May 6, 2012 Comments Off
If you have not heard the good news, In The Country will be gracing us with their scandanavian brilliance for a concert of silent film and jazz. They recently won The 2011 Independent Music Award for best long film for their CD/DVD Sights & Sounds and are here as one of only 3 stops on their US tour.
On May 24th Organ Grinders is presenting a film and band combo more awesome and outrageous than anything that could have appeared to us in feverish dreams. A silent film that few have heard of and fewer have seen: The Wizard of OZ (1925). An adaptation so bizarre that if you play Dark Side of the Moon along with it… well, honestly it does not really work at all. However what does work is the new soundtrack cooked up by Norway’s In The Country, special guests at the 2010 Portland Jazz Festival.
Organ Grinders – The Wizard of OZ (1925)
May 24th – 9:30pm
Hollywood Theatre
Tickets $12 available at the Hollywood Theatre Box Office
and at Filmusik.com
Live score by In The Country
See the trailer for the performance here
Learn more about In The Country at www.inthecountry.no
In The Country defies borders despite their name. Their spacious improvisation eschews descriptions of any kind. Get lost in the vast and melodic world of this Norwegian trio that we were lucky enough to host this month on Organ Grinders.
Voted Best Releases of 2009 by All About Jazz and L.A. Times
ORGAN GRINDERS – From under the screen, the sounds of modern groups are paired with movies from a different era, updating the genre of Silent Film accompaniment to the sounds around us today. Organ Grinders revisits the original vision of the Hollywood Theatre, built in 1926 with an orchestra pit and a hydraulically ascending theatre organ.
As to those Wizard of OZ purists, be warned! The New York Times review noted (in 1925):
A trained duck adds to the amusement in the early scenes of this production. It steals Semon’s lollypop. Then there are several scenes devoted to Semon being chased by bees and going through other discomforts.
April 25, 2012 Comments Off
Friends over at the Hollywood Theatre have a really interesting show coming up, check it out. Next step, ELO revival tour to Portland right? Here is the info:
The Thief of Bagdad: Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.
With a Live Intro by Shadoe Stevens
Portland, OR – In the 1920s, Douglas Fairbanks’ passion project was to turn the tales of One Thousand and One Nights into one of the most lavish and fantastical films of the silent era. The Thief of Baghdad is just that, a no-holds-barred epic filled with indelible images of flying carpets, magical creatures, death-defying stunts, groundbreaking special effects, and sprawling sets.
Sixty years later, radio personality Shadoe Stevens embarked on his own passion project, to take Fairbanks’ silent adventure and give it the ultimate rock soundtrack. After years of experimentation he discovered something surprising: that the lyrics, tone, and music of British art rock band Electric Light Orchestra were a perfect match for the film.
The lush electric-symphonic music of E.L.O. perfectly punctuates scenes of Fairbanks cunningly picking pockets and scaling walls. And as our heroic thief meets the woman of his dreams, E.L.O.’s Jeff Lynne croons, I’ve seen lovers flying through the air hand in hand / I’ve seen babies dancing in the midnight sun / And I’ve seen dreams that came from the heavenly skies above / But I never seen nothing like you. The results of Stevens’ quixotic undertaking are nothing less than astounding.
Stevens became a favorite voice in the early 1970s as one of the city’s most popular DJs. With his resonant voice and command on the airwaves, he was given the chance to assume announcing tasks for both radio’s “American Top 40,” replacing Casey Kasem, and on TV’s “The New Hollywood Squares” (1986). In the 1980s he found himself besieged with commercial work. Both seen and heard on “Squares,” Shadoe’s tanned good lucks, sexy appeal and sturdy physique set off a string of acting roles in such movies as Traxx (1988), in which he played the title role, and Mr. Saturday Night (1992). For four seasons he starred in the CBS sitcom “Dave’s World” (1993).
Trailer: http://www.siff.net/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=44596&FID=206
More info:http://hollywoodtheatre.org/thief-bagdad-shadoe-stevens/
WHEN: April 28th, 2012; 7:30pm
WHERE: Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Boulevard
ADMISSION: $10
April 11, 2012 Comments Off
Our Trailer is out for next week’s Organ Grinder performance at the Hollywood Theatre. Local Jazzer Ezra Weis brings his crew to soundtrack classic silent film.
Click Here to Watch the Trailer
Ezra Weiss has composed and/or arranged music for, among many others, Billy Hart, Leon Lee Dorsey, and Rob Scheps. He has composed music and lyrics to two children’s musicals and his effortless approach to jazz has garnered him the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award three times.
