Bruce Springsteen took part in a two-hour jam session during a surprise appearance at a film festival in his home state of New Jersey.
Longtime E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt and veteran Jersey shore rocker Southside Johnny were among those who played with Springsteen at the Asbury Park Music and Film Festival on Friday. Also taking part were some former E Street Band members and the Lakehouse Jr. Pros, a band featuring child musicians.
The concert followed the premiere of a documentary film chronicling the history of the Asbury Park music scene. The show featured several rock and R&B staples including Chuck Berry's "Bye, Bye Johnny." Jimi Hendrix' "Voodoo Child" and Little Richard's "Lucille."
Springsteen said it was "great" to see the "old guys still cranking it out."
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More
