Drummer and filmmaker, Ben Makinen discusses his films via Zoom from Bali with John Bommarito on The Song Break.
John Bommarito: You're listening to The Song Break on 891 WEMU. I'm John Bommarito. Every now and then, we venture into the territory where we speak to somebody about something jazz related. Maybe they're coming to town. Maybe there's a new record. This time, I'm speaking to an executive producer and director, a filmmaker and jazz drummer who now lives in Bali but has ties to the Detroit area. Welcome to WEMU and The Song Break Ben Makinen. Hello, Ben.
Ben Makinen: Hello, John. Thanks for having me.
John Bommarito: Good to have you from so far away. What made you move to Bali?
Ben Makinen: It's one of the most bizarre stories I could never have anticipated. But I'll give you the short version. About five years ago, an old friend of mine contacted me. I was living in Denver, Colorado at the time as he was as well. He was involved with a gamelan on which, ironically enough, is a Balinese orchestra, if you will. He called me and asked me if I would fly with him and his band to Bali to document their performances across the island. So, he wanted me to come and make a film of them, and I said yes. And it was a short, relatively short, a two week gig out here. And the long story is, I flew out. I landed at midnight. I got a few hours' sleep. Someone picked me up in a van and took me to the middle of the island. And when the door opened, I heard this woman laughing. And I just… the sound of her laughter. It made me so happy that when I saw her. Long story short, I fell in love. And I said, “Ben, I'm here to do a job. This is just…that's just..that is not happening. So, stay focused. Keep your batteries charged in your and your film gear running and do your job.” But I fell in love with this woman. And before I left ten days later, I asked her to marry me. Because I knew in my mind, I just knew I would never be back to Bali. I didn't even know where it was before I left there. So, I knew that if I went back to the States, I'd never see her again and I couldn't live with myself feeling like there was this much potential. So, I asked her to marry me. I get back to the States and of course, without going into any Hollywood tabloid details, the reality is that I got her pregnant. And so, after I asked her to marry me, a few weeks later, we find out she's pregnant. So that fast tracks me getting back there to marry her.
John Bommarito: Yeah, well, that's beautiful.
Ben Makinen: Well, and then it was just absolutely bizarre because this led into, I think one of the reasons you're having me on the show, which is my first film, Jazz Town. Well, COVID hit. My son was due to be born actually on my birthday, which is March 14th. I plan to arrive in Bali a week prior to help set things up. I'd come and I had visited a couple of times, went through a traditional Balinese Hindu wedding ceremony, but then arrived a week early for the birth of my son. But when my flight got canceled because the pandemic, the COVID started to break out of China, as they were saying at the time. So that I was flying out of Chinese airlines. My flight got canceled. I rebooked it for a day earlier, and I ended up landing in Bali. And three hours later, my wife, her water broke. We were rushing to the hospital. Actually, she was driving, which is insane, through some of the most insane traffic, going through her labor pains. And my son was born three hours after I landed.
John Bommarito: Wow.
Ben Makinen: The pandemic hits and I'm locked down in Bali, you know. Boom! And that's when it began. And that, in a weird way, is the birth of Jazz Town, too. Because I had just begun to edit the footage I’d shot in Denver for what would become my first feature length film, which was an ode to my music mentors I grew up with in Denver. And that's chapter one of how I got to Bali. Then I had the film on my hard drives, and I had a camera and like a pair of pants and sandals, and then those were stolen from me, everything except my hard drives. So, all of my gear was stolen and the only thing that survived was this film on my hard drives. Then we had an earthquake. There was a landslide, there was a flood. The water came in through the roof and took out everything on my desk and in the room, again, except for the hard drives.
John Bommarito: Wow.
