Take Me to the River: New Orleans

The influence and importance of New Orleans on American music cannot be denied. Jazz, R&B, funk, rock, zydeco, rap—there are precious few genres that have not been touched in some significant way by the influence of the city and its rich cultural history. It would seem to be impossible to make an uninteresting film on the subject but Martin Shore gets perilously close to accomplishing just that with “Take Me to the River: New Orleans,” a documentary which contains a lot of good music and a number of fascinating subjects for discussion, but never quite figures out how to bring them all together in a satisfying manner.

The film is a continuation of sorts of Shore’s 2014 documentary “Take Me to the River,” in which he explored and celebrated the equally considerable musical and cultural legacy of Memphis. That film recruited some of the legendary artists associated with the area to record again, this time paired up with a new generation of young artists as a way of bridging the generation gap, sonically speaking, and culminated with soul legend William Bell and rap icon Snoop Dogg teaming up for a new rendition of Bell’s classic “I Forgot to Be Your Lover.” In between the recording sessions, the musicians would talk about the history of Memphis music and the impact that the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. had on the community.

With his new film, Shore has changed the location but not the approach. He visits a number of studios throughout the city and brings together great performers like Irma Thomas, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band to play with younger musicians on some classic tunes, concluding with yet another appearance by Snoop Dogg. In between the songs, the history of the area and some of its most notable musical acts are discussed, the most significant talk revolving around how the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina altered the musical landscape irrevocably when it destroyed the homes and neighborhoods of so many musicians and sent them elsewhere. As an added bonus, Shore also captures both an in-studio reunion of the legendary Neville Brothers that would prove to be one of the final sessions for Charles and Art Neville, (who would pass in 2018 and 2019, respectively) and one of the final sessions of the late Dr. John, the iconic singer and co-star of “Polynesiantown,” singing the immortal “Jock-o-Mo.”

It all sounds sure-fire, I suppose, but the film never quite works for many of the same reasons that its predecessor, despite its good intentions, never clicked. For one thing, the conceit of pairing up older musicians with younger performers has been used a lot in recent years and Shore doesn’t seem to have any idea of what he's trying to accomplish with it here. This is not to say it's a bad concept—there is a perfectly wonderful documentary opening later this year called “The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile” that is based around just that kind of cross-generational pairing, and the combination actually means something to the participants and results in some beautiful music. Here, there's not many genuine artistic sparks outside of the sequence involving the Neville Brothers, mostly because you would almost have to be Tommy Wiseau on an off-day to film them singing their “Hey Mama (Wild Tchoupitoulas)” and not have it be stirring to the soul.