The Gig

"The Gig" is a tight, funny and poignant little movie about a group of friends that have gathered together on a regular basis to play Dixieland for fun. The group unexpectedly lands a real paying job, in musician's parlance; a "gig".

They travel to upstate NY for a two week gig at a summer resort minus one member, who bows out due to contracting cancer. At the last minute, they hire a professional to take his place. Things get sticky as an over-the-hill Frankie Valli type attempts a comeback at the resort and tries to utilize the group as his band.

The attitude the professional bass player gave the guys rang true. By signing up to play the two-week gig, they were taking bread out of the mouths of someone who needed the job to feed his or her family. While Pop, Rock, Rap, Country and Western, and R&B stars make money off of albums. Jazz musicians have to travel abroad to make a living. Almost nobody gets rich. The guys living their dream also cost others a needed income.

I believe that almost everyone who can play a musical instrument with some proficiency dreams about playing a paying "gig" one time or another, Woody Allen and Kevin Bacon are two popular examples of this amateur-to-professional crossover. I especially recommend this movie to anyone who has ever played music professionally. My mom, who was a musician, LOVED it.

This is an enjoyable movie. Its very realistic to the "wonderful world of music" I've been there and done that. It shows a human element in each character and the realism that nobody is perfect. These amateur musicians weren't all that bad players. Cleavon Little's character, Marshall Tucker, was played very well. Marshall was no saint himself. Here he was getting paid to do a job and he's giving these guys a hard time about everything in the van on the way up there. You don't bite the hands that feed you. I do find it hard to believe that a player with the jazz experience he has, claims he does not know any of the dixieland tunes. He has a tremendous sense of predicting chord changes to tunes he does not know. Not common, but not unheard of either. He delivers a true and harsh message at the end of the movie when he tells the clarinet player, "its not a religion, devotion is not enough." On that level, he is correct, although I think the clarinet player could have handled the job. He was practicing his butt off and vocal accompaniment music is not that hard to read. Very enjoyable movie.

This film is so difficult to find (I watched a complete upload on YouTube) that it seems foolish to review. As a long time lover of jazz and having been around jazz musicians for most of my life at clubs in NYC like the Five Spot and even places like Trumpets in my hometown of Montclair, this movie rings true on so many levels. Is it a great film? No. It is clearly made on a shoestring and with only a couple of names --Wayne Rogers and Cleavon Little. But the supporting cats are good too, many good character faces from old TV shows. What I think is most insightful, is the writing and how it captures these characters, their love for jazz and their naivete about what it takes to be a pro.

The dialogue is smart and funny. The film drags in a few places when some of the smaller characters are given too much story time but it never slows down to the point of disinterest. The writer knew how to write musicians -- jazz musicians especially, because they are an interesting bunch. I have to say one thing about my man, Cleavon Little. Cleavon left us with some beautiful work and he left us too soon. His performance here deserves attention because he played his character with such a distinct point of view. He and Wayne Rogers carried the film. Another scene, which I felt revealed the quality of the writing was the scene when Wayne Rogers gets knocked out by the wannabe Sinatra guy. A lesser film would have had him fighting back and being all macho. But instead, true to his character, who was not a tough guy, he took it like he had to. That scene must have happened in real life because it could not be made up, it had such a ring of truth. Find this film, and watch it.

This little film brings back a lot of memories, both fond and foul, of what can and does happen when one is a working musician. The not so pleasant accommodations for the band, the management of the venue jumping up and down telling you what to play, the sheer ecstasy of the applause.............. Far from being farcical it is, in fact, very accurate in the way it depicts musicians, professional and otherwise, who have travelled a great distance to perform a season of gigs at a venue. There are those times when everything goes perfectly, there are those other times when you immediately start to miss your partner and wonder what the hell you are doing this far from home. In the end you have to make the best of it because there is no other way out.

This film gave me probably the most pleasant surprise of any I've ever seen. It was not a big-budget production and its premise, middle-age amateur jazz musicians get an unexpected professional engagement at a Catskills-like resort, seems rather modest. What's not modest is the film's success. This is a little slice-of-life movie that is most entertaining throughout. Director Frank D. Gilroy also wrote the script and it's full of interesting subplots and unexpected twists.

The actors are journeymen who do a solid job. The biggest revelation to me was Cleavon Little. He plays a professional musician who is hired to fill in for an ailing band member. His attitude immediately clashes with the others. While they see it as an opportunity for big fun and a once in a lifetime thing, he sees it as his job and not a particularly interesting one. This leads to conflict but when the group gets in trouble, he steers them through. Little, who died too young, really showed me he was a fine actor with this film.

This movie is a true sleeper, the kind that a film fan always hopes to discover. I recommend it wholeheartedly.