“Did you notice we put some swing in that one?” asks Horace Tapsott’s mother, Mary Lou Malone (played by musician Nia Andrews), in a flashback.^[1] Horace and his mother are sitting at a piano. She is guiding him, preparing him to become the musician that he is. She is a vital presence that is not necessarily visible in the record but definitional to its existence. She asks him, “You know what swing is?” A difficult-to-describe answer--language ultimately fails to capture what makes something “straight” versus “swing.” She replays the song, hitting the notes as if straight on--punctuated, clear, singular. She plays it again, the sound is changed: there are infinitesimal pauses, holds, and glides. The solid block of a piano key somehow bends from one edge of a note to another while always remaining as the note. It is as if the note suspends--held aloft--and yet is also in an arcing movement away from that suspension. It is a kind of feeling--pure sensation that one can hear, that one can feel in the keys, that one can imagine, but rarely explain in a way that allows easy replication. You have to find swing. You have to feel it to know it, and in knowing it, can find it again. My own words are vague, gestural attempts at capturing what I hear in Keeping Time’s sound and Nia Andrews's musical improvisations in the scene. But swing is not meant to be captured--it swings away, onto the next bend of a note and unpredictable rest. Swing is the improvisational--an experiment upon the already present form that is not singular and repeatable for it is always made in relation to what is on the page, what others are performing, and what one feels in the room and the spirit.

Keeping Time’s director, Darol Olu Kae, described these scenes with Tapscott and his mother as “found footage.”^[2] Like all of the film, these scenes are nebulously situated between reality and fiction. Despite the film being shot like a documentary, with all the members of the real Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (The Ark) playing themselves and with actual archival footage and sound recordings of Tapscott and The Ark, the film is scripted. But then that script is improvised upon by the band, Kae, and the people who live in the neighborhood, and there are also moments where Kae’s camera captures conversations that are not for the film but instead are the band interacting and preparing for the gigs and practices they have amidst the filming. What holds as “real” and “created” is left suspended and yet always inflecting the shots that surround them. The film constantly moves in purposefully unclear ways between documentation and creation. 

In these flashback scenes with Tapscott and his mother, we can read them as generic documentary reenactments, but are they reenactments of known events or imagined ones? And what does it mean to mark them as “reenactments”? It implies they are restagings of reality but it also means they are an acting performance, and thus, even if connected to a “real event” they are removed from being “evidence,” from being “truth” in and of themselves. While the footage at the piano is not archival in the traditional or definitional sense; for Kae, these scenes produce the record. They are a record. We know that Mary Lou Malone was a musician. We know that Tapscott was taught, in part, by his mother.  We know that music was foundational to Tapscott’s life because of his mother. We know that when the family moved to Los Angeles before going to their new home, they dropped Tapscott off at his music teacher’s home to begin working. We know that Tapscott, as with so many jazz musicians, credited his mother with his knowledge, skill, and drive. What we don’t know is the evidentiary, archival specificity of Malone’s contributions to Tapscott’s training. We don’t know if this scene occurred, but that matters little. To name them as “found footage” is to enter them into the record. To intrude what we know into what is historical “evidence.” That is, following Saidaya Hartman, to fabulate.

Keeping Time’s archive is a swinging one. Like the jazz notes, they point to the page but are not bound to it. The film rejects solidity--that is, playing it straight--in favor of fluidity, bending, and sliding. No footage is “real” or “imagined,” but instead, it is all an improvisation on the charts, on what is on the page, on what is in the record. Keeping Time is after the feeling of The Ark, of the ensemble, of Mekala, of Horace. It is not a documentary or a fiction but a performance. It doesn’t teach you how to swing but lets you feel the archival swing of The Ark, and to feel it means we can begin finding our swing, our improvisation, our ensemble.