Saturday, 20 June 2015

The ICA's #CatalanAvantGarde season : A brief interview with Sílvia Munt

This is a short interview with Sílvia Munt, director of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a brief, recollected* interview, from #CatalanAvantGarde at the ICA (@ICALondon), with Sílvia Munt, director of El Cafè de la Marina (2014), which had a screening on Tuesday 28 April 2015 at 8.50 p.m.

30 April




A very useful event, arranged for the audience, allowed one to ask director Sílvia Munt some questions before the screening (two young Catalan-speakers, one already familiar, kindly agreed to help with translating) : useful, since the exigencies of The Agent’s travel turned out to make lingering long in the Q&A itself inconvenient. So, over some Cava, one was able to establish that, as well as having a warm and welcoming presence and a willingness to engage with enquiry, Munt has directed herself in three of her eight feature films to date (though this one, as became clear (please see below), had been conceived for television).

In this case, though, Sílvia had just directed – as well, that is, as having scripted the film (with Mercè Sàrrias). However, when suggested, she did agree that she is not with Woody Allen in how he is reported to direct himself, by being reportedly keen to quit at the end of the day to catch The World Series. Rather, she can fifteen takes to get what she wants from her own performance, and, when she writes, it takes her three months to develop a script. [Damn ! Could have asked her whether she also uses Allen’s method, when writing, of bashing it out on an old Olympia typewriter... (And, in like analogue vein, substituting text by stapling slips of paper in place over the old material.)]

That said, regarding how scripts develop during shooting, Munt said that hers remain malleable (because actors may find that the words do not sound right when they speak them), and then, as it were [not her words], she ‘reframes the utterances’. She went on to say that this approach fits the nature of her work, as dramatic comedy (rather than, say, permitting the cast to improvise replacement material) : therefore, she does re-writes, because any other approach would not (for her) be congruent with her material. [Another point of comparison (not made) with Allen, who tells us that, if his actors re-formulate his text on set, he can even go with that, seemingly irrespective of genre.]


As became apparent during the conversation, as it specifically turned to El Cafè de la Marina (2014), Munt has adapted what is regarded as a classic of Catalan literature : a stage-play of this name, in verse form (with lines of ten syllables), by Josep María Sagarra. Just from what she was saying, concerning difficulties of location-scouting an unspoilt shore, the film about to be watched** had to be a period piece. [As it is not a period film, though set on that coast, one had to refrain (as this was meant to be active listening [link to Wikipedia®]) from reflecting aloud on Menú degustació (Tasting Menu) (2013), from Camera Catalonia***.]

As Munt spoke, the likelihood arose (as mentioned to her, and realised in the seeing) that there would nigh inevitably be connections with the themes of actor / director Daniel Auteuil’s Marseilles-set trilogy in the making**** (but of which she said that she did not know). (The original films, apparently much loved, were derived from two stage-plays by Marcel Pagnol and then directly from his film-script, which he directed to conclude it, and later turned into a play : the first play had been directed as Marius (1931) by Alexander Korda, and then Fanny (1932) by Marc Allégret.)

As for El Cafè de la Marina itself on film, a confused account (on IMDb and elsewhere) suggests, with little detail, that one was made in 1933 (or was it in 1941 ?) : if so, contemporary with Pagnol on film. At the time of viewing Munt’s version, that had not been known, or that it had been conceived as a t.v. movie. However, when Munt was asked in the Q&A (before The Agent had to rush off) about the effect of using light indoors in the café, it appeared that there had been some issues in converting it to a DCP, and that the look that we had seen might have been different from what had been intended…


A little more (by way of a quick review) to come...


End-notes

* I.e. not digitally recorded, but relying on neuronal techniques of capture...

** ‘From cold’, that is to say with no prior knowledge - on the basis that A film should speak for itself.

*** The six-film Catalan strand at Cambridge Film Festival in 2014 – the third year of films at #CamFF from Catalunya, curated by Ramon Lamarca (who hosted this evening’s Q&A).

**** So far, we have had Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013) (at Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (#CamFF / @camfilmfest)), but César now seems ‘put back’ from having been, previously, noted as in pre-production on IMDb (@IMDb) :



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 19 June 2015

Full circle in Shanxi province ?

This is a Festival review of A Young Patriot (2015)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 June

This is a Festival review of A Young Patriot (2015)
from a screening and Q&A at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 on Saturday 6 June at 12.30 p.m.

