A white teenage musician works his way into the life of a broken black musician, haunted by the feeling that he is the black man’s reincarnated son who was murdered years earlier. 

SYNOPSIS:

It's 1967. Sixteen-year-old Tyler is being groomed by his snobbish mother to become a world-class classical clarinetist. Then one day Tyler hears the new black jazz for the first time and has a mystical experience that turns his life upside down. That same day, after being saved from a gang of bullies by a school janitor, Benson Diggs, Tyler begins stalking the man, driven by an unexplainable feeling that he “knows him from somewhere.”

Riddled by guilt, Benson is a broken man who gave up teaching saxophone years ago after his 13-year-old son was murdered in cold blood because of Benson’s negligence. He wants nothing to do with this rich white boy. But Tyler is relentless and eventually coaxes Benson out of his self-imposed prison to teach him jazz saxophone — this despite threats from Tyler’s mother that pursuing this “jungle music” will ruin his classical career.

In the face of his own inner demons and Tyler’s mother’s prejudice, Benson secretly prepares Tyler to compete in a saxophone competition similar to the one his son was to enter before he was killed—the bittersweet outcome of which determines the fate of both their lives.