Ornette: Made in America

I've been dipping into Shirley Clarke's filmography over the last forthnight and this afternoon I watched Clarke's 1984 film Ornette: Made in America, a free-wheeling portrait of the great composer and jazzman Ornette Coleman. The film is set against the backdrop of a performance of Ornette's third stream orchestral work Skies of America accompanied by the Fort Worth symphony orchestra (pictured below), and flashes forwards and backwards thru various era's of Ornette's life (including some dramatic vignettes from Ornette's childhood). It's not a wholly successful film - some sequences treated with psychedelic and video effects date it quite badly, and at times the film is edited to within an inch of its life with dizzying flash cuts and strobe lighting. But the real meat and potatoes of the film, Ornette's extraordinary music, survives intact, and there's fantastic footage of man in performance with Prime Time and in conversation, revealing an incredible probing, radical intellect. The film also comes with a cameo appearance by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin at the opening of the arts centre the Caravan of Dream, with Burroughs reading a selection of texts from his books. After years of unavailability Ornette: Made in America is back in circulation again as a very fine DVD/Blu and is warmly recommended.

Filmed in Supermarionation

Sky Arts served up a treat last night with the 2014 feature length documentary Filmed in Supermarionation, which celebrates the work of Gerry Anderson and the team of supremely talented puppeteers and designers who created Thunderbirds... This very comprehensive film gathers together all the key players and includes a wealth of archive photographs and vintage behind-the-scenes footage - and particularly wonderful to see designers and technical people interact with the puppets and models. What emerges most emphatically from the documentary is the Herculean task of creating Stingray, Thunderbirds and later series like Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Joe 90, the evolutionary leaps Anderson and his team made from early puppet series like The Adventures of Twizzle to the Thunderbirds films. Anderson's productions were still regularly aired on TV when I was growing up (Terrahawks from 1983, I particularly remember), but I was in too much of a hurry to move on to more adult fare, and often scoffed at what I thought was Thunderbirds' corniness. But in recent years I've grown to admire Anderson's series more and more and have come back to it via Kaiju jamborees and the films of Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay... Filmed in Supermarionation gets a second airing on Sky Arts later this evening at 6:45pm, and is highly recommended.

Journey Through A Body

First album of the day, Throbbing Gristle's Journey Through A Body, recorded in Rome in 1981... This is not a TG album I revisit very often, but I had a dream last night that I was sightseeing in Milan and bumped into the group at various junctures - Gen and Sleazy were kicking a football around with some ragazzi (a very Pasolini-esque image I think) and Cosey was seen shopping with a friend in Milan's boutiques. No sign of Chris, perhaps he was locked away at control room at RAI Studio mixing Journey Through A Body... Journey is probably no one's favourite TG record but it's one of their most fascinating. I've been listening to this album for over 20 years and I still haven't quite figured it out. I don't hear much of Chris and Cosey on this (maybe Catholic Sex), but a lot of Gen and Sleazy, working out ideas that would re-appear in Psychic TV - the album's final track, Oltre La Morte, Birth And Death, TG's most singularly beautiful moment is a dress rehearsal for Mylar Breeze from the Themes 2 album...

Bridges-Go-Round

More bridges... My previous post about Sonny Rollins and the Williamsburg Bridge reminded me of Shirley Clarke's 1958 film Bridges-Go-Round which features 4mins of tinted shots of Manhattan's bridges superimposed on top of one another and meshing with the city skyline to create new and unreal landscapes. Visuals aside the film features an interesting musical soundtrack(s) - two of the them in fact - originally the film was accompanied by an electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron, which sounds awfully like a cue from Forbidden Planet. The film was also issued with a jazz flavored score by the great composer and producer Teo Macero (possibly to avoid a law suit by MGM I suspect). The film can be found on the 2-disc anthology Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 (with the option to watch the film with either score), or can be watched on youtube where some thoughtful soul has uploaded both editions of the film back to back with their individual scores.

The Bridge

Listening to Sonny Rollins’ 1962 album The Bridge… I’m in a New York state of mind this morning, prompted by Rollins’ great album which is irrevocably tied to one of the best stories in the annals of jazz. Around 1959 Rollins turned his back on a successful recording career and took a 2-year sabbatical to practice his tenor. Unable to play his horn in his Lower East Side apartment for fear of disturbing his neighbors, Rollins found a spot on the Williamsburg Bridge, and there, looming 135 feet above the East River, with a panoramic view of the city, honed his skills. “I would be up there 15 or 16 hours at a time spring, summer, fall and winter”. February of 1962 saw Rollins return to the studio to cut some tunes that would be released later that year as The Bridge, named in honor of Rollins’ 2-year solo session.