From the audience, the first question in the Q&A for the director of A Young Patriot (2015) was from The Agent, about why we see so much of Changtong as he is taking photographs (having failed to get a place at Chengdu University the first time, he is taking a degree in photography), but only have two glimpses of his photography : two images, in passing, on a screen, and a glimpse of the photos that he is sending by post to the school, in Shanxi province, where his fellow students and he taught for a few weeks in the summer.

Haibin Du said that he realized that he had not shown much of Changtong’s work. However, the answer, which he timed so as to be amusing, was that the subject himself was more interesting than his photography. Indeed, he got a laugh by saying that, but did not thereby allay one’s doubts about the ethics of his practice in filming :

The question had not been couched as one about exploitation, but it, and the answer given, imply that it could have been*. For, at least three times, we see this film’s subject (its so-called young patriot) expressing himself unnecessarily candidly through the medium of drink. Yet, apart from his younger brother, who leads him away through embarrassment at what Changtong is saying about him (not that, on any occasion, others are not embarrassed at Changtong’s naive dogma and repetition), no one is there to intervene and stop the filming – and could a man as wildly idealistic in a way to rival the character of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin (in The Idiot – brilliantly adapted for film, in Estonia, in a screening seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2012) have given any meaningful consent ?


This film, in seven chapters, brought out the fact that the cinema-seats in the Vimeo-sponsored Screen 2 at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield are hardly the most luxurious in the world : it was at least ten minutes too long, and irremediably chronological, even if it did sometimes juxtapose places. It was mainly – apart from the pivotal excursion to Shanxi (though not treated as one by the film-maker : please see below) – set in Sichuan province, in Pingyao and, as mentioned, Chengdu.

Mao and lion.jpg

For a subject who was almost romantically attached to Mao, liking to sing (well, almost croon, in a higher pitch ?) his revolutionary songs**, maybe it made sense for us to have opening shots of, seemingly, a fading memorial to those times (unannounced, and wrongly identified by the producer afterwards, who also acted as translator, as Datong). If we had dwelt on those images and what they might have signified, could it have been a better film, and might we not have focused, and been more helpful in not doing so, not on Changtong’s extreme form of (historical) patriotism, but rather on his finding himself in modern China (if on him at all) ?

Several times, the film alludes to Tian'anmen Square, and to an (unstated) background, in the West, of knowing what that name means and what happened there : from the first, Chengtong is aware that there had been a protest, but believes that it had had a humane, even benign, outcome :

Not uniquely for a film-maker, Haibin Du chooses not only to leave Changtong in his ignorance (and, in a film that he later said that he has hopes might be seen in China, he does not inform the viewer), but also to concentrate on it as an ignorance that is specifically his – as part of his great dedication to Mao, and what he understands of the history of his country through that lens. That said, in a scene where we see Changtong and fellow students reciting words and singing in a vigil for an apparent anniversary of Tian'anmen Square (the massacre happened in 1989), it is clear that meaning has been generally lost or suppressed about it, and that they are just as much in the dark as he about what they commemorate.


Clearly, it would have been a different film, and not that of Haibin Du, to consider wider attitudes to, and understanding of, the past, but maybe film-makers have a duty not to take ‘the soft option’ in choosing their subject (or how to portray it : however important the topic of orca in captivity may be, does Blackfish (2013), for example, lose the opportunity to tell a totally coherent story about it ?). To allow oneself to be attracted to a very colourful figure such as Changtong may be normal, and almost necessarily full of emotional conflict and with scope for development, but perhaps a maker of documentaries needs to be aware of what it truly is about a subject that glisters to know it from gold, and to have a full appreciation of other stories that could have been told – or of a different construction to have been put upon this one.

Did one need to have asked what simply following Changtong’s story actually says about his lack of self-knowledge (and his growing and eventual disillusion, precipitated by what happens to his family, because of the Chinese equivalent of compulsory-purchase orders, and how resistance gains no benefit) ? In psychological terms, his adherence to a partial account of the co-eval past, in the kind of patriotism that he has adopted, always had to mean something more than an attractive premise for a film :

From the first, Changtong was really crying out for attention (if not unavoidably for that of a film-crew), but the film itself never seems to have engaged*** with what that was or signified (except that he almost had to be heading for a fall – which brings us back, again, to his naivety and whether he was a fit person to give consent). In relation to other Chinese people of his age, 1989 was (just about) part of his life, but not one of which he could have had direct experience or comprehension. Of course, the film did not have to give regard to the wider question of the state of knowledge, but the fact is that it did not.

