Heard and Seen - Projectors, Shipp on Farfisa, Konitz, Ornette on Film

Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan  
The new DPs album has grown on me after some initial disappointment. Though I've found much to like, I still have a hard time seeing it as a step forward from its predecessor, Bitte Orca, an album that sounded like a sustained, cohesive statement of a new direction without obvious predecessors. Swing Lo is a more stylistically diverse record, but perhaps as a result, there are more weak spots, and I don't think the more Bitte-like songs (like the opening "Offspring Are Blank") quite reach the highs of "Cannibal Resource" or "Temucula Sunrise" (to be fair, that's a very high standard to meet). 

I'm not sure whether to describe it as cloying or grating, but "Dance for You", programmed smack in the middle of the record, breaks up the flow for me to the point where I've taken the liberty of editing it out of the album. Its admittedly strong melody did succeed in getting stuck in my head, but I wish Dave Longstreth had left the melisma on this one to Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle. I'm not quite ready to accept Longstreth singing more or less directly about love and feelings, but he does pull off a solid, honest-to-God love song with "Impregnable Question", an undeniable album highlight. 

While Swing Lo isn't a Nashville Skyline-level WTF? veer into romantic crooning, Longstreth does seem to be trying out some new vocal personas. He really is crooning on the closing "Irresponsible Tune", doing what sounds to me like an impression of late-model Nick Lowe, and it works, so much so that I'd like to start the campaign to get Nick to cover it. Another successful move into what sounds like new territory is "Unto Caesar", with lyrics written in some sort of courtly, high Dylanese leavened with casual, sassy responding harmony vocals and a horn section (plus some prominently mixed studio chatter). Just the sort of eccentric mix of elements that get this band accused of being pretentious or weird-for-weird's-sake, but it all adds up and makes a strong impression, especially sequenced after the beautifully minimal arrangement, featuring (amplified? synthesized?) thumb piano, of "The Socialites". For me, this is one of those rare backloaded albums, with a strong run of tracks at the end making up for some weak spots in the middle.

Black Music Disaster 
A single live improvised track with two electric guitars, a Farfisa organ, and drums. Hearing a Farfisa in this kind of long form, rock-leaning improvisational context makes me think of Rick Wright on the early Syd-era Pink Floyd records - not a reference point you'd normally expect when the keyboardist is Matthew Shipp. John Coxon from Spring Heel Jack and J. Spaceman (Spiritualized) are the guitarists and British improviser (and Derek Bailey collaborator) Steve Noble is on drums. I don't know about Noble, but Spaceman and Coxon have recorded with Shipp before, and it was my appreciation of Spring Heel Jack's Live album (which also features Han Bennick, Evan Parker, and William Parker!) that made me pick this one up. I haven't listened to Live in a while but recall it having quite a bit more space than this record, which is pretty full-on start to finish, with Shipp's seething Farfisa expanding into all the sonic cracks like a luridly colored psychedelic fog. 

Lee Konitz - Satori and Enfants Terribles
One of my better finds at Chicago's great Jazz Record Mart last month was Lee Konitz's mid-'70s Satori. The lineup is pretty stacked - Martial Solal, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, with producer Dick Katz sitting in on electric piano on the free, swinging, and seemingly collectively improvised title track. Though I've never really connected with the only other record I've heard with Konitz and electric piano - Pyramid, with Paul Bley and guitarist Bill Connors - the two electrified tracks here (Solal also switches to electric on "Sometime Ago") fit just fine with the rest of the album - Konitz's approach remains the same and it's just a different texture added to the mix. Solal - virtuosic, restless and unpredictable - has a fine rapport with Konitz developed over many collaborations (their shared, deep commitment to improvisation is very much in evidence on the fine live duo album Star Eyes). Though each has recorded with the saxophonist separately, this is the only Konitz record I'm aware of with both Holland and DeJohnette. Only a few years removed from their epochal recordings with Miles Davis, they're relatively restrained here, but swinging and subtly easing the music forward into adventurous territory. Holland and Konitz have a nice duo passage on "On Green Dolphin Street" which helps make it one of the standout cuts on the album.

