Music

...In a demanding and hostile tone Willie Mae's son asks, in essence, why she thinks she, a woman, had the right to play minister, i.e...

...The whole story is seen vi~ flashback at a naval inquisition held, not to try the mutineers, but to determine if and how Bligh had failed...

...ROBIN H. BIDGOOD (Robin H. Bidgood is a free-lance writer...

...The material, in short, is historically valuable, chronologically accurate, and dramatically inert...

...It is also powerfully acted, with Mel Gibson as mutineer Fletcher Christian and Anthony Hopkins as the troubled, driven, all-too-human Bligh...

...I had the same feeling I did throughout the concert in the cathedral...

...By questioning the traditional romantic view of the mutiny, and refusing to treat an authority figure as an easy scapegoat, The Bounty reflects doubts about our antiestablishmentarian sensibility, about the assumption that all power corrupts, and about our culture's proclivity to anarchy...

...Nevertheless, The Bounty, at best, is a mixed success...

...Like ingredients in a _9 witches' brew, they have been mixed again and again and then poured into different molds: small-town Pennsylvania, small-town Massachusetts, middle-class marriage, the roving life of an author, Africa...

...Though aided by the presence of Laurence Olivier and James Fox as skeptical British officers, the trial begins slowly...

...Moreover, their supernatural powers call into question, in a playful way, the role of spiritual energy in the modern world...

...Maybe...

...White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad...

...Vulnerability, in other words, is vulnerability...

...In fact, the sexually active trio of witches are all artists of a sort: Alexandra is a sculptress, Jane is a musician, and Sukie is a writer...

...I was in the front row and I remember that evening very vividly: I remember the sacredness of the cathedral, its vastness and silence...

...He left a name synonymous with martinet, which Charles Laughton's memorable 1935 portrayal translated into sadist...

...These defects are unfortunate, since the issue the film raises is morally significant...

...a man's job...

...What can...

...They have not radically altered in the past twenty-two years, through twenty-eight books...

...I went, full of expectation, and in many ways I wasn't disappointed...

...His sailors, after Polynesia, didn't agree, and dumped him into an open boat...

...Alexandra, for her part, whose former husband rests"on a high kitchen shelf in a jar, reduced to multi-colored dust, the cap screwed on tight," can create thunderstorms...

...She doesn't say much, actually.., but that doesn't stop her from singing...

...Nice at all costs...

...There was no applause afterwards...

...Books: OH, WHAT THE HEX I I N a memoir written in 1962, entitled~ Tile WITCHE| OF EASTWICK "The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood," John t Updike told how his three great boyhood fascinations were sex, religion, and art...

...John Updike Knopt', $15.95, 307 pp...

...The medium is implicitly sensational, and everything else -- drama, structure, pacing -- must cohere perfectly to create effective ambiguity...

...What are the chances that we, the audience take when we choose, or allow, ourselves to listen...

...They put us on the spot and make us feel as if we are the ones performing...

...And I remember the singer's voice filling the space in that immense vaulted chamber the way the light of a candle fills a darkened room...

...times civilization pales when compared to the delights of nature, and film versions of The Mutiny on The Bounty have asked a different question: how could Captain Bligh keep them calm on the deck after they'd seen Tahiti...

...They are the trinity of his dubious faith, the elusive grail of his erudite and mercilessly detailed quests...

...Great art can often be made from raw material like Bligh's combination of decency and dementia, but The Bounty blunts its power by a static dramatic method...

...Her concerts, when she taps into that primordial, unfathomable energy are not just concerts, they're rites of passage...

...A few days later at a workshop a theologian asked us to reflect on what our earliest images were of what it was to be a "good man" or a "good woman...

...Yet one glorious, magical song did emerge...

...The Bounty doesn't...

...So, like Willie Mae Smith, she often deals with an almost unbridled power whose origin and outcome are largely unknown...

...Around the time of the cathedral concert a documentary film about Gospel music called Say Amen, Somebody was released in New York...

...Susan Osborn, at her best, demands this vulnerability of both her audience and herself...

...Worse, the flashback from the trial leads to Bligh's history previous to the main action -- his plans, his family life, his recruitment of staff, including Christian...

...It is spectacularly shot, especially in the open sea sequences, which still retain the look associated with the original director, David Lean...

...In spite, or perhaps because, of its challenging nature, Gospel is revitalizing and healing...

...And while this music is entertaining I would by no means call it nice, and certainly not non-threatening...

...These women are the movers and shakers of the soul and they stop at nothing (or rather the spirit within stops at nothing), until the psychic residual, both in themselves and their audience, is cleared away...

...Nevertheless, it is hard to make a movie without heroes and villains -- hard, but not impossible...

...She shrugs and gives him a blank look...

...But only rarely when listening to Susan Osborn...

...Sukie, who can turn milk into cream, has"permanized" Commonweal: 340...

...Susan Osborm was herself in attendance, and at one point she said: "You know, my image of a good woman was someone who was nice all the time, at all costs...