Ben Makinen: So, this film survived some crazy stuff for sure. And as all the musicians lost their gigs, myself included, I was a full-time drummer up until that point. You know, I had some private students, but I was playing drums and doing gigs, and the pandemic took everyone's gigs away. So, I'm here in Bali with my hard drive with everything I shot. And I realize this is my calling to get this film done because I had been working on it for years, tracking down my old musical mentors. Great musicians who had performed with people like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. There were people in Denver who had been touring and performing and recording with these greats. For whatever reason, they ended up getting off the road, landing in Denver, raising their families and still playing. And I realized that if I didn't get their stories down, a lot of them would end up in the dustbin of history. Of jazz history. They'd be a footnote at best. And these are people that lived these incredible lives making beautiful music. You know, they were local heroes, But I wanted to tell them, “Thank you” first of all. I knew that if they would commit to an interview, it would be my chance to go personally back to them and say, thanks for inviting me on stage and giving me my start. And then I captured their story. And that's the film Jazz Town, which is now on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. And there's an edited version, a PG family safe version of this jazz story on Rocky Mountain PBS. For anyone that can access their website.
John Bommarito: Was music your first love and how did you become interested in filmmaking?
Ben Makinen: Wow, great. Two questions. Music is my first love. I have some bizarre sensation memories of sound that I'm assuming come from the womb, from an awareness in the womb. I mean, you know, when you get into memory and this, it's all… it's deep. People could fabricate memories to fit an emotional need or whatever. But the point is, is I, I feel like I got a sense of sound and rhythm awareness in my mother's womb. She tells me that by the time when I was two years old, I was watching a kid's show. Maybe it was Sesame Street or The Electric Company. And the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji came on and I was watching him and just turned over my Lincoln Logs toy canister and started to imitate him drumming. From that moment on, it was drums. Drums, drums, drums. In fact, I think when after my parents separated, I think my mom sent me to live with my father because every morning while she was still sleeping, I'd wake up and start drumming on the kitchen table.
John Bommarito: That makes sense. Get the loud kid out of here. You take the loud kid, I take the….
Ben Makinen: Yeah! I love my mom. She was great. But I think I drove her nuts. Whereas my dad later, in high school, when I was in his basement practicing drums all day long, on the weekends, he would take his nap on the couch upstairs where I was drumming. And if I stopped drumming maybe to come upstairs and get some food, he'd snap awake and go, What's the matter? Why did you stop?
John Bommarito: Wow. Interesting.
Ben Makinen: As long as I was drumming, he would be relaxed. And so, what's interesting, John, is … so clearly the music for me began quite young. My dad, he was born and raised in Detroit. And my father went to Cass Tech High School where people like Donald Byrd went. He was, I believe, he was in school when Donald Byrd was there. My dad was a huge jazz fan. His father, my grandfather, played trombone, more of a classical Sousa march guy. But my grandfather sang in the Finnish choir there in Taylor, Michigan, and played trombone. My father actually saw the John Coltrane Quartet play live, I think it was 1963 in upstate New York, Syracuse. He took my mom at that time. They had just married. So, my dad was a huge jazz fan. And so, I had access to those kind of records at his house. He had everything from Benny Goodman and Count Basie up through probably those early 60s John Coltrane records. Then my mom, when I would spend time with her at her house, she had kind of the next wave. The 70s. She had some of the early Herbie Hancock fusion, if you will, the Headhunters stuff. She had Isaac Hayes, and she loved her Beethoven. So, I got this kind of mixed….
John Bommarito: Nice cross section of music there.
Ben Makinen: Then my big brother, my older brother was way into the West Coast funk. You know, Earth, Wind and Fire, Average White Band or Ohio Players. And he was the one that got us hip to like Weather Report and Santana. So, there was this great mixture of stuff going on for me and it was pretty obvious to me that this was the music that really moved me. Everywhere you went, you know, in the 70s and 80s, of course there's an FM radio playing and I never gravitated to any of that music. It didn't appeal to me. And it's funny because now when I hear those songs, those classic great FM radio songs from the 70s, it puts me in this really kind of surprisingly nostalgic space because they were almost equally a soundtrack or a background to my childhood. And it was music that, by the time I was in high school, I consciously avoided. You know, there was a period where I was a jazz snob full on in high school. It was John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy. And if it wasn't that, then it was not cool,
John Bommarito: Right
Ben Makinen: It's kind of funny. My friends in high school…I had a lot of drummer friends. Being a drummer, I was in the marching band and all the other drummers were rock and rollers. So, on the weekends they would drag me down to go to the movies to watch “The Song Remains the Same. ” They got me hip to Led Zeppelin and The Doors and sneaking beer into the movie theaters, you know, when we were 16 or whatever. They helped balance my musical equation back.