Konitz himself is in good form (he sounds particularly strong to me on the closing "Free Blues"), as he was recently at the Blue Note with another sterling lineup - Bill Frisell, Gary Peacock and Joey Baron - playing under the name Enfants Terribles. Some of the tunes I remember hearing were "Devil & the Deep Blue Sea" (intro'd by Peacock), "Subconscious-Lee", "I'll Remember April" (with a beautiful intro and melody statement by Frisell), and at some point, a little hint of "Misterioso". This group has a live album coming out from an earlier Blue Note appearance, which, based on the performance I saw, should definitely be worth getting.

This is another band, like Bill McHenry's quartet with Orrin Evans and Eric Revis, that I imagine might've featured Paul Motian if he was still with us. But as with Andrew Cyrille in McHenry's group, having Joey Baron is not exactly "settling" - it's just a different kind of awesome. This was my first time seeing Konitz live, though I've heard live recordings from various periods of his career, including two highly recommended albums with Motian recorded 50 years apart - Live at the Half Note with Warne Marsh, Bill Evans and Jimmy Garrison, and Live at Birdland with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden. While the early records with Warne Marsh featured some very tight and tricky heads, these days Konitz seems to cultivate a loose atmosphere in which improvisation is valued above all else and form can take care of itself. I don't know at what point Konitz started moving in this direction, but it was already coming into focus (or becoming more diffuse, depending on how you look at it) on Satori. Since Konitz has returned to many of the same tunes throughout his long career, it would be possible (and fascinating) to trace his development by comparing some of the various versions - "Just Friends", for example, or his own "Subconscious-Lee" which he's been playing for over 60 years at this point (for a little context on that, try to imagine how Charlie Parker might've been playing "Confirmation" if he had lived into the Obama administration).

Ornette: Made in America
Finally, I'd urge anyone who's an Ornette Coleman fan to try to see Shirley Clarke's restored and rereleased documentary, Ornette: Made in America, which recently opened at IFC in New York. Made in the mid-'80s and focusing on a Fort Worth (Ornette's birthplace) performance of Skies of America with Prime Time and the Fort Worth Symphony, this is far from cinema verite. Clarke, who directed and edited, deploys a large battery of devices and effects to get at the nature of Ornette and his music - otherwordly, forever futuristic but always rooted in the blues. We see a (very much pre-CGI) Ornette on an exercise bike in space, Ornette eating BBQ and talking about King Curtis, a string quartet (w/ Denardo) in a Buckminster Fuller terrarium, and William Burroughs (no special effects needed), among many other strange and wonderful things. Ornette's early music isn't much represented (and I don't think the great Billy Higgins appears at all), but there is some amazing footage of Ornette and Charlie Haden rehearsing with 12 year old Denardo, plus a bit of Blackwell and Cherry, and Ornette and Robert Palmer playing with the Master Musicians of Jajouka. In other words, wonders upon wonders.   

Slava + The Raj

I recommend watching the entirety of this BBC documentary on the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, but if you need to be convinced, the two minutes or so starting at approximately 42:30 contain some of the best live performance footage I've seen of any musician.

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I finally finished the book I've been reading since late last year, Raj by Lawrence James, an appropriately lengthy but mostly fascinating history of the British in India. One of the things that kept me going was the succession of amazing names, mostly British. A sample:

The Marquess of Tweeddale
Sir Montstuart Elphinstone
Ba Maw
Maud Diver
Sir Bampfylde Fuller
Sir Hugh Gough
Lord Minto
Tanti Topi
Sgt. John Ramsbottom
Major Henry Broadfoot
Lieutenant Hooke Pearson
L. Marsland Gander
The Faqir of Ipi
Francis & George Younghusband
Field Marshal Viscount "Weevil" Wavell
Lord Pethick Lawrence (referred to in the book as "the Etonian vegetarian")
Field Marshal Sir Claude "The Auk" Auchinleck

Three Un-recent Movies Seen Recently

Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices
I don't remember exactly when or where I first heard about this one, but I did some have curiosity about the (to me) mysterious world of polyphonic vocal music - motets, madrigals, etc - and, at this point, I would watch a Werner Herzog documentary on just about any subject. Herzog's rather free (to put it mildly) approach to documentary filmmaking surely reaches one of its highest points of invention in Death for Five Voices, as he packs numerous staged scenes and outright fabrications into a 60-minute running time (it was originally made for German TV). Though anyone with an ounce of natural skepticism or previous acquaintance with Herzog's documentaries will be doubting at least half of what they see on-screen, it's all somehow appropriate in telling the story of a man, Prince Carlo Gesualdo, who inspired plenty of wild legends and rumors in his own time and for centuries after. Why shouldn't Herzog get to invent some of his own?