My copy of the album is the 2010 Columbia edition which sounds fantastic but is disappointing in one respect – contrary to Columbia’s usual practice of augmenting their jazz releases with excellent liner notes, the booklet contains nothing of Rollins’ extraordinary journey to The Bridge. In fact I wasn’t aware of Rollins’ stint on the Williamsburg Bridge before I saw the excellent Beyond the Notes documentary on the great man just last year. Thinking about Rollins on the bridge, I wish there was a recording of him playing accompanied by the roar of the city, his tenor meshing with the sounds of traffic from passing cars, subway trains and boats. Perhaps one day when New York summons me back, I shall take a walk over the Williamsburg Bridge with Sonny Rollins’ album on the ipod…

Electric Druillet

Another fantastic piece of Philippe Druillet artwork... Rather ironic that Druillet's design for Electric Ladyland dispenses with David Montgomery's famous nude photograph and instead features a neon-splashed Hendrix in action. This cover adorns the French edition of the album, on the Barclay label and a VG++ copy of the album will lighten your wallet to the tune of €200 or thereabouts. A large scan of the cover can be found here...

Vampire Nouveau

For the past few days I've been clicking my way thru a fantastic online archive of scans from the German Art Nouveau magazine Jugend. The text of the magazine is in German but it's so heavily illustrated with Jugendstil artwork (the German name for Art Nouveau), it's a feast for the eyes. Looking at these Art Nouveau designs, with their long flowing curves and decorative swirls put in mind French artist Philippe Druillet‘s trio of beautiful posters for Jean Rollin‘s Le Viol du Vampire, La Vampire Nue and Le Frisson des Vampires. I considered sending these posters to the color printer to hang on my office wall but they're perhaps a little too racy for the workplace. No surprise to discover that Druillet was a founding member of Heavy Metal, and a little digging reveals that the artist submitted designs for the trucks in Sorcerer, which were ultimately rejected for being too far out, better suited to the Mad Max sequels than Freidkin's film. Check those out here. High quality scans of Druillet‘s Rollin posters can be downloaded for your office cube here

Revisiting The Tempest

"These, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air..." (The Tempest Act 4, scene 1)

October sees the release of James Shapiro's new book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, the follow-up to his brilliant 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and with that in mind I revisited Derek Jarman's 1979 adaptation of The Tempest earlier today... I've always enjoyed this film for its rich occult atmosphere, with Prospero absorbed in his grimoires and surrounded by magical talismans, and cabalistic writings and symbols. It's widely believed that Shakespeare based Prospero on the English magus John Dee, a notion that Jarman validates by having his Prospero wield a magic wand in the shape of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica symbol. The film is infused with a visual magic too thanks to Peter Middleton's chiaroscuro lighting, lending a dreamlike quality to the proceedings, and there's a bold use of costumes - if Shakespeare vaguely set his play during the Italian Renaissance of the 14th century, Jarman is even less specific, as various ages casually mesh together, Caliban appearing like a tawdry Edwardian butler, Miranda as a punk princess, her gown perpetually falling apart, and Ariel dressed all in white, anticipating the New Romantics of the 80's. And I like that the film furthers the connection between Derek Jarman and Throbbing Gristle - Elizabeth Welsh's rendition of Stormy Weather for the film's finale was issued as a 7" single by Industrial Records. Interestingly, a flick thru Tony Peake's biography in preparation for this post reveals that Jarman originally envisioned Brian Eno scoring the film and David Bowie singing Ariel's songs... "Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not..."

Welles

I generally don’t watch films on weeknights but last night I secured an hour and a half of the TV to watch Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, recorded off Sky Arts at the w/end. I’d been looking forward to this 2014 film for the past few days but it turned out to be a major disappointment, being little more than a competent assembly of film clips and talking head interviews. At 90mins the documentary is simply too short, and there’s a sense of getting the whole damn thing over with as quickly as possible, with surgically cut and pasted interviews and the occasional skating over of key films – Mr. Arkadin and The Immortal Story are dismissed with a few seconds of footage, clips from The V.I.P.s and A Man for All Seasons go uncredited and more infuriating, the film wastes precious time with excerpts from RKO 281, Cradle Will Rock, Me and Orson Welles, and Ed Wood, and at one point a celebrity chef (!) talking about Welles’ love of food – hardly essential stuff. Still, there are positives - Simon Callow and Peter Bogdanovich are present to provide their usual expert testimony and it’s a treat to see films like The Stranger and Journey Into Fear in such stellar quality. Ultimately the film makes for a good foot-in-the-door introduction to world of Welles but seasoned fans will find little new here. If you’re in the UK and Ireland, Sky Arts will no doubt have this on rotation for the next few weeks and I would recommend catching it there rather than investing in the BFI DVD...

Discovering Penda's Fen

I'm listening to Current 93's Thunder Perfect Mind album as I compose this post and it seems an appropriate accompaniment... Following a screening of Baal back in June, I explored an earlier Alan Clarke television production, the 1974 film Penda's Fen, a film I’ve wanted to see for a while now after reading enthusiastic eulogies from the blogosphere and a warm mention of the film in the pages of Rob Young’s British folk music book Electric Eden. One initial screening precludes me from saying anything profound about this very mysterious film save to say it's worth suffering thru the lo-fi VHS-transferred copy currently up on youtube. Ostensibly, a rural drama about a bookish teenager who experiences a number of personal and spiritual awakenings regarding his parentage, religion and sexuality, the film is steeped in arcane symbolism and metaphor, the pastoral landscape of Worcestershire a continuum of Britain’s mystical, pagan past driven underground by Christianity. The film is remarkable too for its unexpected supernatural touches (which I won’t spoil), poetic dialogue and its study of Elgar’s 1900 work The Dream of Gerontius. The film would make a terrific Flipside title, but apparently the BBC are demanding a king’s ransom to license the film. For now, that youtube upload…