It also, by not treating the events and experience of being in Shanxi as central to the chosen arc of Changtong’s story (although, cinematographically, it is obviously where the film is most alive, by creatively, and truly strikingly, directing the camera to all forms of local life – and, likewise, showing the difference that the students had made as volunteer teachers), held out for that time when life would break in on his lack of self-awareness, and leave him more bitter (maybe even depressed). That said, the film probably did not owe it to Changtong to show him his vocation (in seeming to enthuse the young village children quite effortlessly), or the fall for which he was heading.

We did hear, when asked about whether he had seen the film, that he had, somewhat nerve-wrackingly, been with its director at the back of the screening in Hong Kong. He told us that Changtong had borne it with what sounded like equanimity, seeming to have regarded it as a separate entity. Which maybe it is – maybe too separate from what could have been distilled from his life, not as apart from, but as part of the generality of modern China’s relationship with its own recent history ?







Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* The question had also said how Chantong’s early flag-waving and declamation (in an old uniform of The Red Guard) had come into its own by being a genuine inspiration to the young children in Shanxi, and had even proudly bought and started flying the starred Chinese flag. (Not surprisingly, another question elicited being told that it was the ostentatious behaviour that had interested Haibin Du in his subject – character, not photographic aspirations.)

** By heart, and seemingly moved by their sentiments when he had finished a rendition (although one somehow doubted whether he could have laid his finger on what they really were, and their relevance to Mao’s days of struggle).

*** Inevitably, with hours of footage reduced to just a couple, one knows relatively little even of the onscreen contact between director and subject, let alone at other times.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 18 June 2015

Gerard McBurney's A Pierre Dream at The Maltings, Snape

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 June

This is a review of A Pierre Dream : A Portrait of Pierre Boulez at Aldeburgh Festival on Wednesday 17 June at 7.30 p.m.




Actors with placards, at times a little too noisy on their castors, protested not student issues from the late 1960s, but with the face, image and message of Boulez, in this unbroken evening, dedicated to his music and his (often literary*) influences.




At times, he was heard translated, possibly when he spoke in French more (or his English had not been so strong**, or he resisted talking in it ?), but very often not. And his face, whether in stills or footage, spilled onto – or was caught on – assemblages or groupings, or discrete arrays, of placards***, along with pages from his scores, or shots of places, or even images that were redolent of natural growth or of the rain. (One can taste the production a little here.)

Soprano Anna Sideris adeptly gave us Improvisations sur Mallarmé I and II (from Pli selon pli : Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui… (Improvisation I) and Une dentelle s’abolit… (Improvisation II)), and Charlotte Betts-Dean Le marteau. Elly Condron, credited as a speaking actor (and all in white – as a Muse ?), was clear, definite, and, deliberately, a little cool and detached in rendering English translations of French texts for his Mallarmé and René Clair settings (in Le marteau).




From excerpts of the intimate sound of piano**** (or doubled piano) to pieces for eleven players or more, such as Dérive 2 or Le marteau sans maître, writer and composer Gerard McBurney’s staging ranged over Boulez’ work, thought and utterance in this intense show. Hearing, and re-hearing, his texts and instrumental and vocal settings, his voice changed, but was always Boulez, just as he changed from his arrival in Paris to contemporary footage.


Do not take one's word for it : this review in The Times now Tweeted :




End-notes

* Proust, Mallarmé, and René Clair.

** Striking up a conversation with him at Aldeburgh Festival’s Boulez at 85, with a friend who wanted to know his thoughts about Keith Jarrett (after enquiring about, which he denied, the influence of Messiaen’s teaching, thought to have been heard in works that he conducted the night before), one can testify to his English.

*** The fact that they were non-speaking actors, or that there were screens on the stage that acted as verbal prompts, was not sufficient to explain how they knew where exactly to be : no doubt there must have been tape-marks, of positions, on the floor.

