind. It seems there is a trend among music documentaries to try to enliven their films with animation (it is not necessary). Let Webb, Sosa and Shorter explain the situation and leave it at that.  

There were other gigs, as Webb could play any type of music: classical, jazz and even played in pit bands for Broadway shows. When he played in Barreto’s band, Atlantic records came knocking. He became a recording artist under his own name in 1977 with two extremely hard to find albums, Mr. Flute and Love Eyes.

At some point in the 1980s Webb decided to take a two week trip to Los Angeles, California and ended up staying. Gigs with Bongo Logic and Johnny Polanco’s band Amistad ensured he would be around for a long time. Somewhere in 2011 Webb lost his home and joined the unhoused population, which led to his health deteriorating. Subsequently he was hospitalized for about a year, then became deeply in debt with medical bills. Fortunately his musician friends and others, including Polanco, raised money for his medical expenses and even found him a home.

About three quarters of the way through the film, Webb is shown playing flute at the restaurant El Floridita in color.

Then Pineda goes back to Webb’s long journey from the gig in black and white. The contrast of the two scenes is particularly emotive.

The film ends on several positive notes, Webb begins taking Uber to the engagements, gigs start rolling in, a recording is planned with Clarke, all now filmed in beautiful color. To extend the good vibes there is a concert at the very end where Webb plays superbly in the company of Clarke on acoustic bass, Oskar Cartaya on cowbell and Shelia E. on timbales.

I am so glad Mr. Flute exists because many more people will see and hear about Art Webb. Pineda has made a fitting tribute to a previously unknown musician, whose musical legacy would otherwise be lost. According to everyone who knew him, he was a great musician and an even better human being.

After nine years of work, Kathryn Golden was finally able to screen her documentary film SANTOS: Skin to Skin and it was definitely worth the wait. One such screening was at the festival tent at the Mendocino, California Film Festival on June 2nd. The audience was treated to an exploration of the life and times of musician John Santos. In the film Santos emerges as more than just a remarkable musician. He is a social activist, educator, family man, a music historian and preservationist as well.

Life for Santos began in the beautiful neighborhood of Bernal Heights in the San Francisco Mission District. On his block there were families of various ethnicities and backgrounds.  Santos traces his ancestry back to Puerto Rico and the Cape Verdean islands.

Early life for Santos was filled with music as both his grandfathers were musicians. Any opportunity to play music, be it a birthday, a holiday or some made up celebratory moment was filled with music. Santos noticed that the musicians were always nattily dressed and thought he might want to be part of that world. He speaks also, about how the sound of the drum, the tumbadora, called out to him and he had to respond.

Raul Rekow, conga drummer for Santana for 37 years, remembers when John and he would go to Dolores Park and play congas. There were no books or videos to guide them, so they had to rely on their ears. Sometimes they would play the rhythms incorrectly and have to start again and relearn the correct way to play them.

John was not satisfied with just learning to play the instruments of Cuba and Puerto Rico, he wanted to know about where the music came from and why. After careful study, John curated a series of presentations at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco called The Roots of Salsa. As the years went by, the presentations became more sophisticated with videos in addition to seminal recordings. John began to write about the music and it came to the attention of ethnomusicologist Robert Ferris Thompson, who is interviewed twice in the film. Thompson, a renowned expert on African rhythms, consulted John about a specific rhythmic nuance which Thompson vocally describes to great effect.

In April 2011 the Board of Trustees of the Recording Academy eliminated the Latin Jazz category, and Santos and many other artists protested. After two years of letter writing, phone calls, organized protests in Los Angeles and a lawsuit& the Academy finally reinstated the category. Santos has also not been afraid to voice his opinions on many issues of the day. He has come out against the gun violence that happens all too often in our society. In the film he says the powers that be don’t want to hear him talk about politics at all.

Many of the musical performances were filmed at the SF Jazz Center where Santos was a resident artistic director for the years 2013-2014. Featured are a wide range of musicians from Hip-Hop artist Rico Pabón to Cuban pianist and composer Omar Sosa. Mainly the John Santos sextet, with Marco Díaz on piano, Saul Sierra on bass, David Flores on drums, Melecio Magdaluyo on tenor and soprano saxes and Dr. John Calloway on flute, provides the bulk of the music. Guests such as Walfredo De Los Reyes on drums, Orestes Vilató on timbales and Ernesto Oviedo on vocals, add their respective energy to the proceedings.

There are two very serene moments in the film where Santos, the family man, comes to the forefront. His two children and partner Aida Salazar go down to the beach and perform a ceremony honoring their child Amalí, who died shortly after she was born. It is a moving scene where flowers in the shape of hearts are offered to the goddess of the seas Yemayá. The other takes place in Peñuelas, Puerto Rico at the graveyard as the family looks for the place where Santos’ great grandmother was buried. This is an occasion for music as Santos sings and his son, who has picked up two sticks, plays an accompanying rhythm.

At a recording session for Ernesto Oviedo, a marvelous Cuban singer, the Santos home doubles as a recording studio. The musicians inhabit different places in the house so the sound of one instrument does not bleed into another. Later in the film, Aida and John are inserting the finished recording into envelopes to be distributed to two hundred people who will disseminate the music. In this way Santos preserves the music that he loves by making the recording and distributing it himself.

The eminent pianist Eddie Palmieri makes this statement,” John Santos lives in my heart and pays no rent.” After viewing this film John Santos will live on in the many hearts of those folks who enjoy great music.

As an added bonus, the audience at the Mendocino Film Festival enjoyed an hour of live music with the John Santos Quartet. I thought this older (and mostly non-Latino) crowd would not understand nor enjoy the music and boy was I wrong. After the first song, they were dancing in the aisles and they enthusiastically applauded each number.