Though some of the stories Herzog tells about the mad, murderous composer are fictional or exaggerated, the music, performed for the film by a couple of different ensembles, is very much for real and quite striking. Though I didn't know enough about the style or have a good enough ear to immediately distinguish the elements that made Gesualdo's music so strange in its own time but attractive to much later composers like Stravinsky, Herzog includes enough explanation from musicians/musicologists to give the viewer things to listen for without getting into levels of detail that might have bogged down a 60-minute film. Herzog rarely gets bogged down, especially in his documentaries, which with their abundance of fascinating people, places, and events have represented his stronger work in recent years. The Herzog filmography contains many lesser-known gems like Death in Five Voices, The White Diamond being only the first that comes to mind.

The Loved One
Check out the list of names associated with this movie, from 1965: Tony Richardson (fresh off his Oscars for Tom Jones) as director; Jonathan Winters, John Gielgud, Liberace, Milton Berle, James Coburn, Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Rod Steiger, and Paul Williams among the cast; Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood as screenwriters, adapting Evelyn Waugh; Haskell Wexler as DP and producer and Hal Ashby as editor. It's not uncommon for movies that are overstuffed with big names to be big flops, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It's dark, a bit strange, and has strong performances from all the leads, including Mad Men's Robert Morse as the at-first befuddled but ultimately resourceful protagonist, an English poet living by his wits in LA. There are so many off-the-wall characters (none more so than Steiger's Mr. Joyboy, though he has stiff competition) and bizarre/surreal set pieces that it almost doesn't matter whether it all adds up, but for the most part I think it does.

The Loved One is one of the many, many films in which Hollywood turns the camera on itself, though here the the funeral industry (along with the pet cemetery business, anticipating Errol Morris' Gates of Heaven) plays an even bigger role than the film industry in making up the strange sea in which Morse's fish-out-of-water finds himself. The idea of a lone sane man and/or outsider trying to survive in the insanity of Southern California is something of a film subgenre, of which Sunset Boulevard and The Long Goodbye are two of the finest examples (though here, as in Sunset Boulevard, the hero is not exactly a white knight, but a man with ambitions whose eye for opportunities is sharper than his moral code).

I don't know how faithful the adaptation is to Waugh's novel, but Terry Southern's influence seems evident in the tone of the movie - anti-authoritarian, satirical, horny, and a bit perverse. The Loved One looks forward to the similarly-themed but more anarchic (and to me, less effective) movies that Southern was involved in later in the '60, Easy Rider and The Magic Christian. While not a restrained piece of work by any means, The Loved One shows more craft and discipline than those later films, which for me typify the period after the decline of "studio system" craft but before the "new Hollywood" had really found its footing. Simultaneously experimental (or perhaps just aping experiments done years before in Europe) and nakedly/desperately appealing to the "youth market", some of these movies (like the Monkees' Head) are still great fun to watch, but they tend to give the impression that most of the cast and crew were high and/or assuming the audience would be.

One last, rather trivial note: I took the shots of rotating statues in the Whispering Glades "memorial gardens" to be an obvious nod to Godard's Contempt (try 1:25 in this excerpt), but in the making-of doc on the DVD, Wexler makes no mention of Godard, even though he singles out those shots and discusses how he set them up. As Contempt opened in the US less than a year before The Loved One was released, I suppose it's possible that Wexler and Richardson wouldn't have seen it in time, but if not, it's a pretty striking coincidence.

Jubilee
Derek Jarman's Jubilee has an all-star cast of a different sort, featuring generally lesser known actors but some big names from the music world, including a very young Adam Ant, punk/glam pioneer Wayne/Jayne County, Siouxie and the Banshees, and soundtrack contributions by Brian Eno. Jarman seemed to have a great ability to find a style for each of his films suitable to the subject (the compositions, lighting, and use of color in Caravaggio, for instance), and the anarchic, violently eclectic look and flow of Jubilee (apparently inspired in part by early punk 'zines) is no exception, though it's not entirely clear how much of this was planned and how much resulted from necessity, disorganization, or lack of funds. As with The Loved One, the succession of wild characters and strange happenings keeps things interesting, with Jarman stuffing a surplus of ideas (mostly good ones) into the cinematic blender.