**** Incises, Structures, Notations, and, with flute (which, it seems, Jean-Pierre Rampal rejected), Sonatine.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 17 June 2015

Sheffield - God's own City ~ Michael Palin at The Crucible

This is a review of Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 June

This is a review of a special screening of Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014) at Sheffield Documentary Festival, at The Crucible Theatre (@crucibletheatre), on Wednesday 10 June at 6.30 p.m., followed by a Q&A (hosted by Josie Long (@JosieLong)) with Holly Gilliam, James Rogan and Michael Palin


Josie Long and Michael Palin







Holly Gilliam’s (Terry Gilliam’s daughter’s) impulse to get a camera into the script-reading for Monty Python (Almost) Live was absolutely right, and, as we heard, that was the impetus for this film – itself documenting a show that was largely and pragmatically put on to meet the legal costs of the members of Monty Python being sued over some rights issue* (it sounded as though they might have been badly advised about defending the court action, maybe by Cleese’s classic barrister Archie Leach, from A Fish Called Wanda (1988) ?).




The approach gave us all that we wanted, including :

* A sense, as the title turned out to imply, of Python on stage, ranging from the celebrated Amnesty International gigs to Monty Python Live at The Hollywood Bowl (1982) (a title that, we learnt, was meant to stir feelings of the incongruous)

* The related interactions and tensions in and between those tallied both by One Down, Five to Go, and in Graham Chapman’s lifetime (to which Python’s memory the film was dedicated)

* The thrills and spills of the ten-night run at that venue that was allegedly so worthless, as The Millennium Dome, that HM Government disposed of it for a pound

* Thoughts about what comedy is and how it works, from Eric Idle seeing it as algebra (not an art), and needing to change one of the terms to get a laugh, to John Cleese’s having had to fight back, over decades, what sounded like rage that people laughed before he had done anything that he thought merited it**

* Michael Palin, dressed as a smart Sheffield woman of his mother’s generation for the ad hoc purpose of a filler (to comply with the limitations of ‘the watershed’ in public-service broadcasting, which it then proceeded to ridicule) : Eric Idle’s script, as interpreted by Palin and creatively imagined by improvisation, clarifying that when she said that she did not have one, she meant a television (not a cunt), or vice versa

* Confirmation that it had been, as it always seemed, Eric Idle’s creation (though directed by Terry Gilliam)


* Laughter again, deep and liberating, at the excerpts from Monty Python (Almost) Live and its staging :

** The candour before, after and during the O2 show (including feigned and real irritation at being filmed)

** The archive material from the show, from live performance and elsewhere : good choice, well placed

** The best of what was recorded during the 10-night show and its rehearsal, including seeing it change, and hearing – in the film, and in the Q&A – about corpsing / timing and their place in creating something fresh

** On this latter point, the very real pleasure of seeing Palin and Cleese in operation together


Holly Gilliam, James Rogan, Josie Long, and Michael Palin


As to the Q&A, one enthusiast closed the proceedings by declaring The Fish-Slapping Dance, which Palin said had been submitted for a comedy version of Eurovision (never repeated ?), the best thing that the Pythons had done : a few seconds, and the fifteen-foot fall into the dock below, had been worth it ! (Yes, it always brings a laugh, but hardly the best thing that they did ?) This enthusiast asked about Palin’s not only knowing his own part, but everyone else’s : yes, he had learnt it early on to feel comfortable with it, and then able to elaborate variations on it.




To that impulse to get a camera to document what happened, much is owed, in this skilful snapshot of the surviving Pythons by Roger Graef (who, sadly, did not attend, because he felt unwell) and James Rogan :






Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* Having established the point, by comment from a Python or three, the film wisely moved on : we did not feel that we needed to know more.

** Cleese also thought that sketches such as The Dead Parrot had not always been appreciated in the t.v. series, but had acquired a popularity through (recordings of) the live versions / iterations :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 11 June 2015

A first-night response to Markéta Popelková's final-year show at The Cass [@TheCassArt]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 June














 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 9 June 2015

A round-up of events* at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest)

This is a summary account of events / screenings at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 June




This is a summary account, in a sentence each (well, almost), of events / screenings at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (5 to 10 June)




Saturday 6 June

* 12.30 – A Young Patriot (2015) (Showroom Screen 2, Vimeo) – inadvertently raises questions both about one’s reasons for choosing a subject and what one has meaningful consent to film (reviewed here) – probably 10+ minutes too long

* 3.45 – Match Me ! How to Find Love in Modern Times (2014) (Odeon Screen 8) – the Q&A essentially confirmed what one had really already suspected, that it was not really about match-making, but had been made to be to complement the story of a couple who had met through a type of arranged yogic marriage – also probably 10+ minutes too long