John Bommarito: Well, even as a jazz drummer or a jazz fan, you have to appreciate John Bonham. I mean, come on.
Ben Makinen: You know, before I even really knew his name, I could hear Elvin Jones. I was like, Whoa. That's the first thing that struck me about him was the way he filled triplets between his feet and hands. I instantly thought of Elvin Jones.
John Bommarito: Interesting, I never made that connection.
Ben Makinen: Yeah, it's really intriguing. It's very intriguing. And you know what? I just met a guy. Well, “met.” I did a podcast with an English drummer who knows one of the recording engineers from back then who actually told him that Bonham met Elvin Jones at Ronnie Scott's. And John Bonham was actually nervous to meet Elvin Jones because he was a huge fan of Elvin Jones drumming, apparently.
John Bommarito: Nice! Very good.
Ben Makinen: Yeah. Yeah.
John Bommarito: You're listening to The Song Break on 891 WEMU. Ben Makinen, filmmaker, is my guest today on the program. Ben, congratulations on Jazz Time being an award-winning documentary. And I know, perhaps, you were inspired by Ken Burns, his jazz documentary that he did. Did that inspire you in any way that you wanted to show a different side of that same story? Did you see that? I suppose you probably did.
Ben Makinen: The first answer is no. You know, I have a lot of respect for Ken Burns, but that's a good guess. But actually, the inspiration came mostly from Art Taylor's book, Notes and Tones. And as many of your listeners will know, Art Taylor was a great jazz drummer. I can't remember when he published this book. It might have been in the late 60s, but Art Taylor went around to all of his peers. People like John Coltrane and Miles Davis and basically asked them, "What is jazz?" I remember reading this book. I might have been 20 years old, something around that time. I was flabbergasted to learn that all of my heroes, all of these great jazz musicians who, in my mind, existed on the same plane. I mean, they were literally on the same recordings together, had sometimes vastly different ideas of and opinions about jazz and about culture and community. So that always stuck with me. How can the creators, like the co-creators of this music, think and feel so differently? In other words, not be in agreement about what is jazz? One of the things I wanted to do, having grown up in or got my start playing jazz really in Denver in this one community, was ask all of my mentors what jazz was to them. Fully expecting a similar vast array of answers that I thought would be interesting to get. So, that was my main inspiration. I had read a lot of jazz biographies, and I tried to absorb as many jazz films as I could. You know, back then we didn't have Internet, you know, back then.
John Bommarito: In my day sonny…
Ben Makinen: Yeah. The Ken Burns thing is interesting. That's a whole other thing. I'm kind of fascinated by the controversy that his jazz series in particular stirred up. You know, as I'm sure you're aware, a lot of jazz aficionados and fans were pretty disappointed at the limited coverage or the exclusion of a number of great jazz musicians, especially given that, what, is that series like 19 hours?
John Bommarito: It's a long one. There’s a lot of footage. I mean, there's so much more you could do covering any kind of subject like that, but it was well done for what it was, for sure.
Ben Makinen: Absolutely. I look at those things, you know, when jazz purists get into things like, you know, as you're as well aware, people will say Glenn Miller wasn't jazz or Maynard Ferguson wasn't jazz, or Weather Report wasn't really. You know. Well, to me, what's important is that that's legitimate music that affects people deeply in the moment whenever they discover it. Whether it was in the time, in the 30s when Glenn Miller was playing or whether it was in the 70s and 80s. A lot of that music…I use myself as an example. As a teenager, well, even younger as a 13-year-old, let's say. I wasn't really ready to sit down and listen to Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, but you put on a Maynard Ferguson album, and I got really pumped. So, they're like back doors. They're like placeholders. Not that anything's better or that you have to get into John Coltrane or whatnot. So, this is the same with Ken Burns. These, whatever the criticisms are, it exposes a lot of people. It gets a lot of people excited about something that they can dig in deeper if they want to. And that's what makes all of those things, I think, great. Not that they even need to be called legitimate, but it does legitimize anything that gets someone hooked and interested to explore any deeper is worth it, regardless of any criticism I think you can come up with. So yeah. Ken Burns, with the help of Wynton. Wynton, I think, was either an executive producer on that or he was pretty closely involved.
