This is the official website of Chuck Dodson’s documentary film about Walter Norris. The film is now in the final stages of editing and is expected to be released in 2008. Please take a look around the site and send an email via the Contact page if you have any questions or comments. Thanks for dropping by.

Walter Norris is a musician most known inside the jazz world. He played piano with many of the all-time great stars of the jazz era. However the interesting thing about Mr. Norris is the evolution of his work. Not content to be a leading jazz pianist, he continued to push the boundaries of piano-playing, blurring the lines between jazz and classical music, joining the ideas of Bach, Mozart and Chopin to those of Louie Armstrong, Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, building on the past to make a music that is very much of the present, even of the future. Chuck Dodson’s film about Walter Norris seeks to demonstrate the greatness of this unique artist who, as many leading critics have said, is in the process of making a historical contribution to the art of music.

A contemporary of Michelangelo’s wrote that when the great artist was about seventy years old he could still chisel off more marble in fifteen minutes than three young stone carvers could in three or four hours. He also noted that he worked furiously and impetuously, yet with incredible precision. That’s exactly how Walter Norris plays the piano.

I was with him in Europe recently when he played a duo concert with a popular young pianist from one of the major cities. Though Norris was probably forty years older, he generated so much energy that it caused the younger man to look tired. After the concert, instead of being exhausted, Walter took us to a restaurant where he ate heartily, then walked for blocks back to his hotel where he stayed up in the lobby until 4 o’clock in the morning drinking champagne and discussing deep things. Then, as he was heading to the elevator to go to his room, he entertained us with his wild ‘electric man’ dance.

Another point about the age thing — it occurred to me after I got to know Walter’s work that most all the great jazz pianists who performed in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and are still alive today, play pretty much the same way now as they did then, decades ago. But Walter has continued to evolve, and he’s still evolving. What he does now is new, is a far cry from his earlier work, and is infused with a passion and vitality that, I think, can only come from giving oneself to such a lifelong evolutionary process. This, in my mind, sets him apart from most of the other great musicians of his generation.

In today’s world most performing artists peak early. They become successful at a young age then try to hold on to their fame and fortune as they get older. Walter’s life has taken the opposite course. Today, at 73, he’s playing better than ever, composing better than ever, and his ideas have been distilled into a keen philosophy of life (he talks as freely about forgiveness as he does about the effects of gravity on time or about what it means to play the blues).

This film is necessary and important because the world needs (desperately) to see a life like this. We need to be reminded that this type of achievement is possible, and that it’s an extraordinary thing when it happens. Only when a human being devotes so many hours for so many years in a single-minded, uninterrupted quest to fulfill a vision they have inside themselves can art of this kind be created. Walter Norris has done this.

Chuck Dodson