Independents’ Day for ‘Played in the U.S.A.’ : Cable: The 13-part series, part of a Learning Channel project, uses autonomous producers to capture the individuality of artists and their music.

As an animated Charlie Parker begins to blow his horn, the screen fills with images, from train engines to Woody Woodpecker, which are torn asunder and sent dancing by Parker’s sax torrents. A porcine man fills sausage casings at a dizzying speed as polka music reels in the background. In a rural shack, an old man accompanies a blues song by scraping a broom along the wood floor--and the camera moves in to show his hands varying their touch on the handle as if he were a violin virtuoso.

These are a few of the images encapsulated in “Played in the U.S.A,” a 13-part series that made its debut Sunday on the Learning Channel, carried by several Orange County cable services. It is the 11th series in the Independents project, a combined effort of the Learning Channel and the American Community Service Network. Last year the Independents presented “Ordinary People,” winner of cable television’s ACE award for best documentary series.

“Played in the U.S.A.” effectively boasts two levels of independence. The musician subjects are all either fiercely individual performers or practitioners of musical styles far outside the pop mainstream. Among them are vocal stylist Eartha Kitt, Lakota Sioux drummer-dancer Ben Black Bear Sr., Latin music progenitor Machito and experimental musician Lou Harrison, performing with Indonesian Gamelan musicians.

And all of the artists in the series are viewed through the lenses and perceptions of independent film or video producers. From D. A. Pennebaker’s tense, kinetic documentary of the cast album recording of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”--which opened the series Sunday--to C-Hundred Film Corp.’s elegiac video for R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion,” their styles of capturing the artists and their music are nearly as individual as the music itself.

Presenting independent views of equally unfettered artists was a central idea of the series, said Stevenson J. Palfi, who co-produced “Played in the U.S.A.” with Blaine Dunlap. Both are independent producers themselves.

Speaking by phone from his New Orleans offices, Palfi said: “Our standard from the outset was that we wanted to have the best series on American music, with the best independent video and film on American music, and the greatest variety of music to show the great diversity of this country. It had to be not only great music, but great TV, so that if the audience isn’t always familiar with the musicians, I think the original ways they’re presented--the superb independent treatments of music and music culture--are what’s going to keep their attention. I think the work is that engaging.”

If Palfi sounds assured about the quality of the program, that follows a year and half of work in which he and Dunlap selected the series’ 34 pieces from more than 550 contenders they viewed.

Typically the Learning Channel finds material for its series through open solicitations, advertising in trade publications and sending notices to producers and filmmakers on an extensive mailing list. Palfi and Dunlap augmented that with what Palfi called “active curating,” traveling to several cities across the country to view film archives and consulting with documentarians and musicologists.

While Palfi praises PBS’s music specials and performance programs such as “Austin City Limits,” he feels that “there never really had been a series on the great variety of American music that wasn’t a performance-only series. We wanted things that went beneath the surface, that had great independent producers treatments on video and film of music and musical culture within the culture of great musicians, the neighborhood and lifestyles of those musicians.”

Some obvious candidates for the series were rejected because they were too obvious. “We didn’t want to use anything that had been widely seen in the last five years, because people might tune the series out if they’d seen some of it before,” he said. Among the works rejected for that reason was Palfi’s own critically praised “Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together,” a documentary on the great New Orleans pianists Professor Longhair, Tuts Washington and Allen Toussaint.

Then there was the problem of choosing among Les Blank’s many respected documentaries, which have included classic portraits of bluesmen Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lispcomb and zydeco king Clifton Chenier.

Palfi said: “It was very difficult with Les, because obviously there should just be a 13-part Les Blank series. Since that’s not what we’re doing, we had to decide which would be best for the series. The one we chose, his ‘In Heaven There Is No Beer?’ was one of the documentaries I told the Learning Channel about when I was trying to convince them the series was a good idea. Not only is it about polka music, which there aren’t really any other documentaries about, but more importantly it captures the culture that polka is a part of. It’s an unusual part of America, and it’s pervasive, all over the country.”

