In the vivid new documentary The Best of the Best: Jazz From Detroit, the Motor City’s musical heritage comes alive as both a historical saga and a developing story. The film, which will have its premiere at the Freep Film Festival in Detroit on April 13 and 14, offers a survey of the city’s contribution to jazz, placing the music within a context of Black cultural and social life.
Following the lead of Mark Stryker’s acclaimed 2019 book Jazz From Detroit, the film profiles an array of influential artists: player-pedagogues like pianist Barry Harris and trumpeter Marcus Belgrave; living legends like bassist Ron Carter and singer Sheila Jordan; and modern bridge-builders like violinist Regina Carter and drummer-producer Karriem Riggins. Also as in the book, there’s a spotlight on important local institutions like Cass Technical High School, whose music program turned out generations of leading jazz musicians.
WRTI is proud to share an exclusive clip from the film, featuring bassist Rodney Whitaker as he leads a rehearsal of The Gathering Orchestra, a fellowship initiative at the Carr Center. “A lot of times, with our formal education in school, we’re mostly focused on notes,” Whitaker says. “But we never really examine the emotional aspects of music, the social aspects of music.”
A bassist of widespread renown, featured on more than 100 recordings, Whitaker has never moved out of the Detroit area. (He now lives in East Lansing, where he’s Director of Jazz Studies at Michigan State University.) As The Best of the Best shows, he’s the heir to a tradition of Detroit jazz mentorship that originated with Harris and was perpetuated by Belgrave.
“Rodney took his own history, where he was brought up as a young man and thrown out there and got a chance,” says Roberta Friedman, a producer of the film. “He’s doing the same thing with young people now — watching for the people that are talented that he can bring up. And that’s really very exciting and important and meaningful.”
The Best of the Best came out of a series of conversations after the publication of Jazz From Detroit. Through a mutual friend, Stryker connected with Friedman and her filmmaking partner, Daniel Loewenthal, New Yorkers drawn to the idea of a Detroit-centered project. “I grew up in Newark,” says Loewenthal, who directed and edited the film. “They’re not exactly similar, but there are a lot of similarities. Detroit and Newark both had riots in 1967 which changed the fortunes of the city. And I went to a high school that was very much like Cass Tech. So a lot about Detroit resonated with me.”
Work on the film began early in 2020, as the first pandemic lockdown was taking effect. An initial round of interviews — with Barry Harris, Sheila Jordan, Regina Carter and drummer Louis Hayes — was conducted in New York, under rigorous safety precautions. Material from those interviews, combined with archival images and historical footage, helped the team raise their first round of funding.
The end result, four years in the making, features insights not only from jazz artists but also figures like Marsha Music, a cultural historian and chronicler in Detroit, and David Maraniss, an associate editor for The Washington Post and author of Once in a Great City: The Detroit Story. “We talked from the very beginning about wanting to make a film that would not just appeal to jazz people,” says Stryker, the film’s writer, and a co-producer with Loewenthal and Friedman. “It was really important to us that the city itself become a character in the film.”
After its premiere at the Freep Film Festival in Detroit next month, The Best of the Best will make the rounds to other festivals and screenings. WRTI will share any information about an opportunity to see the film in Philadelphia.
As for which of the two cities has a greater jazz legacy, Stryker defaults to diplomacy. “The answer is that they are both indispensable to jazz history,” he says. “I always say you can’t pick up a record that was made on the east coast between 1955 and 1970 and not run into one, two, three or even four or more Detroiters. And if the guys on the record were not from Detroit, they were from Philly.”