John Bommarito: He was involved. Yeah.
Ben Makinen: I mean, that stuff is great. It's funny you bring that up because I recently have been going down the rabbit hole of some of the old, the really old, jazz musicians that we have on record. I mean, Jelly Roll Morton, Willie “The Lion” Smith. Some of that early ragtime, boogie woogie, barrelhouse piano stuff.
John Bommarito: 20’s and 30’s stuff.
Ben Makinen: Yeah. I go back to that, and I just find there's so much depth. There's a lot of deep stuff going on with musicians that tend to get easily written off as like “those old Dixieland guys”, you know, that was cheesy stuff. Well, maybe some, but that's where some of the heaviest stuff happened, too. And Ken Burns touches on some of those people. Even like the early Duke Ellington stuff, that's mind boggling. Duke was way ahead compositionally in a lot of regards.
John Bommarito: Sure. Well, your movie Jazz Town explores all kinds of jazz. You’ve got vocal, you’ve got noisy Avant-garde, you’ve got traditional, but… you've got a new film coming out, Echoes of Tradition, which seems to look at the intersection of Native American culture with African American. Right around the birth of jazz, Right. That's what the focus of that movie is?
Ben Makinen: Yes, absolutely. It’s the Native American influence at the birth of jazz. It's the multicultural intersections with the African American diaspora. But the film is very modern. It's contemporary. It's entertaining because we're talking with modern contemporary musicians who are living and playing now. By editing this film together, I found a parallel, kind of a subplot that I snuck in there. Which is kind of the censored histories of women and Native Americans. This film looks at those two in particular. You can use the terms Native American and women also to sort of encompass a lot of underrepresented people. If you look specifically at New Orleans in the late 1800s, there is a massive infusion of world cultures, really. Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, the Creole, of course, the Spanish, you know, in addition to the obviously preexisting Native Americans that were that were here first. Obviously. It's really fascinating to consider this multitude of influences that were simmering all throughout the Southeast in particular. New Orleans is pretty much the hub that experts tend to agree would be the focal point or the flash point, given that it was one of the largest shipping ports in the Western Hemisphere. Echoes of Tradition pretty much focuses on the idea that the rhythms of swing, shuffle, if you will…cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha…is an ancient part of Native American cultural music via the Stomp dance. And the Stomp Dance is a form of dance where the women.. in this case, if we look at the Muscogee tribe, the women would wear percussion shakers on their calves. Tortoiseshells or maybe later cans filled with pebbles. When you do that and you take a simple dance step, if you walk, you're going to create a shuffle rhythm. Cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha. The men would sing. The women would play the percussion. It's just one example we find in this film of a preexisting swing rhythm. We meet Delbert Anderson, who's a Diné trumpet player. Diné is what the Navajo people would call themselves. He has done a lot of research speaking to his elders, who reminded him that a lot of their drumming was based on the heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Which again, is like a jazz rhythm. There is no one singular jazz rhythm. But the movie explores the idea that a lot of these rhythms and a lot of the attributes we put on jazz. The swing, the blues notes, the scoop, the vocal scooping, the growls, the call and response, the flatted thirds and fifths. You know, the people might call it a blues scale or a minor pentatonic scale. These things are found in Native American musical traditions as well as African. So the movie examines the idea that there's a high likelihood that the Jazz comes from… is a co-production, if you will. A meeting of more cultural influences than the mainstream narrative generally identifies. And by talking to Native Americans, we end up talking to women, African-American women, educators. We discover some professors who have done a lot of work with the digital storing of oral histories, the digital analysis, I should say, of oral histories collected, and that all kind of tie in to illuminating a larger picture of the birth of jazz.
John Bommarito: Pretty fascinating. I never really made that connection, and it's nice that you did, and I don't think anybody else has, as far as I know, a film anywhere close to this.
