Music is a tough business.  You cannot just plug in a guitar, pound a drum-head, blow into a saxophone, or other instrumental applications, and expect a hit or a successful song to just materialize.  It may seem that easy to the casual observer but nothing is further from the truth than this fantasy.  Success comes at a price and that price is, almost always, a firm commitment to your craft to the near exclusion of all else.  Don’t have that, you’ll never be in the limelight – guaranteed.

Within the film, Musician, part of a Works series by filmmaker Daniel Kraus (Works looks at people’s lives and how they live to work or entertain within the framework of time), you get an insightful view into the life of Ken Vandermark, who ekes out a living playing avant-garde improvisational jazz with such an intensity, you have to wonder that he has a life at all outside the music.

The film begins with a frustrated Vandermark composing a jazz piece with a snail’s pace.  Eventually the piece finishes and is then played in a club.  But the film has already begun to parade the difficulties of creation, moving music from the inner self to paper, hardly a fun transition.  The transition to paper loses the complexities of the music heard in the creative processes of the mind.  As the film progresses, you see Vandermark within a recording studio preserving his album.  As the film will underscore, he has produced over 100 albums to date.  And you think life is too busy for you?

From the creative process, to rehearsals, to club performances, to recordings, and on through the myriad processes of the music world, the dedicated involvement of the musician as he travels and plays is captured in this remarkable montage of commitment to a craft.

What makes this film so important is its unabashed and straightforward look at what it takes to bring meaningful music to an audience.  If you have a band and expect any sort of success, you should view, and take to heart, this film’s brutal honesty in just what it takes to be even moderately successful.  The actual film is just under an hour with a remaining hour of deleted scenes left over but, combined, provides you all of the nuances of the demands on a musician, questioning your own level of dedication.

Musician is brilliant and essential.