New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments

Listening to Max Eastley and David Toop’s album New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, originally released on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records in 1975... Both composers take a side each on the original LP but I find Eastley’s four contributions the most compelling, his customized musical instruments using the natural environment – wind, water, to generate the sounds heard on the album. The first track Hydrophone named after a device which interacts with water, produces a very eerie lament that could pass for the sound of wolves whining across a valley, while the metallic-sounding Centriphone might have been lifted from an early Z’Ev album. Truly extraordinary stuff. What’s more, Eastley’s instruments can be enjoyed as works of sculpture, like the Metal Wind Flute pictured below...

Listening to these self-built musical automata puts in mind the singing statues of J.G. Ballard’s short-story collection Vermillion Sands. New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments is currently out of print but the album can be downloaded at the ever fantastic UbuWeb. Also worth checking out is the 26min documentary Clocks of the Midnight Hours from 1986 which explores Eastley’s music and sculpture (and sees him duetting with Evan Parker) – available to watch on youtube

Science Fiction

Listening to Ornette Coleman's 1971 album Science Fiction this evening, perhaps my favourite Ornette album, a dazzling salvo of high velocity fire music brimming over with brilliant ideas and memorable hooks. I've always loved the title of this album - one would think it more suited to Herbie Hancock's early 70's albums with their electronic window dressing, but here it lends a much more enigmatic flavor, echoing the futuristic mood of album titles like Tomorrow Is the Question and The Shape of Jazz To Come. Columbia's 2000 remaster of the album, part of the expanded 2-disc Complete Science Fiction Sessions sounds incredible and one to play loud, with James Jordan's spacey production complimenting some terrific performances from Don Cherry, Billy Higgins and in particular Charlie Haden delivering some fantastic angular basslines that wouldn't sound out of place on a moody post-punk album. I love the album sleeve also, an ethereal sunset river vista layered several times to create an exotic, impossible alien landscape. Science fiction indeed !

The Ancient Heavenly Connection...

My previous post mentioned Shirley Clarke’s film The Connection, which culminates with Warren Finnerty’s junkie “looking for an angry fix”, to quote Allen Ginsberg. And with that in mind I listened to a recording of Ginsberg reading from Howl, recorded I believe at Reed College, Portland in 1956 to an audience clearly jazzed by the references to sex and drugs and Ginsberg’s herculean performance. The 26min recording is available here: here Speaking of connections, I made a cursory mention of Roger Corman and The Trip in the last post and as I was preparing this, it jogged a memory of seeing a copy of City Lights’ Howl and Other Poems strategically placed in Bruce Dern’s pad !

The Connection

Listening to Jackie Mclean’s Destination Out! album this morning… The lead feature in this month’s Sight and Sound, 100 Overlooked Films Directed By Women put in mind Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film The Connection which I revisited last night, and features Jackie Mclean as one of the junkie jazz musicians holed up in Warren Finnerty’s roach infested tenement apartment waiting to score. It’s a great tragedy that so little footage of Living Theatre performances exist, The Connection especially - early productions, included Martin Sheen and Cecil Taylor in the cast, but what a high-wire act that play must have been to see, with actors suffering the unpredictable tortures of junk sickness (which many audiences believed were genuine), spontaneous outbursts of bebop jazz, and great street poetry. Shirley Clarke’s film is surprisingly cinematic for an adaptation of a single-set production, the play-within-a-play transposed to a film-within-a-film and includes rough camerawork, sudden jump cuts, narrative breakdowns, and in a sequence where the film’s fictional director experiments with a shot of heroin, the camerawork becomes listless and inattentive, a moment that always makes me think of Roger Corman, ever conscientious, taking LSD in preparation for making The Trip… The Connection is available as an excellent luminous looking region-free Blu-Ray, and comes highly recommended.

Muscle Up, listen up...

Transmissions from the secret history of gay porn music… October sees the release of Dark Entries’s second volume of Patrick Cowley instrumentals used as soundtrack music for gay porn films School Daze and Muscle Up (both from 1980). Taking its title from the latter film, this latest collection features 75mins of vintage electronica recorded between 1973 and 1980 and is an excellent mix of ambient and cold wave electronics, spacey weirdness and robot funk. Porno music is traditionally music of the cheapest kind, usually lifted from bargain bin library cuts, the musical equivalent to old scratchy WWII stock footage, which makes Cowley’s music all the more remarkable in this context. What’s more, much of the music here is darkly experimental – a track like Uhura from the Muscle Up collection sees Cowley mining similar ground to Throbbing Gristle and Chris Carter. My knowledge of gay porn is almost nil so I’m ever curious to know how Cowley’s music plays in these films - it’s difficult enough to imagine these instrumentals in straight porn. If you’re curious, Dark Entries are previewing the Muscle Up album on their mixcloud page, while the first Patrick Cowley collection, School Daze is still available on CD and LP at the usual places...