All you need is KLAUS!

“All You Need Is Klaus” airs on Smithsonian Channel as part of the August series Inside the Music, profiling music and musicians who’ve made great impact on our society and the world.

If you don’t know Klaus Voormann , you are wrong.  You just think you don’t know Klaus.  Well, you may not know the name, but you do know the music.  Klaus Voormann was on of the most in-demand bass players from the mid-60’s till the ‘80’s.  Everyone wanted him.  The Beatles, Manfred Mann, Harry Nilsson, the Plastic Ono Band, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, the BeeGees, the list goes on endlessly.  A funky, inventive musician. 

To make a hit record, all you needed was Klaus.

Discovering the Beatles in a Hamburg bar, a mere youth, these Liverpudlian lads likewise discovered Klaus. These ‘kids’ became lifelong friends; to this day Klaus considers George Harrison his closest friend.  He misses him dearly.

An artist, a budding musician, who played the classical guitar, Klaus followed the Fab Four back to the UK, where he embarked on an art career in graphic design, but soon found himself as the most-wanted bass player in the business.  Klaus never gave up his art though; in fact, another reason, you do know Klaus is for the Beatles’ Revolver album cover.  Shamanistic artist? Maybe more of a rock ‘n’ roll Renaissance Man.  This subdued, reflective guy could do it all.

After an extraordinary career and a hell of a lot of fun, he went back to Germany and now resides near Munich, an artist, keeping in touch with old friends, but never looking back.

Until now.  To celebrate his 70^th birthday, Klaus decided to make that journey back, to Nashville, to Los Angeles, to New York, to London, to make an album with old friends and some new, to revisit the best of times with great musicians, featuring Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, Joe Walsh, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and many more – the music’s great and everyone’s having a fantastically good time.

Two things here worth noting: at 70, Klaus Voormann is a charismatic, contagious man – sensitive, intelligent and wise – while he’s not the gorgeous, young man we view in the extraordinary archival footage, he’s now the stunning and ageless septuagenarian.  Klaus is just down-right likeable.

The other thing is the Smithsonian Channel, still relatively new and not available in every market across the US.  Demand it – it’s worth it.  They’re making some very palatable original programming.  Entertaining and top quality.

Klaus Voormann’s first ever solo-album is entitled A Sideman’s Journey: Voormann and Friends.

 “All You Need Is Klaus” premieres Sunday, August 22^nd  on the Smithsonian Channel and can be seen following on OnDemand. 

52 minutes, produced with WDR-Germany. The Smithsonian Channel is a joint venture of the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime Networks Inc., with content from the world’s leading cultural institution.

Other titles in this series, “The Accordion Kings”,  “Electrified: The Guitar Revolution”,  “The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice”, “Play on John: A Life in Music”,  “Making the Monkees” (yes, I still have a thing for the Monkees), “Sound Revolution and Worlds of Sound: The Ballads of Folkways.”  For more information and schedule, go to www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/inside-the-music

Spike Lee's If God is willing and da creek don't rise...

“If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” is Spike Lee’s long awaited follow-up to  the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning “When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts”… he was shooting this new documentary on the aftermath and recovery of New Orleans…then something happened along the way…

Five years after Katrina devastated one of the last of the steadfast original and cultural centers of this nation, that is New Orleans, Spike Lee returns to the Big Easy, first to document and to observe first-hand her attempted ‘rise from the ashes’.  Then in the midst of shooting, the region experiences another violent blow with the BP Oil Catastrophe or as some folks call it the ‘Oil Spill’.  While devastating and shattering as this documentary is, it is also a tribute to the citizens of New Orleans, to their resilience, their faith, to their love of this place they still call home.  Yet as a viewer- and a lover of NOLA, I just shake my head, wipe my tears and wonder, just how much do these people have to endure, just how much more can anyone take down there?

An opus, like a larger-than-life jazz opera, this work rifts and segues continually in its four hours, divided over two nights, as we touch down upon some truly good things like the Saints victory at the 2010 Super Bowl, the series of legal victories that demanded accountability for many of the displaced, Brad Pitt and his housing development in the Lower Ninth Ward.   The city was coming back despite successes and failures in healthcare, education, housing, economic growth and a surge in crime that started with the hurricane and never ceased.  Then in February of this year, the earthquake hit Haiti in its bowels and Port-au-Prince, the sister city of NOLA was devastated; perhaps this should have given us an inkling, an intuition that more was to come. 

