Higher Ground

In my last post, I mentioned that I would be seeing a certain 2011 movie soon that could turn out to be the most moving film I'd see for the entire year.  I was right.

The movie is question is called Higher Ground. It starred and was directed by actress Vera Farmiga and it is based on a memoir about a woman searching for her faith.  Quite simply, the lead character, Corrine, gets baptised when she's a little girl, mostly because it's expected of her. She grows up, gets married and settles into a close-knit evangelical Christian community with her husband and children where the formal trappings of the church are replaced by a more communal atmosphere where peole hold worship groups in each others' homes, everybody wears blue collar working clothes to services and the pastor is called by his first name. The community seems conservative but not fanatical or bigoted while Corrine comes to feel restless and out of place, never getting the deep-seated feeling of God's presence that her husband and friends do. She eventually draws away from the community, leaves her husband, explores the larger world of literature and thought and by the end of the film, she is still waiting to feel God in her life.

This story is very simply and powerfully told. My synopsis left out all the ways Corrine and other characters, like her best friend in the community, Annika, come off as well fleshed-out and believable characters.  As a actress Farmiga draws a haunting portrait of a woman slowly growing into her own person wihtout finding any answers or audience-pleainsg big revelations.  Religion is not ridiculed in this movie. It is treated as something that is an important foundation of people's lives, even as the lead character seeks her own peace but never finds it.

All this explains why the film has been so overlooked in the end-of-year lists.  A woman searching for God isn't anywhere as sexy a topic as sexual addiction or the end of the world.  That the Oscars overlooked it is no surprise (though in a perfect world Farmiga would have nailed a Best Actress nomination at the very least) but in all the should-have-been nominated blog pieces I read, only Roger Ebert, who has become understandably philosophical in recent years, brought this film up.  Even the so-called "anti-Oscars", the Independent Spirit Awards, ignored it.  A story about an honest search for religious fulfillment with no villains or stereotyped characters is obviouvlsy too strong and scary for a lot of people. Sadly, Higher Ground may be one of those movies that sits around unnoticed for several years until someone runs across it on TV and writes an article about how good it is. It'll be a great movie ten years from now and it's a great movie today.

Oscar Thoughts

It's Oscar time again and as usual, the movie blogosphere is buzzing with either outrage, disdain or joy over what got nominated and what is expected to win.  For every blog that says a certain film (Hugo/The Artist/The Tree Of Life/(your choice)) is a masterpiece and a wonderful advancement in cinematic art, there's another that says (Hugo/The Artist/The Tree Of Life/ (your choice)) is bland, pretentious junk and a symbol of how corrupt the entire process is.

I'm kind of taken aback by all this.  I've only seen a few of the Best Picture nominees so far and I'd be perfectly fine with The Descendants or The Artist taking the award.  Maybe they weren't the absolute best films of the year but they're both good pieces of work. I'm also tickled by the thought of a silent black and white film possibly winning the top Oscar in the year 2012, a time when noise, gadgetry and bombast rule the theatres.

The truth is that I just haven't seen enough 2011 movies for me to stand on a mountaintop and make thunderous pronouncements about what should have been nominated. I have yet to see Drive, Melancholia, Hugo, A Dangerous Method, Take Shelter, Midnight In Paris or Carnage and We Have To Talk About Kevin hasn't even played in this area yet.  There's also one film almost no writer I've read has mentioned that I have a feeling could be the most moving of the lot. I should be seeing that one over the weekend.

If you watch a lot of movies, your opinion on the best of any given year is always subject to change because something always turns up after the fact.  There have been plenty of times when I've seen a film a few years after its release and been completely gobsmacked. Often it's a film that got no critical attention when it originally came out, much less awards.  My prime example of this is always A Map Of The World, a 1999 film that starred Sigourney Weaver as a school nurse falsely accused of molesting a student.  The movie was powerful and Weaver was flat-out amazing. She deserved a Best Actress Oscar nomination at the very least yet I've never seen a single word written about the film anywhere. Given that, it's hard for me to get excited about Albert Brooks getting snubbed for Drive. At least someone noticed he was snubbed.

"The End Of An Era"

Today I did something I'm probably going to have very little chance of doing for the rest of my life, I went to a record store.   Not just any record store but Melody Records, the last independent general record store left in the Washington, DC area. It's been around since 1977 but in the next few weeks Melody will bow to the inevitability of the times and close.  That will leave Barnes and Noble and their meager selection as the only place around here you can actually walk into and buy CDs.