...Jane, a cellist, can fly through the air...

...There is a definite backlash that they must contend with as a result of their "calling...

...It focused primarily on the lives of the black women who helped create and nurture this unique art form: the Barret Sisters, Zella Jackson Price, and Willie Mae Ford Smith...

...And yet the men in this film, the lovers and sons and brothers of these women, are clearly intimidated by their music and their power...

...Suddenly it struck me: those songs, those identical folk tunes she sings are " n i c e , " nonthreatening, both for Susan and her audience...

...I June 1984:339 I pondered over this: the seeming disparity between the chant and the other more or less identical folk/pop songs...

...Susan Osborn put her guitar down, closed her eyes, and proceeded to intone a melody she had written for a Hopi Indian chant while on a raft trip down the Colorado River...

...I left in a trance-like state, but vaguely putting this concert in the same mental category as a Mary Lou Williams gig two years before and an Arthur Rubinstein concert three years earlier...

...However, it also beckons that which might more easily have been left untouched and unquestioned...

...Months later, I found out that Susan Osborn would be doing a concert on the West Coast in conjunction with a conference I was planning to attend...

...Music SOUL SHAKERS SONGS BOTH HAPPY & SAD "White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing t h e m . . . " James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time W HEN James Baldwin wrote those lines he wasn't referring to Susan Osborn...

...But in The Bounty we get to know Bligh as a human being, gentle in his own way, though ambitious, to be sure...

...As lead vocalist in the Paul Winter Consort she has appeared in numerous concerts and made her album debut on the widely acclaimed" Common Ground" LP...

...The words, and the raw unaccompanied melody of that chant are still reverberating in my brain...

...As the early scenes show, Bligh was a loving father, a kindly friend to Christian, and an exceptional sailor battling the aristocratic prejudices of the admiralty...

...we learn, but yawn...

...Susan Osborn, like the women in SayAmen, Somebody, is a healer...

...I first heard her at New York's Cathedral of St...

...Something had.been revealed to me, deeply personal in the singer, and, in turn, within me...

...Just silence...

...P h i l l i p Cor'win His new novel, about three witches and the intrusion of a mysterious, wealthy stranger from New York City into their small Rhode Island town, maintains Updike's three perennial concerns...

...What are the chances that she takes, or a Gospel singer takes, when they sing and totally open themselves to this power...

...After that number the evening continued as it had started, with another five or six folk songs - - nice, pleasant, entertaining, But/they did not embody the kind of archetypal essence I heard in the cathedral, or in the Indian Chant...

...her former husband hangs in the cellar of her ranch house "among the dried herbs and simples and was occasionally sprinkled, a pinch at a time, into a philtre, for piquancy...

...And the ability to truly listen (and a performer "listens" just as much if not more than her audience), this receptiveness to the New is not too different from an openness in our beings that often results in pain and ultimately wounds...

...But why...

...Worst of all, although the trial eventually makes for some effective counterpoint with the sea voyage and mutiny, references to it are dropped at a critical juncture, just when it seemed the film had found its rhythm...

...The church scenes are filled with teary, emotionally charged parishioners (not to mention the people in the movie theater...

...They are challenging...

...The chant, and the cathedral pieces, on the other hand, go far beyond mere entertainment...

...Listening to this music, this high-powered pulling out of all the stops, this no-holds-barred Gospel music, empties and invigorates you in a way that other art forms rarely achieve...

...she say...

...This music sets every cell, every fiber and molecule of your being on fire...

...His Tahitian breadfruit expedition -- as Hopkins laughingly terms it, a "grocery trip" -- promised glory if he could circumnavigate via the treacherous Horn...

...John the Divine...

...it hastens from you all that is vital, alive, and burgeoning...

...So, for Willie Mae, as for the other women in the film, being a professional Gospel singer is not all glamour and limelight and ecstatic Sunday morning ritual...

...Instead of stock melodrama, and stereotypical politics, The Bounty provides an image of two tragically divided points of view, to both of which, alas, life makes perfect sense, it is refreshing to see such a treatment of conflict, where black and white hats are replaced by vulne];able human beings, their foibles, their passions, the pressures of events, and mainly the limits of their understanding...

...It seems to me that faith, the essence within that enables us to listen, to hear not only music but Life, involves both angst and joy...

...I also remember that I sat there with the tears running down my face not knowing quite why they were coming, or caring, had I known, how to stop them...

...To its credit, the newest recounting of the mutiny, simply called The Bounty, asks a different question: who exactly was Captain Bligh...

...Halfway through the film it becomes apparent that these women are not just singers, they are healers, shamans, and ministers...

...A film can be uncertain in its verdicts, but it better be clear about its uncertainties, define them quickly, and pursue them relentlessly...

...However, most of the songs that evening just did not hit me in the solar plexus as the ones did months before in the cathedral...

...At best, The Bounty feels like life...

...But The Bounty does not turn neoconservative: while Bligh isn't wrong, Christian isn't either...

...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...