The series also includes a short, poetic fiction by Blank of bluesman Hopkins as a young boy. There are several examples of inventive animation, from George Griffin’s ludic visualization of Charlie Parker’s music to crystalline computer graphics illustrating a Phillip Glass work. There are documentaries ranging from an unflinching portrait of be-bop saxophonist Art Pepper to an often uproarious look at country banjo pioneer Uncle Dave Macon by Dunlap.

The series includes three world premieres, “All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story,” “Mary Lou Williams: Music on My Mind” and Palfi’s “Papa John Creach: Setting the Record Straight.” Pennebaker’s “Company: Original Cast Album” hasn’t been shown nationally in 20 years and required five months of wrangling to clear the rights to use it.

“Don’t Look Back,” Pennebaker’s film of Bob Dylan’s 1965 British tour, may be a pinnacle of music documentary works, but it wasn’t considered, Palfi said, because all parties thought it would be impossible to edit the film to fit “Played in the U.S.A.’s” hour format and keep its integrity. Several of the films in the series were edited to shorter lengths, but, as independent producers themselves, Palfi said he and Dunlap always made sure the filmmakers had the chance to do the edits.

Including their own projects in the series might raise some question of their objectivity, but Palfi said the Learning Channel had stipulated it wanted their works when they first took on the series.

Palfi, 39, didn’t arrive at doing music documentaries by a direct route. A love of music began in childhood, when his earliest memories include listening constantly to records of Harry Belafonte calypso and Adlai Stevenson speeches. “I listened to Stevenson because my parents named me after him. I’m not sure his speeches were especially musical, though there was a cadence to them.”

He began using video as a teaching aid while student teaching as a philosophy major in college. Next he found himself teaching documentary production, which he wasn’t entirely comfortable with, as he’d never actually made a documentary himself. Hence, he got a camera, caught a ride with a friend to New Orleans’ Mardi Gras during spring break and found his place in life.

If nothing else, a degree in philosophy taught him enough to move permanently to New Orleans. While heading a project there to teach the educationally disadvantaged to use video as an educational tool he took in the Crescent City’s rich music. His first music documentary, “This Cat Can Play Anything,” was a portrait of Preservation Hall banjoist Manny Sayles.

He met onetime Jefferson Airplane violinist Creach in 1978 while doing the documentary on Sayles; the two musicians had been partners decades earlier.

“I knew Papa John just the way everyone else did, as this acid rocker violinist who got up and blew people away onstage,” Palfi said. “Then here was Papa John with Manny Sayles running the gamut of musical styles, and Papa John was just unbelievably good. I started thinking about what a tragedy it was that this guy had probably mastered more styles of music than anybody else alive, who has this absolutely unique sound, and he really isn’t being exposed. So I started thinking then of doing the documentary on him.”

Palfi describes himself as a slow, meticulous worker, and it has taken over a decade from the Creach documentary’s inception to its debut in the series. It captures the violinist, now 74, playing in a wide variety of settings, with everyone from the late R & B saxman Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson to Windham Hill pianist George Winston.

“That’s one reason why the Learning Channel really wanted the Papa John documentary,” Palfi said, “it really is a metaphor for the whole ‘Played in the U.S.A.’ series because in one program it has this tremendous diversity of music and musicians.”

That diversity is something Palfi feels is an essential part of America, one that is only recently being rediscovered.

“We’ve lost touch with that diverse heritage. Music is still the universal language, and America has so many unique musical accents that tell us about ourselves and our culture. But you don’t hear them in the popular music, which all sounds the same.

“But if you look at the CD reissue revolution, of an incredibly rich range of music, that’s been tremendously successful. At the same time cable television is forcing commercial television to change. I was on a plane once with the president of CBS, who at the time was saying that cable would in no way affect the future of broadcast television. I argued that people would want cable’s tremendous diversity of programming, not commercial television that’s all bland and predictable.

“Having the choice has opened people’s eyes and ears to a heterogeneous way of looking at the world. I think people are sick now of uniformity, and we’re hoping programs like ‘Played in the U.S.A.’ help show audiences how much more there is out there.”