Like any music lover I've been buying this stuff in one form or another for a long time, 40 years in my case, and I've seen plenty of local stores come and go, Waxie Maxie's, Harmony Hut, Viscount, Orpheus, Olsson's, and Kemp Mill and though it was a worldwide chain, Tower Records was always a great stopping place for me because of its infinite variety of selection.  The wonderful thing in going to all these stores was that you were always going to be surprised. You might go in looking for a particular item but you were always going to see some album or CD you had barely heard of or didn't even know existed.  I always loved the feeling of being immersed in music of all types. In the 70's I listened to mostly progressive rock then punk and new wave,  but all the jazz reissues coming out in those days from Original Jazz Classics and Blue Note would invariably catch my eye. As I got to know more about jazz, it was always great to go into a store and find new titles from labels like ECM and Black Saint popping up almost weekly. The covers, the liner notes, even the song titles, all fascinated me.

That's an experience online shopping and (shudder!) downloading can't give you.  I have bought things from several stores with online presences like Seattle's Jazz Loft, Chicago's Dusty Groove and the ubiquitous Amazon but the first two only specialize in certain genres or carry small amounts of titles and Amazon is fine if you know what you're searching for beforehand.  There's no real surprise in buying that way.

Obviously that doesn't matter to most folks so the public has left the physical stores behind and they have slowly given up the ghost, one by one.  Now the last one left in DC has fallen. If I want that pleasure again I'm going to have to wait until I make an infrequent trip to some other city and hope I can find a CD store left like the one I ran across in the historic section of Philadelphia a couple of years ago.

I made my first trip to Melody since the closing announcement 10 days ago. The store was pretty full of people buying up what they could and telling the staff how much they appreciated their being around all these years.  I did that as well and walked out with $100 worth of CDs: Craig Taborn's Avenging Angel, June Tabor's Ashore, Magnus Ostrom's Thread Of Life, Thelonious Monk's Criss-Cross, Claire Martin's Secret Love, Aaron Goldberg's and Guillermo Klein's Bienestan and Katie Bull's Freak Miracle, a haul of avant jazz, jazz singing, British folk and, in the last case, something I had never seen before.  Today I went back again and it was a little depressing. The store was still busy but several racks were now empty with the Jazz, Folk and World sections taking up about half of their former space. I still found another $100 worth to buy though, CDs from Lisa Mezzacappa, Aki Takase, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Jen Shyu, Wu Man, Theresa Wong and again one that came as a complete surprise, a 2 CD set of Gershwin compositions and other 20's Broadway works performed by Scottish classical pianist Joanna MacGregor. I think it's always fun to discover something new and record stores were always a great place to do that for me.  Never again, never again...

2011 In Review - The Non-Depressing Parts

This is the time of year when a lot of internet denizens, professional and amateur, review what things in the popular arts they liked over the last year. In my case that would be music and movies, but I really don't feel able to do a conventional "best of 2011" in either genre. In music, I don't listen to much current rock or pop stuff anymore, usually just paying attention when some familiar old duffer like Tom Waits or Lou Reed comes out with something new, though  Florence and The Machine has caught my ear recently and I always have time for folk-based singers like Gillian Welch and Eliza Carthy.  In that vein I really enjoyed the maligned Reed-Metallica opus, Lulu, and was really amazed upon hearing the legendary Beach Boys Smile Sessions.  Even at a remove of 40 years with bits and pieces floating out there for years, the work turned out to be every bit as beautiful and visionary as it was always claimed to be.

The main music I listen to is Jazz which had an avalanche of riches come out this year, most of which I've yet to hear. Almost every best-of-the-year list I've seen in print or online has different recordings on it which just a few names like Craig Taborn, Bill Frisell and Sonny Rollins showing up in more than one place. That's cool with me because that gives me a lot to catch up on but I've yet to see any love for the 2011 CD I enjoyed the most, Kaiso Stories by the group Other Dimensions In Music.  Jazz Reissue lists have been a different story with praises universally showered on the two historic finds from the International Phonograph label, Bill Dixon's Intents and Purposes and Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D.  The same went for the Miles Davis Live In Europe 1967 set for damn good reasons.



I have spent a lot of time watching movies over the past year but not too many of them were 2011 releases.  I hope to catch up on at least a couple of current releases this week but so far I 've managed to see and enjoy in different ways the following Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Tree of Life, Kill The Irishman, The Guard, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Meek's Cutoff, Young Adult, The Descendents Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Everything Must Go, the serious Will Ferrell film that seems to have slipped everyone's mind. I did also see one very popular movie, Bridesmaids, about which I can only say...are you kidding me?  A few funny bits of raunch are thrown into a predictable plot about a whiny, unlikable loser who can't find a decent boyfriend and that's supposed to be a great female comedy?  Charlize Theron's Young Adult was much more entertaining even though her character was a complete mess.