* 7.00 – (screening at around 9.45) Mavis ! (2015) (The Botanical Gardens) – Mavis Staples is a figure whose musical significance is worth bringing to greater prominence, with the sort of voice that is normally called lived in and an impressive career, but fairly conventional / unremarkable in documentary terms themselves



Sunday 7 June

* 12.15 – Containment (2015) (Showroom Screen 2, Vimeo) – a title that IMDb (@IMDb) will have to disambiguate, as there are also two features of this name, but they will not skilfully look at a range of issues such as where nuclear waste comes from, serious mistakes in our understanding that prove to have been made in attempts to store and process it, and how (perhaps not a wholly integrated theme ?) we warn those in AD 12,000 of its existence / presence (reviewed here)




If one had not tarried, to talk to directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison after the Q&A, there might have been a chance to get to Imperialism or Inquiry : How Fair is Our Foreign Filming ? at 2.30 (ITV Town Hall Council Chamber) (or, at 3.30, How Interactive Content is Shaping the Future of Cinemas and Film Festivals (Memorial Hall, City Hall))...


* 5.45 – Iris (2014) (Odeon Screen 8) – unlike with Mavis !, a film that was not exactly awash with humility, although Iris Apfel is a great encourager and collector with definite tastes and flair, and where doing a deal – having justified the concept of haggling in its appropriate place – seemed part of the thrill of the chase in remorseless acquisitiveness (although tempered by giving archive material, both temporarily and permanently)





Monday 8 June

* 12.00 – The Nine Muses (2010) (Showroom Screen 1, AP Archive) – excellent melding of readings (Naxos Audiobooks) from sourced such as Dante, Homer, Beckettt’s trilogy (Molloy and The Unnameable) with music, images and displayed quotations – directive, but largely through meditative juxtaposition of powerful source and new material (reviewed here – and as prophetically Tweeted ?) :






Little White Lies (@LWLies) had this to say : Even more of a revelation was the screening of Akomfrah's The Nine Muses (2010), which effectively demands the cinema experience. Abstract, demanding but never less than compelling, we can't pretend to have grasped its every free-associating allusion, but its intoxicating riffs on diasporic identity and memory are assembled with the eye of an obvious master.




* 2.15 – Jungle Sisters (2015) (Showroom Screen 2, Vimeo) – the combination of an incipient headache and motion-sequences that felt overly jerky did not make for a screening that could be sustained




* 4.00 – Influence Film Club : Almost There (2014) (The Adelphi Room, The Crucible Theatre) – a pleasant chance to meet, off Twitter, the directors and producers and share and chat with them, as well as seeing a trailer and a clip, and hear them interviewed




Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden (directors) and Tim Horsburgh (Kartemquin Films)


* 6.00 – The Making of Long Lost Family (The Crucible Theatre) – apologies if it is wrongly recalled as in Rotherham, but, anyway, the story of Yorkshire twins, only one of whom knew of the other’s existence, and what the programme did to help her track down her sister, who turned out to have been living just three miles away the whole time, and even to have been registered with the same medical practice – as Nicky Campbell tellingly described it, they became young girls again as they ran towards each other, and Davina McCall could scarcely contain herself that they were there to join the panel on the stage of The Crucible, which was just one unexpectedly moving moment in this session about Long Lost Family, and its commitment to quality and care for its subjects

* 8.15 – Meet the Makers : The Revolution will be Televised (The Crucible Theatre) – despite the fact that the chat was ably chaired by Owen Jones (@OwenJones84), nothing altered the fact that comedy’s effects can be wildly subjective (in a Freud-like way, one can see that something is amusing, but not laugh), and this seemed less hard hitting than much other British satirical work, and more like Dom Joly’s stunts (with a political slant)


Owen Jones



 
Tuesday 9 June

* 10.30 – The BBC Interview : Charlotte Moore (Controller, BBC1) interviewed by Alex Graham (Festival Chair) – proof (one has done it in Q&As, and in interviewing Ken Loach) that one can be so keen that those listening are aware of the store of one’s knowledge that one swamps the interviewee with propositions (mixed up with a question somewhere), and then, lively to engage, irritatingly (?)** cuts short the answer…

* 12.45 – Newsnight and documentary : Ian Katz (Editor, Newsnight) interviewed by Nick Fraser (Executive Producer, Storyville) – Nick Fraser, by contrast, used fewer words, but to better effect, and integrated clips highly appropriately into talking to Ian Katz (@iankatz1000), who spoke with such a fluency and command of language that he well conveyed what helped us understand his editorial approach and decisions at, and hopes for the use of documentary for, Newsnight and in relation to other BBC factual output