Because it did on April 20^th -  and New Orleans and its environs have now been delivered another mammoth obstacle to recovery, at that moment when the British Petroleum off-shore oil rig exploded and erupted, spilling, no -  gushing endless amounts of oil into the Gulf producing the largest man-made disaster this country has ever known.  This on top of the fact that they truly had never recovered from Katrina, not really.  Not even close. Not with so many of its citizens who’ve never been able to come home, because their neighborhoods and homes are simply gone, or they simply can’t afford to live there anymore. 

Lee faces us with the truth, the truth of our times.  The truth that in the wealthiest, most advanced country in the world, we don’t take care of our own. Nor do we make those accountable for their acts, be it the Bush Administration’s careless disregard for a city with one of the largest diverse populations or a multinational corporation like BP who doesn’t take proper precautions to care for a fragile and complex environment such New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, let alone the eco-system of the entire Gulf region.

What is most honorable about this work is that Spike Lee does give voice to all sides – more than 300 hundred voices here, including as C. Ray Nagin, Mitch Landrieu – former and current mayors of the city, celebs like Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Anderson Cooper and Wendell Pearce, former governor Kathleen Blanco, former FEMA director Michael Brown, and many ordinary, decent citizens hanging onto a thread of hope, or of what?  A fantasy they’ll someday get their life back?  Or something better.  I mean don’t we,  as human beings, all hope for that?

Like these voices or not, agree with them or not, the one thing uniting all them all is a love of this city and a desire to see her come back.  Will she? 

Only if God is willing… and da creek don’t rise…

“If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise”  premieres Monday and Tuesday, August 23^rd and 24^th  on HBO and can be seen following on OnDemand. 

HBO Documentary Films and 40 Acres and a Mule present a Spike Lee Joint;  produced by Sam Pollard and Spike Lee; directed by Spike Lee; supervising producer for HBO is Jacqueline Glover; executive producer for HBO is Sheila Nevins.

Rated TV14 for Adult Content and Adult Language. 

2 x 2 hours.

Lewis Black: Basic Black

When I sat down to watch “BASIC BLACK”, my first reaction was, “Oh, him?”

I kind of knew him as a comic and as a Daily Show contributor. So what…

An hour later, I am a diehard fan of Lewis Black.

Directed by Adam Dubin, produced by Jack Gulick and Benjamin Brewer and following its success with “Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story”, which has garnered a first-time Emmy nomination for EPIX, the multiplatform service launched by Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate, “BASIC BLACK” is the second in a line-up of non-fiction programming on big-name comics.

In this up-close and intimate documentary that takes us on his recent sold-out tour and behind the scenes of his first EPIX comedy special, “STARK RAVING BLACK”. Interwoven with concert and on-the-road footage, this takes us back to his roots in Detroit, we meet his sweet-natured father and hear about his larger-than-life mother (no wonder, Lewis Black is Lewis Black), we meet friends and colleagues from his days at UNC-Chapel Hill and Yale School of Drama, where he garnered an MFA in Playwriting (he’s written 20+ plays) and from his days as producer, director and resident playwright at the West Bank Café in New York.

He’s outrageous as a comedian; his language is filled with expletives- the f-word is used loudly and often. He’s a loyal friend – as seen with his longtime friendship and professional relationship with comedian, Joe Bowman, who opens for him on the road. He’s a loveable, growling teddy bear; he is curmudgeonly, yet you know there’s vulnerability aplenty; he’s a loud-mouth intellectual; he’s a Midwestern everyman. He’s the heir to the great comics George Carlin and Rodney Dangerfield. More importantly, he’s the voice of our conscious in contemporary America. Here is where he shines – whether you are male, female, no matter what race, color, creed, no matter what age (at age 60, his fans span from 18-80), he dares to say, he shouts, he explodes with what few of us dare to utter, but with what so many of us are thinking, what our own brains are exploding with – that of the insanity of the contemporary life and all the s**t we find ourselves up against – and he, Lewis Black keeps us sane by making us laugh.

Whether seen as a companion piece to “STARK RAVING BLACK” or as a stand-alone, this is a must-see. My next big dream after viewing “BASIC BLACK” is to see Lewis Black in person – but until then…

“BASIC BLACK” premieres Sunday, August 1^st on EPIX and can be seen on OnDemand. Rated TV-MA. 69 minutes.

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Cynthia Kane is a writer, who in January 2007, moved cross-continent from New York City to San Francisco to work in Programming for [ ITVS ] primarily overseeing the International Intiative for funding. Prior she’s had many incarnations from actor to writer to producer. She co-created DOCday on Sundance Channel during her 10-year tenure there.