Anyway I think for a non-professional movie fan like myself who doesn't have to keep up with all the latest stuff, the idea of just paying attention to the newest work coming out is really antiquated. We live in a time when recent movies are always around on DVD or some other medium and older films are consyantly being rediscovered and put on the market.  At any give point there are hundred of movies available in multiple forms from past decades as entertaining as anything currently playing in theatres.By accident, most of the movies I've seen in the last year have been recent releases from the past few years. Some were highly touted and some really obscure, but all had something that grabbed me. They included a Belgian equivalent of Robot Chicken, A Town Called Panic, Sally Potter's experimental drama made for Smartphone viewing, Rage, Tilda Swinton ripping a hole through Viscontian melodrama in I Am Love, and Ken Loach's comedy about a British postman getting life coaching from the imaginary presence of an English football star, Looking For Eric.

    The others I liked were: Winter's Bone, The Illusionist, The Wrestler, Black Dynamite, The Ghost Writer, Gone Baby Gone, Sugar, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Wild Grass, Boogie Woogie, Alexandra's Project, The Descent, I'm Not There, The Social Network, Babel, The Disappearance Of Alice Creed, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly and The Fighter.

As for somewhat older work, I got to see Sir Laurence Olivier in a 1968 production of Siringberg's The Dance Of Death, John Carpenter's Assault On Precinct 13, Newsfront, an Australian epic about the history if the newsreel business and a real rarity in Girl Of The Night, a 1960 film that starred a gorgeous Anne Francis as a call girl dealing with the psychological trauma of her profession.

I also saw a few oddities from the always fascinating early talkie, Pre-Code era like Safe In Hell, a drama about a prostitute running from a murder rap with a ming-blowing conclusion, He Was Her Man, an obscure early James Cagney film where he plays an uncharacteristically, for him,  gallant gangster who sacrifices himself for the woman he loves and the 1929 version of The Letter, stiff like many talking pictures of its time but with an intense, modern performance by the play's original stage star, the doomed Jeanne Eagles.

Then there were new discoveries from two of my favorite directors, typical Sam Fuller pulp artistry in The Steel Helmet and Underworld U.S.A. and Michael Powell delivering what was proablty one of the most genteel war movies ever made, The Battle Of The River Plate.

 
Above all though there were two movies that really just blew me away with their effectiveness, two films that only relatively few people have  probably even heard of, 2006's The Gymnast and 2010's A Marine Story.  Both of these films were lesbian themed dramas with the same director, Ned Farr and the same star, his wife, Dreya Weber, a beautiful actress/aerial performer/choreographer. In the first one, Weber plays a former Olympic athlete in an unhappy marriage who develops a spectacular aerial nightclub act with a younger Korean dancer with the two women's feelings inevitably getting out of control. In the second, she's a lesbian former Marine officer, forced out of the Corps because of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", who goes back to her hometown and ends up undertaking the rehabilitation of a young woman involved with a drug gang. The narratives of these films ignore all the cliches that others may get from these situations, instead going for deep characterizations and tell stories about people having the courage to find themselves no matter what society thinks. Weber is a striking, compelling actress with impressive athletic skills and is really a formidable presence in both films. The privilege of watching her is one of the things I enjoyed most at the movies this entire year.

R. I. P. Sam Rivers (1923-2011)

Dammit! I've been working on a long post about the past year that I had planned to finish and put up today, but not now. I'm definitely not in the mood.

Lou and Lulu

I've got a couple of things I hope to be writing about in the next few days but after hearing the Lou Reed - Metallica opus, Lulu, for the first time, I had to write some quick comments.  The consensus I've seen about this CD online is that it isn't very good. Chuck Klosterman, a writer of some renown, even went so far as call it "totally unlistenable".  As the WWE's Miz would say "Really? REALLY?".

Most of the opinions I read seemed more knowledgeable about Metallica than Reed and were disappointed that Metallica had yet again failed to match their Master Of Puppets heights and were being subservient to an "elderly misanthrope" in Klosterman's words. Well, yes, this is essentially Metallica serving as Reed's backing band and that's perfectly fine with me.

