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.

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

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”.

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.

The Organ Grinders silent film series takes you sleuthing around the movie theatre. The case: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr, a 1924 tale of love, rivalry, thieves, and the movies. Also included in this evening’s fare will be the 1921 Buster Keaton short THE GOAT, a classic tale of mistaken identity.

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”.

Check out the Trailer Here with music by Bear and Moose and clips from the film

Organ Grinders: The Man With The Movie Camera
Live Score by Bear and Moose
March 15th – 8pm
Hollywood Theatre – $12
Tickets available at Filmusik.com and the
Hollywood Theatre box office.

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.

Praise for Bear & Moose

The album also has an impressively full sound, capturing the duo’s combination of bluesy swagger and the cumulus-scraping highs of psychedelia, considering the duo recorded almost all of it live in the studio. -Willamette Week

Their debut Bear/Moose is a double LP brimming with shimmering guitars and loads of sugarcoated harmonies and hooks. -The Portland Mercury

Bear & Moose is certainly a band well worth keeping an eye on. -Stereo Subversion

“Bear & Moose have put together some of the most compelling music of the year. Yeah, the songs are great, but the way they’re played here is otherworldly.” -Aiding & Abetting

Featured in Spinner Full CD Listening Party

David Abelevich Kaufman (Russian: Дави́д А́белевич Ка́уфман) (2 January 1896 – 12 February 1954), better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov (Russian: Дзи́га Ве́ртов), was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the Cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking and, in particular the Dziga Vertov Group active in the 1960s.

Born David Abelevich Kaufman (Russian: Давид А́белевич Кауфман) into a family of Jewish intellectuals[citation needed] in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. His father was a librarian. He Russified his Jewish name David[citation needed] and patronymic Abelevich to Denis Arkadievich at some point after 1918. Kaufman studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German army to Moscow in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, where Denis Kaufman began writing poetry, science fiction and satire. In 1916-1917 Kaufman was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with “sound collages” in his free time. Kaufman adopted the name “Dziga Vertov” (which translates loosely as ‘spinning top’); Vertov’s political writings and his work on the Kino-Pravda newsreel series show a revolutionary romanticism.

Early Writings

Vertov is known for many early writings, mainly while still in school, that focus on the individual versus the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he was known to call his “second eye”.

Most of Vertov’s early work was unpublished, and few manuscripts remain after the Second World War, though some material survived in later films and documentaries created by Vertov and his brothers, Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman.

Vertov is also known for quotes on perception, and its ineffability, in relation to the nature of qualia (sensory experiences).

Career after the October Revolution

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee’s weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. While working for Kino-Nedelya he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who at the time was working as an editor at Goskino. She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Three Songs About Lenin (1934).

Dziga Vertov with his brother, Mikhail Kaufman
Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin’s agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances or printing presses; Vertov’s had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains went to battlefronts on agitation-propaganda missions intended primarily to bolster the morale of the troops; they were also intended to stir up revolutionary fervor of the masses.

In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution; in 1921 he compiled History of the Civil War. The so-called “Council of Three,” a group issuing manifestoes in LEF, a radical Russian newsmagazine, was established in 1922; the group’s “three” were Vertov, his (future) wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman. Vertov’s interest in machinery led to a curiosity about the mechanical basis of cinema.

Man with a Movie Camera

With Lenin’s admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy (NEP), Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a “corrupting influence” on the proletarian sensibility (“On ‘Kinopravda,’” 1924). By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in 1925. Potemkin was a heavily fictionalized film telling the story of a mutiny on a battleship which came about as a result of the sailors’ mistreatment; the film was an obvious but skillful propaganda piece glorifying the proletariat. Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the line of the Communist Party. He was fired for creating “A Sixth Part of the World: Advertising and the Soviet Universe” for the State Trade Organization into a propaganda film, selling the Soviet as an advanced society under the New Economic Policy of Lenin, instead of showing how they fit into the world economy. The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov says in his essay “The Man with a Movie Camera” that he was fighting “for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature.”[4] By the later segments of “Kino-Pravda,” Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with the Movie Camera (filmed in the Ukraine). Some have criticized the obvious stagings in Man With the Movie Camera as being at odds with Vertov’s credos “life as it is” and “life caught unawares”: the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot which films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, Vertov’s two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, “life as it is” means to record life as it would be without the camera present. “Life caught unawares” means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov “life caught unawares” meant “life caught unaware of the camera.” All of these shots might conform to Vertov’s credo “caught unawares.” Dziga’s slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Vertov’s brother Mikhail described in an interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in Man with a Movie Camera, two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail talked about Eisenstein’s films as different from his and his brother Vertov’s in that Eisenstein, “came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads.” “We all felt…that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism” Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, Man with a Movie Camera, was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his actions, such as the decision whether to jump or not, you can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, for them to be, in a sense, one.