Among the strange case of characters, Toyah Willcox's performance as Mad, the genuinely frightening butch pyromaniac, is of particular note. Though she was a serious, trained actor in a cast made up largely of non-actors, friends of Jarman, and genuine punks, her performance came across to me as more "real" and believable than some of those who may have been playing characters much closer to their off-camera selves. Apparently Willcox later became something of a pop star, but I hadn't heard of her, and until I saw the making-of documentary, I assumed she was someone Jarman found trawling around London punk shows.

Though very much inspired by and steeped in the punk aesthetic, Jubilee is by no means a celebration of punk. Jarman was an outsider, fascinated by the aesthetics but able to retain a critical distance from the scene he was immersing himself in. His skepticism about punk as a cultural revolutionary movement is part of the reason Jubilee is still watchable as something more than a period piece and helps explain why many scenesters were apparently upset and disappointed with the film when it opened (most notoriously, Vivienne Westwood, who responded with her "Open Letter to Derek Jarman" t-shirt, a reading of which reveals that Jarman's film certainly hit a nerve). This reaction from the true believers is understandable in light of the film's (cynical but, in retrospect, rather uncontroversial) suggestion that punk was just another style ripe for co-option and exploitation by the star-making machinery. Even some of Jarman's friends and associates took the film as a politcally conservative piece of nostalgia for the Golden Age of Elizabeth I, and there is certainly enough material in the film to make that a defensible interpretation, though not the only one.

Jubilee fits well with some of the work that Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg, among British directors, were doing in the '70s, as well as having some apparent nods to Kenneth Anger and, perhaps inevitably, to some of Godard's late-'60s films. Jarman was clearly well-read, but the book that Jubilee put me in mind of was written many years later. The idyllic seaside ending (with Elizabeth and her astrologer/advisor/magus John Dee walking off along some very scenic cliffs) reminded me a bit of Iain Sinclair's novel Downriver, which, like Jubilee, shows contemporary Britain (Downriver came out just after the Thatcher era; Jubilee just before) through a dark, twisted mirror (Sinclair also shares Jarman's fascination with Dee, though I don't recall that he figures in Downriver). In both works, the ending feels like a relief, resigned if not necessarily hopeful, after the violence and grotesquerie that went before. In an unexpected but effective touch, Jarman lets the seagull sounds from the last scene continue for a minute or so over a black screen, like the blank pages at the back of a book, inviting the audience to sit for a bit longer and reflect.

Some Thoughts On The Nilsson Doc

I finally got to see the long-time-in-the-making Harry Nilsson documentary, Who Is Harry Nilsson?, the other night.  Some lightly sifted thoughts:

This movie may be unmatched as an endless parade of bad teeth and embarrassing hair styles.  Some of the fashions on display betray the length of time it took to finish the movie - clearly, much of the interview footage had to wait several years before making it to the screen.  I'm sure some of the participants are as mortified by the way they look in this movie as I am by my high school yearbook photos.  Yes, Van Dyke, those jeans do make your butt look big.

Though not made with the skill of an Errol Morris, a D.A. Pennebaker, or even a Burns brother, I would've been happy to sit through this movie if it had run to the length (239 min) of Peter Bogdanovich's admirably workmanlike Tom Petty doc.  There's probably a sharper, more stylish movie to be made with this material, but as a Nilsson fan, I'll take what I can get and like it.

I was disappointed that one of my favorite Nilsson albums (and a great example of the Late Work As Neglected Gem genre, a genre I think I made up*), Knnillssonn, wasn't mentioned (although one or two songs from it made the soundtrack).  The story of its "comeback album" potential being squelched by the ill-timed death of Elvis (Harry's RCA labelmate) seems like it would've been an irresistible story for the filmmakers, but instead, the late RCA albums were glossed over as if they were all of a self-indulgent yet half-assed piece.

Speaking of underrated albums, I wanted to shout at the screen when Richard Perry started dissing Son of Schmilsson.  I love both of the Perry-produced Nilsson albums, but I've always preferred the rough edges of SoS over the more polished (but undeniably masterful) Nilsson Schmilsson.  Perry's interview footage is very revealing.  After "Without You" became a worldwide hit, he saw a wide open road of nothing but good times and platinum records ahead, but Harry grabbed the wheel and, like Neil Young at around the same time, steered into the ditch.  The footage of Harry with the pensioners' choir recording "I'd Rather Be Dead" undercuts Perry beautifully (the old folks get it, Richard!), though he would probably see it as indicative of Nilsson's growing self-indulgence. In any case, it makes me wish the SoS making-of documentary had been finished and released (it's not too late, of course).