The set focused on music from the 40’s and 50’s. Classic jazz and Cuban tunes filled the tent. Included in the set were Pent Up House by Sonny Rollins, Equinox by John Coltrane and Drume Negrita by Ernesto Grenet.  Three of the compositions were attributed to members of the band, pianist Marco Díaz  with Raíces and Descarga Con Changüí and bassist Saul Sierra with Mi Niña. On Mi Niña (A Danzón/Mambo), which Sierra dedicated to his daughter, he played a very complicated rhythmic bass solo. Sierra’s family from Mexico City was in the audience and his playing was truly inspired. According to Ann Walker, one of the organizers of the Festival, a week after the show Mendocino was still talking about SANTOS: Skin on Skin and the concert.

• Related Link: SANTOS: Skin to Skin – A Searchlight Films Production

_{SANTOS–Skin to Skin is a film portrait of community activist and seven-time Grammy nominee John Santos, a “keeper of the Afro-Caribbean flame.” Rich in musical performances, Santos links the rhythms of his ancestors to contemporary struggles of identity and social justice.}

^{Photos courtesy of Searchlight Films Production}

Anyone approaching this film about the iconic Cuban composer and pianist Omar Sosa, by the award-winning filmmaker Soren Sorensen will be almost immediately struck by its [the film’s] Joycean [Ulysses-like] ‘stream-of-consciousness’ narrative style. While this may not have been the intention of Mr Sorensen at the start of his epic odyssey it becomes a unique and quite stunning device for telling the story of one of the most unique Cuban artists of an era – contemporary or otherwise.

The title of the film – Omar Sosa’s 88 Well-Tuned Drums – is an oblique reference to JS Bach’s epic books I and II of The Well-Tempered Clavier, is well-intentioned yet also emerges as ironic and slightly irreverent when it deals with the poetics of Mr Sosa’s music. It is both daunting [and hardly fair] to even attempt a classification of Mr Sosa’s musical poetics despite the fact that the initial montage of interviews by several critics and producers use several epithet to describe the experience of listening to Mr Sosa.

Mr Sorensen therefore lets the music speak to the reference to what, in fact, unfolds as Mr Sosa’s percussive approach to the piano; the 88 keys – at well-tempered intervals – are manipulated by touch, articulation and dynamics into a symphony of melodic, harmonic, and percussive music that seems to emerge from deep inside the very heart of the pianist. The music is seemingly been composed by the restless nerve-endings of the pianist’s very finger-tips rather than the end of a pencil to be precise. And this is exactly what defines the role of Mr Sosa’s entire nervous-system in the whole musical equation: delicately controlled impulses naturally designed to interpret the language of the pianist’s heart and soul on which his unique humanity is written.

Mr Sorensen has divined the perfect technique for telling the story of Mr Sosa and his music. This is a breathtaking, non-linear narrative, but a wonderfully unfolding, deeply engrossing story full of agony, ecstasy, [musical] community and utter loneliness, all of which drives the artist – any artist, really – but which is a lifestyle that is so unique to Mr Sosa, that it becomes a life-story – from Cuba through [the liberation of] Angola to Europe and the United States, which is both terrible, as well as exhilarating; so full of doubt and pain and somehow full of triumphant, cathartic pathos as well.

_{Omar Sosa’s 88 Well-Tuned Drums Trailer}

This narrative weaves back and forth in time and place as Mr Sosa tells his story, accompanied by a musical commentary on the piano, often with other musicians. We live through the questing urges of the pianist, his sojourn from his birth in Camagüey, Cuba’s third-largest city, conservatory education in Havana, and relocation to Ecuador where he briefly wrote and arranged commercial jingles. Sosa’s story continues with a fateful mid-90s move to the U.S., a stint as a sought-after sideman in the Bay Area’s Latin jazz scene, and partnership with manager Scott Price that continues to this day.

Along the way we meet the globetrotting artist in various emotive and evocative settings – his duo with celebrated Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu is absolutely unforgettable where during a live performance the trumpeter ends the set by holding just one note while Mr Sosa propels the music with rhythmic cascades… until the trumpeter stands up, walks around the enormous concert grand and the rhythmically-yammering pianist as his note fades into the distance. We also meet with Mr Sosa’s Afri-Lectric Experience, and with his latest band, the Quarteto AfroCubano in storied venues including New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club. Sosa’s Quarteto AfroCubano features fellow Camagüey natives Ernesto Simpson on drums and Leandro Saint-Hill on alto saxophone and flute and bassist Childo Tomas, who hails from Maputo, Mozambique. Perhaps most thrilling for [Omar Sosa] fans will be the full-circle nature of Sosa’s 2015 album Ilé, which reunited Sosa’s music with its Cuban roots.

The most thrilling performances, by far, are Mr Sosa’s live performances with the Senegalese kora master, Sekou Keita, the Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles – a master maraquero – and the bewitchingly virtuosic and ethereally beautiful and Cuban-Swiss violinist, vocalist and dancer Yilian Cañizares, whose performance precedes the magical film’s dénouement. By this time we have discovered an artist whose quiet humanity is actually larger-than-life, whose puckish smile punctuates the raw silk of his speaking voice as he connects some of the dots in the woven narrative of a life in music; and who seems just a handshake away, yet retains his unique mystique. A son of the Orisha Eleguá or perhaps – one might begin to wonder – even the very personification of the Orisha himself – musically-speaking, of course…

Omar Sosa’s 88 Well-Tuned Drums

Music by Omar Sosa / Edited by Soren Sorensen / Director of Photography Jason Rossi / Co-Executive Producers Jess Collins, Nathan Collins / Produced by Soren Sorensen & Scott Price / Directed by Soren Sorensen

USAFILMFESTIVAL.COM / OMARSOSAFILM.COM / OMARSOSA.COM