You can hear some of their recent work here: http://www.facebook.com/strangleddarlings.  And… and this is a big and:  Tune into KZME 107.1FM tomorrow, Thursday at 5pm PST to hear a specially recorded session with the band and a conversation on¨Sessions From the Box¨. We´re excited to be partnered with KZME,  Portland´s local music station now beaming to an airwave near you.  Check them out and stream some tunes at 1071fm.org

Also, true to it´s namesake, Organ Grinders this month features a pre-show performance by the Columbia River Theatre Organ Society starting at 7:30pm.   The massive electro-organ they have installed will come to life, I can´t wait!

Organ Grinders: NOSFERATU
February 18th – 8pm
Hollywood Theatre – $12
Click here for Tickets

On Saturday, The Strangled Darlings creep from the crypt and into the Hollywood Theatre. The tome, Nosferatu, FW Murnau’s 1922 tale of purity of heart, vampires, and blood. The Strangled Darlings present a disconcerting mix of styles. They paint an eerily dark portrait that seems like it was made for the classic horror genre. 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.

The Darlings came from outer space upon the Devil’s ship. God was making cookies, peanut butter chocolate chip. He forgot his new creation, as gods are wont to do, and the Devil caught the Darlings & choked them white to blue. Strangled now & heartsick by their true forsaken Lord, the lost & longing Darlings are wobbled troubadours. They sings of things unspoken, to hide from good & bad they always dress immaculate in case conceptions’ had. They flitter through the country side looking for a perch & if you want to hear their tale, the Darlings are your Church.

As a special fundraiser for our outdoor concert the good people of the Richmond and Sunnyside neighborhood associations are having a findraiser at the Bagdad Theater.  Check it out:

Bagdad Theater Presents “The Secret of Roan Inish” in Fundraiser Matinee for Richmond and Sunnyside Neighborhood Associations

Our winter series of silent film and soundtracking is rolling on with Nosferatu next month!!  We are back in the newly renovated Hollywood Theatre with ultra-comfy seats and a slick paint job.   Strangled Darlings have put together an awesome piece this month for the original vampire feature.   It’s a visually brilliant film if you haven’t seen it.   Come sink into the new seats with a wine or beer and check out Organ Grinder’s February offering!

On February 18th, The Strangled Darlings creep from the crypt and into the Hollywood Theatre. The tome, Nosferatu, FW Murnau’s 1922 tale of purity of heart, vampires, and blood. The Strangled Darlings present a disconcerting mix of styles. They paint an eerily dark portrait that seems like it was made for the classic horror genre. 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: NOSFERATU
February 18th – 8pm
Hollywood Theatre – $12
Tickets available at Filmusik.com and the Hollywood Theatre box office

The Darlings came from outer space upon the Devil’s ship. God was making cookies, peanut butter chocolate chip. He forgot his new creation, as gods are wont to do, and the Devil caught the Darlings & choked them white to blue. Strangled now & heartsick by their true forsaken Lord, the lost & longing Darlings are wobbled troubadours. They sings of things unspoken, to hide from good & bad they always dress immaculate in case conceptions’ had. They flitter through the country side looking for a perch & if you want to hear their tale, the Darlings are your Church.

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.

NOSFERATU – Wisbourg, Germany based estate agent Knock dispatches his associate, Hutter, to Count Orlok’s castle in Transylvania as the Count wants to purchase a isolated house in Wisbourg. They plan on selling him the one across the way from Hutter’s own home. Hutter leaves his innocent wife, Ellen, with some friends while he is away. Hutter’s trek is an unusual one, with many locals not wanting to take him near the castle where strange events have been occurring. Once at the castle, Hutter does manage to sell the Count the house, but he also notices and feels unusual occurrences, primarily feeling like there is a dark shadow hanging over him, even in the daytime when the Count is unusually asleep. Hutter eventually sees the Count’s sleeping chamber in a crypt, and based on a book he has recently read, believes the Count is really a vampire or Nosferatu. While Hutter is trapped in the castle, the Count, hiding in a shipment of coffins, makes his way to Wisbourg, causing death along his way, which most attribute to the plague. Hutter himself tries to rush home to save his town and most importantly save Ellen from Nosferatu’s imminent arrival. In Wisbourg, Ellen can feel the impending darkness as Nosferatu gets closer. But she learns that a sinless woman can sacrifice herself to kill the vampire. Will Hutter be able to save Ellen either from Nosferatu and/or her self-sacrifice?