In a special one-time performance, the Hollywood Theatre is transformed back to its vaudeville days of bowler hat bedecked musicians and big screen spectacles.
Organ Grinders: SHERLOCK JR.
April 19th – 8pm
Hollywood Theatre – $12
Click here for tickets
Ezra Weiss can take a jazz motif and bring out it’s lovely hues and shades with his economical inferential piano style. His playing intimates years of maturity and an astute understanding of the jazz vernacular with his optimistic take on progressive jazz.
SHERLOCK JR – Buster Keaton, a movie theatre projectionist and janitor falls for a beautiful girl but immediately has a rival, the local sheik. In a game of one-upsmanship, the two begin a campaign of gift giving involving dishonesty and theft. The projectionist dreams of becoming a detective to solve the crime and win the girl.
Also playing: THE GOAT – In a case of mistaken identity, Buster Keaton becomes the subject of a manhunt for captured murderer “Dead Shot Dan”.
April 10, 2012 Comments Off
About Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time.
Born in 1895 to Joe and Myra Keaton, Joseph Francis Keaton got his name when, at six months, he fell down a flight of stairs. Reaching the bottom unhurt and relatively undisturbed, he was picked up by Harry Houdini who said the kid could really take a “buster,” or fall. From then on, his parents and the world knew him as Buster Keaton. By the age of three, Keaton joined the family’s vaudeville act, which was renamed The Three Keatons. For years he was knocked over, thrown through windows, dropped down stairs, and essentially used as a living prop. It was this training in vaudeville that prepared him for the fast-paced slapstick comedy of the silent movies.
When, in 1917, his father’s drinking broke up the act, Keaton moved to Hollywood, where a chance meeting brought him contact with another former vaudevillian. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, one of the most famous of the comic actors of the time, took Keaton on and showed him the ropes of the movie industry. For the rest of his life, Keaton would acknowledge Arbuckle as one of his closest friends and his greatest influence. With his deadpan humor and exceptional acrobatic technique, the lanky Keaton was a perfect partner for Arbuckle’s clumsy antics. The audience agreed, and within a few years, Keaton had acquired the notoriety to move out on his own.
The bulk of Keaton’s major work was done during the 1920s. Writing, directing, and staring in these films, Keaton created a world unlike the other comic stars of the times. Where Harold Lloyd battled physical adversity trying to make it to the top, and Charlie Chaplin avoided catastrophe through luck and good will, Keaton was an observer, a traveler caught up in his surroundings. He often found himself in the same compromising circumstances as Chaplin and Lloyd (chased by an angry crowd, left behind by a train), but he maintained a sense of even composure throughout. No matter how lost or downtrodden Keaton seemed to be, he was never one to be pitied. The NEW YORK TIMES said of him, “In a film world that exaggerated everything, and in which every emotion was dramatized and elaborated, he remained impassive and solemn, his poker-faced inscrutability suppressing all emotion.” It was this “stone face,” however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.
In films such as THE NAVIGATOR (1924), THE GENERAL (1926), AND THE CAMERAMAN (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films. The subtlety of the work, however, left Keaton behind the more popular Chaplin and Lloyd. By the 1930s, the studio felt it was in their best interest to take control of his films. No longer writing or directing, Keaton continued to work at a grueling pace. Not understanding the complexity of his genius, they wrote for him simple characters that only took advantage of the most basic of his skills. For Keaton, as for many of the silent movie stars, the final straw was the advent of the talkies.
Though he acted in a number of films in the ’30s (often alongside Jimmy Durante), Keaton no longer possessed the stoic charm many had grown to love. He worked as an uncredited writer for the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton, eking out a living at a fraction of his former salary. He began drinking and through the ’40s did very little work of serious interest. It was not until 1953, and his appearance in Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT that the public revival of Keaton’s work began. More than simply a nostalgia for the old days, this new interest encouraged Keaton to revive his career with frequent appearances on television. The sheer ability of his acrobatics astounded audiences who had become used to less sophisticated physical comedy, and by the 1960s, his films were returning to the theaters and he was being hailed as the greatest actor of the silent era.
In 1966, after finishing work on Richard Lester’s A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, Buster Keaton died at the age of sixty-nine. His career spanned six decades and touched the lives of millions of people. He had worked with everyone from Marlene Dietrich to Samuel Beckett, Cecil B. DeMille to Tony Randall, and had maintained a seemingly selfless composure throughout. For many, this deadpan style was a poignant reminder of the fragility of life in the age of complex and overwhelming machines. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Buster Keaton’s films seem as funny, touching, and relevant as ever.