Some of the best moments in the movie occurred, as one might expect, on the soundtrack.  Although Cinema Village must have some of the smallest screening rooms (calling them theaters seems a bit too grand) in New York, and the sound is nothing special, it was still a thrill to hear Harry's voice writ at least semi-large.  Due credit was given to his amazing self-harmonizing and overdubbing abilities and to the phrasing that he was forced to lean on after blowing out his voice during the Pussy Cats sessions.  I'd love to see something like the "Layla" mixing board scene from the Tom Dowd documentary done for one of the great, many-layered Nilsson vocal performances (though for calling attention to the artifice/magic of singing with yourself via studio technology, it would be hard to top his "three Harrys" BBC performance).

In summary: I'm not sure if this documentary is greater than the sum of its parts, in that I'd probably rather see a two-DVD set of Did Somebody Drop His Mouse? and The Music of Nilsson (if such a thing existed), but, for someone who's already a fan, there's more than enough good stuff here to justify the enterprise.


*Though, of course, the idea of artists having a distinct "late style" is a well-known one and can be useful as a lens/key to view/interpret difficult or neglected works in a new way.

Moving Midway

The documentary Moving Midway went completely under my radar when it came out in 2008, but I caught up with it on DVD over the long holiday weekend. This anything-but-simple story about moving a North Carolina plantation house is about as good a portrait of the contemporary South as I can imagine. Full of unexpected twists, ironies, and racial tensions, it's also just the sort of thing that Hollywood would royally butcher.

Hollywood's long and curious love affair with the South, and particularly its portrayals of antebellum plantation life, is a preoccupation of filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire, a New York-based critic and cousin to the owner of Midway Plantation. Whether it's the romantic fantasy of Gone With The Wind, the Southern Gothic terror of Deliverance, or the outright racist revisionism of Birth of a Nation, Hollywood has had difficulty telling Southern stories without distorting the picture, either patronizing or demonizing its subjects. Moving Midway, probably because it was made by a Southerner who had the added advantage of being related to most of his subjects, is refreshingly free of caricature (that's not to say that there aren't some molasses-thick accents and charmingly eccentric behavior on display), stereotyping, or exploitation. The film portrays a series of very distinct individuals rather than a collection of "types" or a strange, massed "other", and is therefore capable of surprising us with the way people speak, behave and interact.

The discovery of a whole line of descendants of the family's slaves and their subsequent participation in the film and the events surrounding the house relocation provide Moving Midway with some of its best moments and a compelling second storyline to add to the titular drama. The interactions between the descendants of slaves and the descendants of their masters is, as you would expect, fascinating to watch and somewhat fraught with tension. Southern cordiality reigns, but there's clearly a lot going on beneath the surface on both sides as a result of the history involved.

Dr. Robert Hinton, an NYU professor, North Carolina native, and the first of the slave descendants to become involved in the film (eventually supervising all the historical research), plays a key role, giving voice to the mixed emotions stirred up by the contemplation of the house and its history and expressing concerns that might otherwise be left to simmer unspoken. In one memorable moment in the film (at a Civil War reenactment, no less), Hinton has the perfect rejoinder when he hears the old saw about the War being more about "states rights" than slavery: "States rights to do what?"

Besides issues of race and the Southern legacy of slavery, Moving Midway illustrates some very fundamental questions about land, property, and history. What meaning does a historic house have without the land it sits on, especially a plantation house? When a new strip mall or housing development is named after the previous occupants of the land it sits on, is this a fitting honor or a cruel and tasteless, if unintentional, insult? (The film shows one housing development that was presumably named after the 18th-century slave patriarch of Midway Plantation, Mingo.) Almost all of the broader questions raised by the film are related to the central, specific question at its heart. Namely, is the decision to move Midway right or wrong? Cheshire shows us various points of view on this question, as well as the Fitzcarraldo-like feat that is the actual move, but wisely leaves us free to come to our own conclusions.

If you rent Moving Midway, don't overlook the additional interview segments included as bonus features. The segment with Algia Mae Hinton, the Piedmont blues singer and banjo player who is featured on the soundtrack, performing for the camera while sitting (though definitely not sitting still) in her comfy chair in sweat pants and socks, is several minutes of pure joy.