McGlynn, Don (Producer/Director). Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan [DVD]. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, Inc. (9333 Oso Avenue, Chatsworth, CA 91311, Phone: 818-407-9100, Fax: 818-407-9151; http://www.image-entertainment.com, http://www.dvdinformation.com. 2002, 58 minutes, $19.99 purchase. No captions.

König, Sabine (Director), Ryninks Films /IKON Television (Producer). The Blind Orchestra (Film). Hilversum, Netherlands: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Media Park, Sumatralaan 45, Hilversum, Netherlands, Phone: ++31-35-677 34 34, Fax: ++31-35-677 33 07, http://www.npbsales.com, Kaisa Kriek Kaisa.Kriek@omroep.nl, 2002, 50 minutes, $500 licensure (at last price quotation), single showing. In Arabic, with Dutch or English subtitles.

Reviewed by Alex Lubet, University of Minnesota

For teachers of disability, one challenge is able-bodied students' discomfort with the topic. The arts can be a user-friendly window into this challenging subject. While literature, theatre, film, dance and visual arts are often taught in disability studies, music remains an outlier. This is unfortunate. Students are often passionate about music and there is a wealth of material. The difficulty of teaching disability through music–its opaque narrative content–is ameliorated by emphasizing the musicians, rather than repertoire.

Several music/disability films are well known. Many are object lessons in how not to treat disability. Foremost of these is Shine (1996), a powerful, well-produced, Oscar-winning biopic that is, however, dishonest and cruel. While I find such films useful, they should be used only by instructors conversant in the often-manipulative language of cinema. Fortunately, there are alternatives to disability-negative films, among them two excellent music documentaries that practically teach themselves.

Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan interweaves an album's worth of Parlan's gorgeous jazz pianism with biography. Parlan, celebrated for collaborations with such legends as Charles Mingus and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, is a polio survivor. Jazz aficionados often know this, though it seems not many realize how significantly impaired his right hand is (An African-American expatriate living in Denmark, Parlan tours little. Few Americans have seen him play.) Parlan uses only two, essentially immobile right hand fingers, as if they were xylophone mallets.

Listening, I doubt anyone notices Parlan's impairment. It is difficult, perhaps even logically fallacious, to hear what one doesn't play. What Parlan does play is marvelous and enviable, emphasizing perhaps the ablest left hand in the business, often leaping from basslines and chords up to melody, adding harmonies with his right hand. This melody-in-the-middle texture Parlan favors is unique and clearly born of his impairment. An able-bodied pianist with a great left hand could play this way, but it has apparently never occurred to one to do so. Parlan has thus transformed his disability into a gift.

The narrative element of Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan combines the words of the artist, his wife, and friends with historical footage. Parlan says just enough about his impairment, its impact on his socialization, education and career, to contextualize it appropriately into his full and rewarding life. No supercrip, he acknowledges a life enriched by support, encouragement, family, friends and a truly extraordinary piano teacher.

My one concern in this film is that Parlan never discusses ableism in jazz. While jazz is more accepting of impairment than some other musical genres, particularly classical music, technical virtuosity is among its defining elements. If Parlan has indeed never endured professional prejudice because of his impairment, that is marvelous. But it would have been reassuring had he made that explicit.

The Blind Orchestra is, like Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan, naturalistic, told mostly by its subjects and directorially unobtrusive. It portrays a Western-style symphony comprised entirely of women, mostly Muslim, at Cairo's Al-Nour wal Amal, an all-female school, residence, and workplace for the blind.

That this ensemble is transgressive and liberatory cannot be overemphasized. Western classical music is arguably the most disability-hostile of all genres, nowhere more than in the symphony orchestra, where–apparently, everywhere but Al-Nour wal Amal—the use of print notation and a conductor make exclusion of blind musicians virtually automatic.

Under a (sighted male) director who coaches rehearsals rather than conducting performances, the women learn their parts from Braille music notation and perform from memory. They have toured extensively in Egypt and Europe. Some players are quite remarkable. The obvious challenge to a blind orchestra, the lack of a conductor, is no problem. They listen intently and, after all, unique among symphonies, they know their parts by heart. They play as well as or better than many sighted community and school orchestras.

In addition to violating classical music protocols, the other multivalent cultural transgression of this orchestra is that they give Western music concerts in Egypt. Both Western culture and music of all kinds are regarded with suspicion, sometimes even outright condemnation, in the Arab, Islamic world. Further objections derive when women—particularly blind women—participate in public life, especially as entertainers.

While life at Al-Nour wal Amal is less than ideal, it provides these women with otherwise unimaginable options. Some are grateful that their blindness has placed them in an institution that provides opportunities unavailable even to sighted women. Others lament the near impossibility, as blind Egyptian women, of marriage and children. One, a bassoonist, likely the orchestra's finest and most dedicated player, regrets that her impairment will almost certainly deny her the opportunity ever to play in a professional (sighted) ensemble. The multiplicity of perspectives among these women is one of the film's great strengths.

One irony is how the orchestra, among the most authoritarian and conservative cultural institutions in Western culture, becomes liberatory and feminist in an Arab Islamic context. The symphony enables women with disabilities to concertize and tour–to live in public–transgressing social protocols. The compromise of performing Western classics in modest Islamic garb, which the women appear to embrace–they are only radically transgressive in ways they deem desirable or necessary–must seem as cognitively dissonant to Egyptians, in its peculiar multiculturalism, as it does to Westerners.

My reservations regarding The Blind Orchestra are few: a moment of heavy direction, even including a special effect, and its Dutch or English-captioned Arabic. While sighted viewers typically prefer captions to dubbing, it will sadly diminish the film's appreciation for those blind audience members who might otherwise enjoy it most. For showings of The Blind Orchestra in the US, an Audio Description option would be most welcome (There are no plans for single-copy sales.) Along with Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan and several others, a small library of disability-positive films about music is becoming an excellent tool for teaching disability studies.