Ian Katz


* 3.00 – The Channel 4 Interview : Dan Reed (maker of documentaries (and feature films)) interviewed by Ralph Lee (Deputy Chief Creative Officer, Channel 4) – flagging too much for little other than sustenance by caffeine and chocolate brownie (courtesy of those welcoming people upstairs in The Influence Film Club) and an energy drink (donated by delegate Ravinder Surah), but with little glimpses through Dan Reed’s lens into worlds of depravity, violence and threat


Ralph Lee (L) interviews Dan Reed (R)


* 6.15 – A Sinner in Mecca (2015) (Odeon Screen 8) – despite director / cinematographer Parvez Sharma’s hope that his film was not self indulgent, and the insights that he wished to share – through going on a Hajj – about Mecca and other holy sites, and the ruling Saudi dynasty and its attitude to the past, how he pursued, and attained, the object of his quest seemed to stay very personal to him and his experience (unsure now : see after-thought – and, which is more considered, the review now here)





* 8.45 – DS30 (2014) (Odeon Screen 8) – three films (the first two, being contemporary to the NUM strike, between them totalling around 14 mins, and the third around 33 mins) that, respectively, documented or revisited (a commission for AV Festival in 2014) the mood and music of the time, the latter as made by Test Dept and The South Wales Striking Miners' Choir :










[...]



Wednesday 10 June


* 11.00 The Awards Ceremony (The Crucible Theatre) – a pleasure to be 'inside' this event, hearing the wit and versatility of Jeremy Hardy as host first hand, both before and during :






* 2.00 – Volunteers' Secret Screening : The Confessions of Thomas Quick (2015) (The Void, Sheffield Hallam) :




* 6.30 Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014) (The Crucible Theatre) – to Holly Gilliam’s (Terry Gilliam’s daughter’s) impulse to get a camera to document what happened at the script-reading for Monty Python (Almost) Live, and afterwards, much is owed, in this skilful snapshot of the surviving Pythons by Roger Graef and James Rogan (reviewed here)







To be expanded / continued...






End-notes

* These Tweets refer :





** Assured by Charlotte Moore that the style of the interview had not felt antagonistic, one still felt uncomfortable watching more than short sections of it, and others did not disagree with having been disquietened.

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 6 June 2015

An equal partnership, full of felicity

This is a review of a gig given by Tommy Smith (tenor) and Brian Kellock (piano)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 June

This is a (delayed) review of a gig given at The Stables, Wavendon, by Tommy Smith and Brian Kellock on Tuesday 2 June at 8.00 p.m.

The jazz world / market remains a dazzlingly small one, and no disrespect to Stacey Kent’s enchantingly quirky vocal-style, but there is no way that the ticket-price of her gig at The Stables (on 1 July) – at Wavendon, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes (@stablesMK) – should be £9.00 more than that for someone of the class of Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith ! Let alone excellently partnered – as they have played together for some years – by pianist Brian Kellock. (More, if one considers that an announcement offering two tickets for the price of one had been made.)




Staff of The Stables, talking about the gig beforehand and the fact that it was two sets of fifty minutes, seemed puzzled that it was piano and sax, not a trio – they had clearly not figured that a jazz trio is, typically, piano with bass and drums, whereas it is larger groupings, from a quartet upwards, where one has a voice (human or instrumental, since clarinets, saxes, trumpets, trombones, flutes, etc., have much in common with our voices), or a pair of such voices.


The gig tended to alternate slower / quieter numbers with livelier / faster ones, and the first transition needed to bed down, after a number by Michel Legrand (he had a piece in each set, as did hits for Glenn Miller). For there is something banal about ‘I want to be happy’* (from Tea for Two), and, after quite a right-ahead statement of it, the duo took a time to work their magic, before getting it away into jazzified territory : they did it, because they can do anything, but the shock of the new did not subside straightaway.

After that, and with Hoagy Carmichael given an elaborate piano introduction of that dizzying kind, where one can both not catch the tune or even confidently state any more what ‘Stardust’ should sound like, they treated the repertoire as raw material for their ever-inventive treatments.




