Oscar Brown Jr. died last year at age 78, having lived a full and fascinating life. His chief claim to fame was as a jazz lyricist -- he wrote ``Strong Man" for Abbey Lincoln, and put words to such well-known jazz instrumentals as Miles Davis's ``All Blues," Mongo Santamaria's ``Afro Blue," and Nat Adderley's ``Work Song" -- but Brown also made marks as a singer, poet, playwright, actor, television host, and social activist. He unsuccessfully ran for public office in his native Chicago, wrote musicals that starred Muhammad Ali (``Buck White" ) and the Blackstone Rangers street gang (``Opportunity, Please Knock" ), and performed his cleverly rhymed, often politically charged lyrics in a style -- as much spoken and acted as sung -- that some consider a precursor to rap.
Documentary puts fascinating figure back in focus
For all that, Brown died not particularly well-known. So it's a pleasure to see director Donnie L. Betts come along with the well-wrought documentary ``Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr." to give Brown his due.
Betts breaks Brown's life into three acts. The first opens with a clean-shaven, youngish Brown singing ``Work Song" on ``The Ed Sullivan Show" morphing into the white-bearded, middle-aged Brown doing likewise on some more anonymous stage, then cuts back and takes us through Brown's youth in the Bronzeville section of Chicago and his early jobs as a radio actor and union organizer. Act II shows him hitting full stride as a musician, moving from cranking out songs and plays while supposedly working in his father's real-estate office to selling his first album to Columbia Records (``Sin & Soul" ), chasing financing for his first would-be Broadway musical (``Kicks & Co." ), and collaborating on (and quarreling over) Max Roach's ``Freedom Now Suite."
Act III takes as its starting point Brown's declaration that ``a long time ago, I made a choice -- I said you could either operate for money or for people," and gives a sense of how his civil- rights advocacy may have prevented his achieving the wealth and renown he seemed headed for in the early 1960s. The poet Amiri Baraka, one of several admirers popping up to comment on Brown (others include Lincoln, Studs Terkel, an d the late Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett), suggests that Brown could have been the black Neil Simon were it not for his politics.
The farm's worth of marijuana that Brown jokes of smoking over the years may have slowed his career's advance, too. One of the film's many strengths is that it shows Brown's shortcomings and losses without flinching. We hear of his first two marriages going awry, and one of the most affecting segments concerns the 1996 death of Oscar Brown III, who as a little boy had inspired Brown's charmingly childish lyrics to the Bobby Timmons tune ``Dat Dere."
The film's greatest strengths are Brown and the access Betts had to him via archival footage and six years of interviews. There's no better way to appreciate Brown's humanity and humor than to watch the man in action.
Bill Beuttler can be reach ed at bill@billbeuttler.com.