Short Takes: May 3, 1993

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MUSIC

Ice Guys Also Finish First

ICE-T'S HOME INVASION (RHYME SYNDIcate/Priority) was supposed to be too hot to handle. In January, Warner Bros. Records released the hard-core rapper from his contract, apparently fearing more controversy after the storm last year over his song Cop Killer. However, the new album is, for the most part, balanced and coherent. On Race War, Ice-T calls for blacks, Asians and Hispanics to unite. On Message to the Soldier, he raps, "Check the history books, son/ Black leaders die young/ They tell us that our words are scary/ They're revolutionary." With his gangsta posturing, Ice-T is far from a role model for urban youth, but his real goal is to expose suburbia to inner-city anger. "I'll tell you what we did," he raps on the title track. "We stole your kids."

MUSIC

Still Swinging

ELLA FITZGERALD CELEBRATES HER 75TH birthday this month, and it ought to be a state occasion. The received wisdom is that there has been no better jazz singer since Billie Holiday, but the trouble with such accolades is that they tend to become academic. A good introduction to the vibrancy, perpetual immediacy and -- bet on it -- the greatness of the birthday girl is Ella Fitzgerald First Lady of Song (Verve), a three-CD anthology from her peak years, the late '40s through the mid-'60s. There are 51 songs, 20 previously unavailable on CD and seven never released before, including a ravishing version of the old piano plunker Heart and Soul. Fitzgerald can make the familiar fly and turn what's already classic into something timeless.

CINEMA

I Am a Camera

THE DIRECTOR CALLS THE SHOTS; THE cinematographer shows you the light. In VISIONS OF LIGHT, a superb documentary by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels, directors of photography are revealed as painters on film, Rembrandts with an Arriflex. The movie blends clips from Hollywood's wondrous black-and-white era with reflections by such modern masters as Michael Chapman ("A cinematographer's job is to tell people where to look"), Allen Daviau ("What's important are the lights that you don't turn on") and Conrad Hall ("There's a language far more complex than words"). If only the vast movie audience could find this film -- it would teach them not just to look at the actors and listen to the words, but to see.

TELEVISION

When Art Meets Journalism

IN FIRES IN THE MIRROR, HER ACCLAIMED off-Broadway play, Anna Deavere Smith created an unusual mix of art and journalism. In response to the 1991 Crown Heights racial disturbances (which erupted after a black youth was killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew), she re-created onstage the words of more than two dozen witnesses and participants, based on her own interviews. Adapted for PBS's American Playhouse (April 28), the 90-minute piece is riveting, a TV documentary as performance art. Smith precisely reproduces every word and stutter, the rhetorical bombast and silly yammerings. All seem to be aspects of the same human need for self-justification, yet Smith shows empathy for each and not a hint of condescension.

BOOKS

Fair Fay