Listening to all the talk I put this on expecting to hear Metal Machine Music 2.  Instead I was treated to Mr. Reed at his pissed-off, profane best, spitting out lyrics over a violent musical backdrop and a lot of musical variety, involving strings and acoustic guitars as well as Hetfield & Company's sturm und drang. Anyone surprised by this stuff has heard very little Lou.  There are echoes of "Sister Ray", Berlin, Street Hassle, Ecstasy and other classics here.  On first hearing it does fade a little in the late going as some tracks on the second CD have more plain riffing than melody but the work ends with a flourish on "Junior Dad", one of Lou's haunting string-laden, open-hearted ballads in the mold of "Sad Song" and "Street Hassle".  If this is unlistenable to some youngbloods, God forbid they ever run into Peter Brotzmann or Merzbow.  For my money it's heartening to know that the "elderly" Mr. Reed is still spitting blood, bile and jism with gale force.

Paul Motian 1931 - 2011

 

(So somebody has to die before I'm inspired to write here again.  Oh well...)

I was looking at the excellent Destination Out website of jazz rarities (http://destination-out.com/) this afternoon when I noticed a mention of "Paul Motian appreciations".  That worried me because there is usually one reason in particular why people start posting appreciations of a particular artist. I checked a couple of other sites and my fears were confirmed. The great jazz drummer, Paul Motian, had passed away this morning.

Paul Motian R.I.P.

Motian was special among the many jazz drummers of the last fifty years.  Whereas a lot chose to follow the multi-directional power drumming route of the likes of Elvin Jones and Sunny Murray,  Motian went the other way playing with subtlety and sparseness and creating a velvety carpet of accents and colors for his bandmates to work with. He played with an insane number of great musicians, Lennie Tristano, Tony Scott, George Russell, Bill Evans in his most famous trio, Keith Jarrett, Carla Bley, Paul Bley, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, John Abercrombie, Jason Moran, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Jim Pepper and Lee Konitz just to name a few.  In looking over a couple of his credit listings today I was reminded that he was also the drummer for Carla Bley's epic recording, Escalator Over The Hill, and that he had played with Marilyn Crispell on a bunch of her ECM CDs. You could play the Six Degrees game with Motian and link him to most of the great jazz players of modern times.

Like Count Basie in his later years, Motian eventually reduced his art to its essence, never hitting a lot of notes but always hitting the right ones and letting the music breathe. He could throw down a 4/4 rhythm with the best of them, often in his Electric Bebop Band when he played with younger musicians, but it was always the abstract interplay with others that got me.  Right now I'm listening to one of his many trio recordings with Lovano and Frisell and the rustling decorations and lazy feathering he does around the sax and guitar is simply amazing. He sounds like a free falling ballet dancer.

This clip is from a 1995 performance at the Umbria Jazz Festival where Motian does his thing expertly with a heavyweight group consisting of Lovano, Frisell, Konitz and Marc Johnson. Nobody could float and drive simultaneously like this man.

Good Vibes (I know it's a corny title but I can't think of anything else right now)

I've known about the music of vibraphonist Gary Burton for many years but tonight was the first time I ever got to see him perform live.  Burton has been a long time innovator, both with his technique of playing with four mallets at once and in his mixing of other genres with Jazz, notably country and rock.  He's been around for a long while and it's stunning to realize he is 68 years old. With short blondish hair and glasses, he looks a good twenty years younger than that. Then again, with all the octogenarian Jazzers out there still kicking butt like Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Sam Rivers, Roy Haynes and Sonny Rollins, I guess Burton is still a relative kid.
     I saw him at Blues Alley tonight in the quartet format he has favored for most of his career. Actually watching him play with four mallets was a fascinating experience with the dexterity he showed in being able to hit different notes simultaneously with a bright rhythmic flow and even use only three mallets at a time with the fourth jammed in his fist but not touching the keys. Of his bandmates, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Antonio Sanchez were both excellent but the real eye opener was guitarist Julian Lage, a 23-year-old former prodigy that Burton has been playing with for ten years. The young man played with fire, passion and rock-influenced dexterity much in the tradition of former Burton guitar players Larry Coryell and Pat Metheny.
     As good as Lage was Burton's playing was the real revelation for me. Half of the group's set was spent doing tunes from their latest CD but the rest of the time they played familiar pop and Jazz standards. Burton is known for all the non-jazz musics he has dabbled in over the years, like country and rock in the 60's, tango and Spanish music in the 70's and his contributions to ECM's classic airy, hovering aesthetic with albums like Crystal Silence with Chick Corea. Tonight he showed he can play straight-down-the-middle Jazz with real swinging drive as he did "Afro Blue", "I Hear A Rhapsody" and Thelonious Monk's "Light Blue". The encore was Milt Jackson's "Bags' Groove" which was bluesy as all get out and struck me as a little poignant. Here was one of the great living masters of the Jazz vibraphone doing the music of a departed master as soulfully as the dour-faced Jackson himself might have played it. It was a great show and I'm glad I went.