Ben Makinen: John let me tell you, one of the reasons it's fascinating to me, this is something I haven't really been able to speak to or admit to people yet, but I was a professional drummer for 40 years before I started finding some of these things out. And it was flabbergasting to me because, as I said, I've been to school, I had jazz mentors, I studied at the university level, I've read the books. You know, I thought I knew a lot about my professional field that I spent decades in. And another major eye opener for me, inspiration for these for the movies that came after Jazz Town, was Judy Chaikin's film Girls in the Band. She made this…I think this came out in 2014 I think It was funny. I walked down to the movie theater to catch what I thought was going to be a Miles Davis matinee, and the movie theater had been taken over by a local film group that I that I had never heard of. And they were playing Judy Chaikin's movie. The Girls in the Band is all about the all-girl bands as they were known in the 1940s. There were hundreds of them all girl bands, big bands, you know, women playing drums and bass and trombone, doing everything and just kicking butt touring across the country while the men were off fighting in Europe and the Pacific, you know, during World War II. It's fascinating. I walked out of this movie absolutely mind boggled that I had never heard of these women. And again, I said to myself, how is it that I could have spent a lifetime in a profession and never heard of this stuff? So when I got into researching the Native American stuff, a similar thing started happening to me and I started finding out more and more things that…why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't these stories being told, You know, like the Creole. The influence of the Creole musicians in New Orleans, who are a combination of many cultures. You know, we could get into that. That's a big deal. And the Caribbean influences! It's mind boggling. So, the basic premise is that many indigenous people around the world had some elements of what we like to ascribe to jazz, but which have traditionally been just called African. And when you start to think about the way people walk. The gate of bipedal animals, humans, it's going to become a shuffle. Almost everybody’s heartbeat has a swing to it. Almost all indigenous folkloric music traditions have some kind of non-tempered scale singing for pretty obvious reasons. You know, we didn't have tempered tune pianos more than 600 years ago and whatnot. So we start looking around the world and you see a lot of these similar elements there. What's very intriguing is why jazz came into existence in America when these other elements are in other places in the world. There was something very unique about America, and perhaps even more so about the southeastern states of America during that period. There was a confluence of just the right things. It's really interesting. It's fascinating. And here I am. I'm 57 years old now. I've been playing drums, you know, professionally for over 40 years. And it's like the lid has been popped on this whole new thing, which is really interesting. And I've been finding there are people out there who have stumbled across this. They're like obscure Ph.D. research people. They discover something, they write a paper, and then it ends up on the desk of an archivist, so to speak. So, I've been able to find some of these things and I'll be referencing all these people and their work. There are some people who have been down this path before me. But, Echoes of Tradition, what's exciting to me is I've just submitted it to film festivals. They haven't run their course yet, but I got an offer for national distribution on this film to the public broadcast television stations across America. I just need to find underwriters for it now. So I'm in the process of doing that. While editing the next film, which is Women in Jazz and the obstacles women face in a male dominated industry.
John Bommarito: I noticed that because you sent me a screener for Echoes of Tradition, it seemed like you could have been filming them at the same time because you were interviewing a lot of women in jazz for Echoes of Tradition. If I didn't know there was another film coming out, I would have said, “Wow, he could do a whole other film on just women.” And there it was So...
