Coming after what basically viewers and critics agreed to be Spike Lee’s masterpiece, Mo’ Better Blues seems to have met with a good deal of problematic discourse at the time of its release.

Lee continues his focus on the black community, this time dissecting the life of a musician and allowing that frame to include problematic relationships, screwed up business deals and of course a huge amount of music. The scenes of the Bleek Gilliam Quartet, headed by Denzel Washington as the band’s namesake, are a bit more digestible than those earlier big production numbers. And while watching Washington feign understanding of the trumpet isn’t too bad with Branford Marsalis’ licks getting overdubbed, contrasting those moments when a proper John Coltrane or Miles Davis number serving as the soundtrack doesn’t do anybody any good. What’s more awkward is the occasionally Marsalis rendition of a Coltrane composition. That boarders on sacrilege.

Using musicians as the narrative focus here distinctly ties Lee’s script to the work of August Wilson and specifically to his play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. That work focuses on racism being levied on performers even after they’ve made label owners a few bucks. Its scenario isn’t reused verbatim, but scenes with Moe and Josh Flatbush, played by John Turturro and his actual brother Nicholas, echo the sentiment.

Though only included in the film during three scenes (if I counted properly), the Flatbush brothers’ portrayal earned Lee reprisals from the media at large as well as the Anti Defamation League, an organization meant to track anti-Jewish sentiment.

Lee’s response to the criticism deftly included a history of the film industry as its exploited images of black folks during the one hundred year run of moving pictures. What’s more interesting – because the response could have been guessed at -  is that John Turturro ostensibly plays the same character in any number of other films and hasn’t ever had his performance’s examined in this manner. While the name ‘Moe’ might give away the brothers’ religious background, they might as well be Italian.

Stereotypes, of any kind, though, have some sort of basis in reality. If that weren’t the case, a huge portion of the Washington character would be difficult to understand. But again looking at this only through racial issues, there’s a member of Gilliam’s band dating a white women, who isn’t denigrated so much as ignored throughout the film and there wasn’t any sort of uproar about that.

I don’t know what that means about the ADL, but it’s pretty clear Lee wasn’t attacking Jews through two small roles in a film aimed at the black community.