We're at the Detroit Film Theatre here inside of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

This is where the 11th annual Freep Film Festival is gonna kick off on April 10th.

The festival is produced by the Detroit Free Press and more than 20 feature-length documentaries and dozens of short films will have screenings over the course of five days at various locations in the city and suburbs.

One of the documentaries making its world premiere is "The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit".

It tells the story of Detroit's innovative and influential jazz musicians.

Here's a clip from the film, followed by my conversation with the documentary's co-producer and writer, Mark Stryker.

- It's about the meaning of music and jazz and the power of music and jazz, because a lot of times our formal education in school, we're focused mostly on notes, but we never really examined, like, the emotional aspects of music, the social aspects of music.

One, two.

(gentle instrumental music) Let's do it.

(gentle instrumental music) In Detroit, you are instilled with this idea that that is a part of your mission to mentor other folks from the time you first play, start playing.

It is like the "each one, teach one" philosophy is instilled in you by the time you're 15 years old.

How I choose folks to be mentored is sometimes I see the potential that this person can be a leader.

So I wanna mentor folks that are gonna mentor folks.

- Mark, welcome to "American Black Journal".

- Thanks.

It's great pleasure to be here.

- Yeah, it's really great to have you here.

You have been working on this material now, I think, for five or six, maybe almost 10 years.

Is that right?

- Well, you know, the book "Jazz from Detroit" came out in 2019.

I was 56 years old when the book came out, and I, like, people would ask, "How long did it take you to write the book?"

And I'd like to say, "Well, 56 years."

- Yeah, that's right.

All 56.

- But you know, once the book was out there, you know, a year later, right before the world shutdown in March of 2020, I went to Urbana, Illinois to give a couple of talks about my book, and I went to school at the University of Illinois.

So there were a lot of old friends there.

I was at dinner one night with some of them and one of them said, you know, "Have you ever thought about making a documentary out of your book?"

And I said, "No, but that's a really great idea."

And she said, "Well, look, I have these friends.

They're in New York.

They're filmmakers, and that's what they do."

And so she connected us and Daniel Loewenthal, Roberta Friedman, they are New York-based filmmakers, and they have deep experience in the documentary world and in the commercial world.

Dan is the director and the editor of the film.

And he's edited 20, 35, 40 Hollywood features.

And he's directed, the last film that he and Roberta did together, it's called the "Power To Heal: Medicare And The Civil Rights Revolution" that ran all over the country on PBS.

And Roberta is a producer and a filmmaker.

And she worked on "Star Wars", the original "Star Wars".

So, you know, deep experience.

They love Detroit.

They both love jazz.

And we started talking, and four years later, here we are.

- Here we are.

Right.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, so, I mean, the book, of course, focuses on the special role I think that Detroit plays the history of jazz.

Talk about how that gets enhanced through a documentary rather than a book.

- Well, it's actually been amazing to watch the sort of transformation of some of this material into a new form and to learn, because I don't know anything about, didn't know anything about filmmaking.

Now I do.

Seeing how that material can transform and really deepen and become a much richer experience in many ways for an audience.

So for instance, in the book, it's organized by these biographical chapters that highlight the contributions of these defining jazz musicians from Detroit.

And, you know, you can't tell everybody's story in a documentary film.

And so what has happened in the film is that Detroit itself has become a much richer and deeper character.

And we have embedded the history of jazz from Detroit and the stories of these great musicians within the rise and fall, and hopefully rise again, of Detroit's economic, social, cultural trajectory as an industrial power and the trials and triumphs of the African American community in Detroit.

So that material, which exists in some fashion in my book, kind of throughout, is really foregrounded in the documentary film.

And so we do tell the story of many important Detroit jazz musicians.

We follow them from Detroit to New York, and we see them influencing the rest of the world, can't tell the history of jazz without also telling the history of jazz from Detroit.

That's a big part of the film.

But also the story of Detroit and the conditions here that created this explosion of jazz in the middle of the 20th century and then sustained it all for the last 50, 60 years.

We keep producing great jazz musicians here, punching way above our weight class.

And so what I like to say, and I think what the film does very well is it shows you that what happened in Detroit was not an accident.

It was the result of particular social conditions, a particular community, and a variety of things and particular people and all of that sort of comes together.