Ben Makinen: John, you're very perceptive because actually that's exactly what happened. I actually began filming the Women in Jazz first. The story behind that is basically what I said about Judy Chaikin's film. I was shooting Jazz Town when I saw her film, which got me just asking the women in Jazz Town, the female jazz musicians I interviewed for Jazz Town. I started to ask them more about their perspective as women in this business, in a life of professional music. And I realized I had too much that I realized that all of their responses to that couldn't fit in the scope of one movie. So, I put that in the back of my mind. A few years later, I got an opportunity to start filming interviews for Women in Jazz. I'm calling the film We Are Here: Women in Jazz. I met the Manhattan Transfer, Ingrid Jensen, Veronica Swift, India Owens, Andromeda Turre, Steve Turre’s daughter. She's an amazing musician as well. And you're right. What happened is while interviewing these women, they would often give me another recommendation. They'd say, Ben, have you heard of so-and-so? And I'd say, no. And they say, I'm going to send her an email. You should talk to her as well. And so, by word of mouth, I met some other musicians. A few of them happened to be Native American, as was one of the men, Delbert Anderson. I met Delbert Anderson. I met Julia Keefe, who runs the Indigenous Big Band. That got me to thinking. That sparked a few things. And, of course, I went home and started researching some of the things they said. Some ideas that had been planted in my mind over the years. My father had actually worked with Native American nations here and over in the U.S. and I got exposed to some tribal community events when I was young. All of this got triggered. I started investigating, and then the news broke that the headliners were announced for the last Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival at the John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The concert was in May, but when the announcement for the headliners was made, it turned out that I had already interviewed three of the Mary Lou Williams headliners. If you counted their sidemen, five of the people I interviewed for the Women in Jazz were going to be at this Mary Lou Williams concert. And a big portion of that was dedicated to Julia Keefe and her Indigenous Big Band. Now she's a vocalist out of Spokane. She grew up on a Coeur d’Alene tribe's reservation in Idaho. She spent time there. And her big thing is she's taking her inspiration out of the jazz singer Mildred Bailey. Mildred Bailey, who got her start with Paul Whiteman back in 1929 on a radio show. She's part Native American. She's from the same nation as Julia Keefe, the Coeur d’Alene. So Julia Keefe got booked at the Kennedy Center. I had already interviewed her and focusing mostly on her experiences as a woman in jazz and through the music conservatory. She went to the Manhattan School of Music. I believe that's where she got her masters. And I realized I had a whole other film worth of Native American material that would tie in with the Kennedy Center, Mary Lou Williams Festival. So, you're quite right. All of these people had been interviewed. But again, I was facing a situation where I had way more material than I could possibly fit in one movie. So, I had women and men speaking about Native American things, and I also had women and men speaking to the balance of masculine and feminine energy onstage. What I thought, this is back in January, I thought, well, I can whip out a one hour film focused on these Kennedy Center headliners. What's interesting, there were four headliners, and I had interviewed three of them Julie Keefe, Ingrid Jensen and the bassist India Owens. India Owens is a Grammy winning bass player who is the House bass player on The Stephen Colbert Show. And she also leads her own band. This last year, she's been tearing it up. I think she was at the Detroit Jazz Festival. I might be mixing that up. No. India Owens is from Detroit. I know that much. She's a Detroit native and she's tearin’ it up, taking her music around the world. Well, the fourth headliner was Diana Krall. I quickly sent an email out to her management trying to interview her so I could have all four in my movie. They passed, but I had the three headliners and a few of their sidemen and side women. So, I quickly whipped up a film featuring them. I sent it to the Kennedy Center, but it really wasn't a completed film. It was a desperate Hail Mary sketch, like, Hey, I've got your folks here in a movie. Maybe we can tie it in. And they looked at and said, Yeah, why don't you finish your film?
John Bommarito: It’s close!
Ben Makinen: Yeah, exactly. That's what they said. They said it's close. Send it when you’ve got it finished. And now I have it finished and I'm about to hit the send button back to them. And they said if you've got something good, well, we'll program it at next year's Mary Lou Williams Festival. And it just so happens that while speaking to these women and men about women in jazz, Mary Lou Williams comes up quite often. She was a piano player who got her start with Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, that old big band. Well, she was a beast. She was arranging songs for other bands, like, for Benny Goodman. All these other people would call her for her arrangements. She was touring as the pianist with Andy Kirk's band. When the gig was over, she'd be in the car on the bus, writing out charts with a flashlight to sell to these other famous big bands. So, it's some amazing stuff. And then, of course, she famously had house parties in the 40s where people like Dizzy Gillespie would come over. Jack Teagarden. People were studying with her. She had some advanced European harmonies and arranging techniques that she had done pretty well. Well, she gets mentioned a lot in Echoes of Tradition because of her significant role as a woman who had a huge influence on the trajectory of the beboppers of Parker and Gillespie and Monk, but who is often overlooke. Her role is downplayed a little bit in the history of jazz. But speaking about Mary Williams offers a good portal into the role other women played. And even though they weren't necessarily drummers in the 1920s or the women weren't necessarily allowed or encouraged to play masculine gendered instruments like bass and drums and tuba and trombone. There were women there in very powerful and significant roles as singers and piano players, as arrangers, who were helping to shape jazz. As I said, Judy Chaikins movie makes it clear that pretty soon after, by the 1930s, women were playing all of the instruments in the big band. They just don't get talked about much. Once the guys came back from war. It was time to send the women back into the kitchens and let the men have their jobs back. And in essence.
