The music is sensuous big-city jazz from around midnight, swirling through cigarette smoke and perfume and the musty smell of a saloon, and it's good to listen to. There is a lot of music in the film, provided both by Bill Lee's score and by the Bleek group, which has been dubbed by the Branford Marsalis Quartet.
#MO BETTER BLUES MOVIE#
The middle sections of the movie take place in a world of jazz clubs and dressing rooms, stage door entrances, bars, coffee shops and apartments - urban New York at night.
#MO BETTER BLUES PROFESSIONAL#
That leads into physical and professional tragedy. Giant is a compulsive gambler who is hopelessly incompetent to guide anyone's career, but through some sort of perverse logic Bleek is loyal to him instead of to the friends who would really help him. The band is on the brink of breaking out big, but needs better leadership than it gets from Bleek and his childhood friend and manager, Giant (Spike Lee). Bleek desires both of them and has enough time for neither, and eventually gets himself into one of those situations where they both show up at the night club on the same evening wearing the same red dresses - identical gifts from Bleek.
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There are two women in his life: Clarke Bentancourt ( Cynda Williams), as sleek as her name, a seductive songstress and Indigo Downes ( Joie Lee), sometimes as blue as her name, less glamorous but steadier and more emotionally healthy. As played by Washington, he is handsome, assured, and a dedicated ladies' man. We flash forward to Bleek as a successful jazzman. There won't be any softball until he finishes his scales. "Let the boy be a boy," Bleek's father says, but the mother will have none of it. The movie gives us some insights into those possibilities in a prologue that shows Bleek as a young boy, growing up on a middle-class Brooklyn street, being forced by his mother to practice his trumpet while the neighborhood kids stand on the sidewalk and taunt him because he can't come out and play softball.
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He leads a successful jazz group, but sometimes seems distracted and unhappy, maybe because he never really wanted to be a musician, maybe because he hasn't grown up enough to find himself. The movie stars Denzel Washington as a trumpet player with the evocative name of Bleek.