- Yeah.

In some ways it's not terribly surprising because, I mean, this is a community that in terms of creation and creative energy, we have it in lots of different places, right.

I mean, so why not jazz is almost the right question.

- Yes.

And the answer to the question of when you go deeper and you say, "Well, why Detroit?"

You know, that's a story that starts with the Great Migration.

It brings, you know, hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the north to Detroit in the first half of the 20th century.

And it's the story of, you know, jazz is an expression of African American culture, right.

It's a music of improvisation, of adapting one's life to ever-shifting conditions, that is the African American experience.

And you see that play out, I think in our film, you know, the Great Migration brings all of these folks to the north, they're attracted by the auto industry, which is offering some of the best wages in the country for African Americans.

It builds a Black working in middle class.

In Detroit, that economic vitality creates the neighborhood of Paradise Valley, which is the economic and business center of Black Detroit in the middle of the 20th century.

All those clubs, hotels, bars, opportunities for musicians, and lay on top of that things like the Detroit public schools.

Some of the best music programs in the country, particularly at places like Cass Tech.

Cass was integrated.

So Black kids got the same opportunities there.

It's no surprise that Donald Byrd and Paul Chambers and Ron Carter, and many, many others, all came out of Cass Tech in the 1950s.

And much later, Geri Allen comes out of Cass Tech.

So you lay all that together and then you lay on top of that mentorship, which is a huge theme in our film.

And in the 1950s, Barry Harris, a great pianist, is the sort of professor of bebop, and he's training everybody that comes outta here.

And he sort of builds the DNA of mentorship into Detroit jazz.

That baton gets picked up generations later by Marcus Belgrave, a trumpet player.

And today that baton is being carried by the bassist, Rodney Whitaker, sort of the mentor in chief.

We followed those three stories through the film.

So all of these overlapping, interconnected conditions are very powerful set of conditions that don't exist in other places.

So you go, why Detroit?

Well, that's why.

- That's why, yeah.

And you can feel it still.

I mean, I went to see Herbie Hancock recently who was playing with Terence Blanchard.

And the atmosphere in the theater was even Herbie acknowledged like he was coming home.

It was as if he was a Detroiter.

And he kept referencing that the whole time.

And I kept thinking, you know, you wouldn't necessarily see that every place else, or not in the same way.

- No, you would not.

I mean, listening to Detroit is very powerful in an audience like that, because jazz is still a social music in Detroit.

And it's still a vital part of African American culture in Detroit.

And we still have a large African American population that comes out and hears the music.

And when you're playing for an audience in Detroit, you know, you're playing with people that went to high school with Geri Allen or Bob Hurst.

Or, you know, their parents went to school with Milt Jackson's family, or Tommy Flanagan's family, or they heard those guys coming up in Detroit.

So it's special.

The Detroit audience, you know, in the film, a couple of people say this, Dan says it that, you know, Detroit audiences, you can't Detroit audiences, right?

'Cause we know, we've been there.

We've seen it.

We've heard it.

So people know when they come to Detroit, they really gotta bring it.

And you can feel that.

Terrence, I should say too, Terence Blanchard is in the film.

He's one of three sort of big name jazz musicians from outside of Detroit that act as sort of commentators.

Pat Metheny is in the film.

Terrance Blanchard is in the film.

Christian McBride is in the film, all sort of paying homage to these great Detroiters that have come from here and influenced the course of jazz history.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So the film is done and gonna premiere at the film festival.

Is there more for this material in your future?

You've got a book and a movie.

- A book and a movie.

You know, it's clear to me that the cultural soul of Detroit and the cultural soul in particularly of Black Detroit has become a life's work for me.

I mean, I grew up as a jazz musician.

I grew up idolizing Detroiters like Hank, Thad, and Elvin Jones and Joe Henderson, the saxophone player, and Paul Chambers.

These were all my heroes growing up.

Charles McPherson, who's great in the film.

And I've lived with their legacy for a long time.

And I'm hoping that, I don't know what's next in terms of this material for me, but I can't imagine leaving it behind for too long before returning to it in some way.

It's a rich legacy to mine.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Alright, well congratulations on the film.

We will see at April 13th at the DFT.