For
a musical art form to survive, it must be performed live, for real people, so
it can actively engage with the world around it. Starting in 1986, the veteran
bluesman known as Satan (born Sterling Magee, not a fan of organized religion)
and Adam Gussow very definitely kept the blues alive. Playing on the streets of
Harlem undeniably strengthened their attacks and gave them ample opportunity to
pick-up on all the life going on around them. Satan’s vocals started to incorporate
rap elements, while Gussow developed jazz saxophone influences on his mouth
harp. V. Scott Balcerek chronicles the duo’s life and times in his twenty-three-years-in-the-making
documentary, Satan & Adam, which
screens during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
It
is probably the second most famous creation story in blues, after Robert
Johnson’s meeting at the crossroads. On that fateful day, Gussow asked to sit
in with Satan, who was already quite recognizable for playing solo electric
guitar, while accompanying himself on drums with the foot pedals. Satan was
curious enough to agree and was pleasantly surprised when the kid managed to
keep up. They started playing together so often, they became a regular act:
Satan & Adam.
Initially,
they busked on the streets, but they started to get respectable, recording an
album, holding down a regular weekly bar gig, and signing with a manager.
Frankly, their story was so attractive, it was probably inevitable they would
get at least fifteen minutes of fame. They were after all the first interracial
performers to appear together on the cover of Living Blues magazine. However, the music was so good and so
honest, they maintained a loyal (and rather sizable, by blues standards) fan
base, even after the music media moved on.
Balcerek
managed to capture a fair amount of those glory days and he was also there for
the quiet years of separation. Balcerek’s treatment is somewhat vague on the
particulars, but Satan had something like a nervous breakdown and moved to
Florida, where his Evangelical family forced him to temporarily give up the
blues and the “Satan” moniker. In his nonfiction collection, Journeyman’s Road, Gussow more-or-less
suggests he had to learn to let Satan go and get on with his own life.
As
poignant as those sentiments were, it turned out the music wasn’t ready to let
them go. In fact, S&A has the
best third act of any music doc since Searching
for Sugar Man. It was maybe more like a fourth or fifth act, but for their
fans, it was utterly shocking good news, sort of like Harper Lee publishing Go Set a Watchman, but more satisfying.
It
is that combination of pain and joy that makes Balcerek’s film such an
immediately indispensable document of modern Americana. This film is blues to
the bone, including the clear-eyed manner it addresses issues of race. As is
often the case with jazz, the music we call the blues is frequently intertwined
with racially charged questions of authenticity. Yet, without white (and
increasingly foreign) audiences, there would be little market for the music. Of
course, the first listeners Satan & Adam won over were “pre-gentrification”
Harlem residents, who just responded to what they heard. If you respect the
music, you also have to respect young players keeping it alive, regardless what
they look like. (That is why it is so odd to see Al Sharpton turn up as a
talking head in the film, because probably nobody else who has done more to
foster racial tension in New York, through his involvement in the Tawana
Brawley hoax and the Crown Heights Riots.)
Thank you for the positive review!
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