John Bommarito: That doesn't fly in 2024. Sorry.
Ben Makinen: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That wouldn't, no. Well, and there's no need for that. That's what's amazing about these women today. We've got Ingrid Jensen, Tanya Darby, Andromeda Turre. I spoke with The Manhattan Transfer about being women on tour who had their children and were actually able to raise... both the women and men in Manhattan Transfer, Janis and Cheryl had their children basically on the road and were able to raise them. Of course, they had help, you know, and they were in a financial position. You know, their husbands supported them, and they were making enough money to afford the additional help. That's something that basically couldn't happen in the 30s and 40s. So, we live in a day and age where there are a lot of women kicking some serious butt musically, and going home and still raising their family. Ingrid Jensen. She has children and she's the current Dean of Jazz Arts at the Manhattan School of Music, as well as touring like crazy with a bunch of different groups, including her own band, Artemis.
John Bommarito: My guest today on The Song Break, Ben Makinen, the filmmaker and jazz drummer living in Bali. I'm sure we could talk another hour or two, maybe. I have questions, but I think we should just wrap it up. I’m wondering if you have any idea when either of these two forthcoming films We are Here: Women in jazz or Echoes of Tradition might be available for fans of jazz to be able to view.
Ben Makinen: First of all, I got to say thank you, John, for letting me just talk so unhinged. I really appreciate that.
John Bommarito: Sure.
Ben Makinen: As I said, Jazz Town, my first film, is available right now on Apple TV and a bunch of other streaming platforms, Amazon Prime. An edited version exists on the Rocky Mountain PBS website. There's a short film that we didn't talk about that looks at the brutal economics of jazz. It's called Who Killed Jazz. I just put that up for free on my YouTube channel @Bmakinfilm. If you just Google Search Who killed Jazz? Ben Makinen on YouTube you'll find it and you can watch it for free. And if you do that it'd be great if you maybe consider subscribing to my channel. And there's also a digital tip jar that helps immensely to post these things. The two new films, Echoes of Tradition is completed. I'm in negotiation right now with a distributor who would like to put it on nationally on PBS. If that were to happen, it wouldn't be probably until April of 2025, next spring, basically. I'm still trying to line up underwriters for that and we're negotiating a contract. But that would probably be the soonest Echoes of Tradition would be available. And I promise you, We are Here: Women and Jazz is coming. It's in post-production. I've got it all shot. I just have to edit it. I've been doing these films all by myself, so I'm trying to negotiate contracts and deals for one film and then put on my editor’s hat and cut this next film.
John Bommarito: Well, let me compliment you on your skill level that you’ve achieved because I watched Jazz Town and then I watched Echoes of Tradition. And I can tell you I saw the difference in your skill level at doing what you're doing.
Ben Makinen: Thank you, John. I learned a lot on that first film for sure. Yeah, that means a lot. I appreciate that. Thank you.
John Bommarito: You're welcome.
Ben Makinen: John, if I may really quick, I wanted to give a big shout out to my Michigan family. They they're from Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo to Manistee. The Roberts. The Makinen’s. I love you guys.
John Bommarito: Well, Ben, thank you so much for your time today and for filling us in on all of this upcoming and very interesting information about your films. It was great meeting you virtually and chatting with you on The song Break today.
Ben Makinen: John, I can't thank you enough for having me. Thank you again.
John Bommarito: You're very welcome. Let me know when that finally is available to be seen publicly, and I'll share that with the listeners.
Ben Makinen: You got it. I appreciate it. Thank you.
RESOURCES:
WEBSITE (Links to films):
https://www.benmakinen.com
IG:
https://www.instagram.com/ben.makinen
FB:
https://www.facebook.com/ben.makinen.90
LI:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmakinen
YT:
https://www.youtube.com/benmakinen
TWITTER X:
https://x.com/BmakinMusic
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