TV Review : ‘Red Hot + Cool’ Blends Jazz and Hip-Hop on PBS

It’s no longer such a novelty, but the ongoing merger of jazz and hip-hop continues to offer dynamic alchemy in tonight’s PBS special “Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool,” which includes, among other things, six genre-bridging matchups between rappers and boppers filmed live at the Supper Club in New York.

Digable Planets, meet Joe Sample; Me’Shell NdegeOcello, get funky with Joshua Redman; Last Poets, let Pharoah Sanders’ people blow; etc.

But the hour itself is a hybrid too: part galvanizing concert special, part sober AIDS-awareness edutainment documentary. Between the two, don’t expect any chat about the music itself--beyond the Pharcyde’s opening comment that “Jazz brings to hip-hop a spiritual plane.” Both the music and discussion are urgently plague-centered.

In this intense focus, the special--airing in tandem with a just-released GRP album featuring different performances--differs from the previous four benefit projects put together by the Red Hot Organization (the Cole Porter tribute “Red Hot + Blue,” “Red Hot + Dance,” “No Alternative” and the recent “Red Hot + Country”). Here, nearly all the lyrics are in-your-face AIDS-themed, which is appropriate given a medium that’s more message than massage, although the shortage of lyrical levity undoubtedly narrows what could’ve had mass appeal.

The best non-musical segments involve average HIV-positive folks of color commenting on their predicaments in bits that are brief but poignant. Less engaging are the moments when a couple of the young hip-hoppers resort to the ever-popular conspiracy theory to explain away what’s too horrible to explain: “They don’t want to cure the disease,” says a member of Digable Planets, “they made it.” He also offers the rather arguable theory that African Americans have been reluctant to use condoms because condoms are manufactured by the government. Huh?

It’s up to black author and historian Cornel West to offer some token balance to the Planets’ otherwise uncontested rambling. Lack of equilibrium and unsupported agitprop aside, the sense of exigency in disproportionately afflicted minority communities does ring through as intended.

And the performances, although sometimes crude (including a tasteless slap by the Last Poets at Diana Ross), have been excitingly filmed, thanks largely to music-video-vet photographer Kevin Kerslake. The kinetic but not hyperkinetic camera work and editing put you right on stage and also, almost, on that other plane the Pharcyde talks about.

* “Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool” airs at 11 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.