Film-maker Brian cross specialises in bringing together the greats of skools old and new. He tells Jim Carroll about his new documentary about the music that results when LA jazzmen jam with hip-hop Djs and Brazilian drummers

SOME gigs can change your life. Limerick lad Brian Cross went to see Public Enemy in McGonagles and Schoolly D in the SFX back in the 1980s and loved everything he heard. But Cross also heard something else. And he's still hearing it as the journey which first took him from Limerick to Los Angeles continues apace.

Today, Cross is best known as B+, one of hip-hop's leading photographers. He's written a fascinating book on West Coast hip-hop (It's Not About a Salary), but his photos are louder than words. That's his work on the cover of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing and he's snapped the likes of Mos Def, Easy E, Jurassic 5, Money Mark, David Axelrod and hundreds more for magazines, record sleeves and what have you. Photos led to videos and, perhaps inevitably, video led to film.

Keepintime is Cross's fascinating, enthralling documentary of what happened when a couple of old-school jazz drummers hooked up with some DJs and turntablists. The drummers were the cream of the cream. Earl Palmer, Paul Humphrey and James Gadson worked with the likes of John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, Fats Domino and countless others. They may have been a little unsure about what was going on when they hooked up with Cut Chemist, Babu and J-Rocc, but they had beats in common and a conversation soon began.

"There are many, many reasons why these different musicians should be talking to each other," says Cross. "It begs the question why some independent film-maker is making this happen and not every other piece of music television that you have ever seen."

But Cross knows that music television is, strangely enough, rarely about the music anymore. "Music television is an advertising conduit for the music industry. Once you get into music as a subject for documentary, it becomes just another subject. It was much more radical before music television came along, and it's now very difficult to get funding for the projects I'm talking about. Sadly, we're so swamped by the commercial products that we have forgotten what is fundamentally interesting about the relationship between film and music."

To Cross, the jazz shows which the BBC ran back in the 1960s still rule. "They'd have Art Blakey and his band playing a set and four cameras in studio capturing it. It's so simple and yet so beautiful."

The Keepintime story, however, didn't just end with that documentary. After screening it at the Red Bull DJ Academy in London in early 2002, Cross was invited to go to Sao Paulo with the academy later that year. "But they didn't just invite me or one or two of the DJs, they invited the whole show, all the original cast."

It gave Cross an idea, so he went to Brazil to scout locations and source collaborators. On a sultry November night in a hall packed with Paulistas, the LA jazzers and hip-hop DJs played with a selection of Brazilian drummers. "It was a crazy night. What I ended up with far exceeded my wish list."

What struck Cross most about the encounter was how quickly the musicians gelled. "Musicians are funny. The LA cats didn't know any of the Brazilian dudes by name so, at first, it was a bit tentative. None of them had ever been to Brazil, but they were saying to me, 'hold on, they have amazing drummers there, why do you want us?'

"But after an hour playing together, everyone was so invigorated. When they were all together, they were spitting stories about bossa-nova, who really made the differences, all kinds of stuff like that. There was no room for egos."

Watching the musicians, DJs and producers chatting together, Cross was struck by how natural it all was. It made him think about why such gatherings don't happen more often.

"You see, the generation gap now between musicians is very profound. It didn't exist in previous musics. John Coltrane did play with Duke Ellington - their paths crossed many times. Now there really is a gap. You will see Quincy Jones show up in a Ludacris video, but it should be more than that."

Cross believes the gap comes down to how the music is made. "There is no social space for these encounters to happen. Where does Snoop Dogg rub shoulders with Barry White? Yeah, they'll do a song and a video together, but there's not a social space. The encounter happens in the studio. It's a constructed encounter for the purposes of selling records.

"You do have interesting experiments like Jazzmatazz, but they're not improvised environments. You'll have Roy Ayers on a cut or Donald Byrd dropping a solo, but they don't try to foster an environment where that kind of activity could happen in a different, more natural way."

Naturally, Cross kept his cameras rolling during the entire get-together in Brazil. "That was three years ago and we're just finishing the film now. It's a lot more complicated than the first one, which was more the film of the show. This one has a lot more footage and interviews about the relationship between the two musics, and I've been back four or five times since to get extra stuff. I've photographed every samba school in the city and hooked up with the people who set up the Sao Paulo Zulu Nation.

"I've tried to mosaic it out so that when you see these amazing drummers getting down freestyle for 30 minutes at the end of the film, you know where they're coming from and have a good understanding of how special it is. It's not just about the encounter between cats of their generation and cats of our generation, but to expand the conversation across cultures as well as generations."

He hopes to finish Brasilintime in time for the Sundance Film Festival. Keepintime is regularly screened on the Sundance TV channel. "That's awesome for something which was self-produced, shot on shitty video cameras and edited in a bedroom." He's sold 10,000 copies of the Keepintime DVD through his website, a distribution deal is in place in Japan, and Ninja Tune is about to roll it out in Europe and Australia.

"Before we released it, there were a number of interesting distribution deals on the table for the United States. In the end, when we got down to the fine print, the deals were not that great. It would have been prestigious to take them and cool for the project, but we wouldn't have made any money, so we decided to go it alone."

But the project is still growing and developing. "New doors keep opening all the time," says Cross. "We're doing a huge thing in New York in October featuring the drummers from Brazil and LA. We're also planning to do it in LA and Sao Paulo again."

After that, there's plenty more to mull over. Cross has been approached a few times about revising It's Not About a Salary, but he's more interested in doing something with the "three or four photo books just sitting here ready to go".

The other night, though, another idea struck him. He was intrigued by a documentary on BBC World Service about Brazilians working in a bakery in Co Roscommon. "I'd like to go and make a film about them. Now that would be a trip."

Keepintime will be screened at the Sugar Club, Dublin on Thursday, August 25th. The DVD will be released on Ninja Tune the next day