At times, they came very close to home, sweetly rendering the melody, but, with the same reverence, embellishing, enlivening and abandoning all but its shape. Both men have a strong rhythmic quality to their playing**, not just, with Brian Kellock, elements of boogie-woogie, blues or stride, but in their phrasing, and in fitting so well together, though both are – from the harmonics and note-pattern of their chosen standards – creating before us, with and through their practised feel for chordal variation / progression, and changing accentuation.


If the staff at The Stables had been worried about any lack of difference, from piece to piece, in the sound of a duo, they need not have been – standard orchestral playing can easily be less varied than that of a small ensemble, if one is attuned to the dynamics, pace and resources of chamber musicians :

In December 2014, hearing Jan Garbarek, majestic again with The Hilliard Ensemble*** , one reflected on his distinctive sound-quality, sharp in a sort of way that maybe (as we know it to be so ?) suggests Scandinavian – and what it is that gives those players who have their own voice a tone that is all theirs, even if, of course, it will be cast in a variety of hues. Sound-production is always going to be subject to a number of factors, but, with Garbarek, it is only partly his attack, and more, at the heart of it, how he breathes with the instrument, and infuses his phrasing with the felt physicality of the breath.



Calling Tommy Smith’s tone ‘straight’ might sound as if it implies that he is square, but consider the word in phrases such as He looked at me straight or In a straight-ahead linking passage, and think again. Nothing simple / simplistic in what he does, but a clear and candid way of delivery that gets right to the point, and, bringing to his approach, a wealth of skill and experience that lets him place juxtapositions of register, breath-quality, intensity and feeling with strong, intuitive assurance.


Something that Tommy Smith did in one piece, very atmospherically, was directing the sound of his tenor into the body of the piano. At first just so that his playing came off the lid onto the strings, but, later, pointing the outlet from the horn onto the strings, and even with the bell of his instrument inside the frame.


During the interval and quick to get to the foyer, one found Tommy Smith, all ready to sign CDs for just £10 (and Brian Kellock soon joined him). He was asked about his breathing, because his breath-control and the way that, sometimes almost speaking, he breathes through his sax had been a joy to witness. As he was going to say in the second set about the ensembles that he had been playing with (from a quartet to new compositions with a symphony orchestra, where he needed to use a harder reed), as well as that talk of directing his sound into the piano, he answered that it depends what one is playing and with whom. But he was very alive to the idea of someone watching him as he played, breathing through these longer phrases, and having wondered how he did that.



When we resumed, we were told that some had come up, made themselves known, and bought CDs and got them signed, so we were also given an explanation of the title of the new one, Whispering of the Stars – not a piece of vanity that the pair are stars, but how, in the North of Norway (where Tommy Smith apparently spends some time), the effect of exhaling into the cold air is described.


We were also told us a little more about blowing into an open piano :

* As a twelve-year-old at a school in Edinburgh that did not have many resources, there had been the stringed frame (no more) of a piano on the wall, and Tommy Smith had liked playing notes at it (which, he swiftly revealed, had been the opening ones of the only tune that he knew, the ‘Pink Panther’ theme)




* In a concert with The Stables’ own Sir John Dankworth to celebrate 150 years of the sax (so in 1991 ?), he had a piece for eight saxes, JD and his Eight Dwarves, but also a solo piece, likewise played with a pianist (but in the dark), and also into the body of the piano – which was reported in the press as having used a synthesizer...

* Brian Kellock, he observed, had been using moments of opportunity to determine his use of the sustaining pedal


Come a second Gershwin song, ‘They can’t take that away from me’, it seemed (he was not quite clear) that Brian Kellock might have heard Tommy Smith sing at some point, when the latter admitted that he did not know the words anyway. (Behind, and unheard on stage, a woman said The way you wear your hat.) In the light of this observation, it was curious that Tommy Smith chose to tell us that he was puzzled by what the title might mean, for, in fact, the lyrics are plain enough : the song must have a context, where, even if one separates a couple, the memory of qualities that one observed in, or of experiences with, the other cannot be negated (I’ll miss your fond caress).

What, if permitted, would have made a great photograph was Tommy Smith, standing the base of the bell of his sax on the floor, and leaning on the neck, during an extended piano solo. After the gig, one joked with them about the longest that he had had to wait, and Brian Kellock quipped As long as possible !



In the first set, one could see Tommy Smith, with respect tinged with amusement, look down the length of the instrument, under the lid, for an indication from his colleague – it did come, but it was a long time coming, both times, as the other really got absorbed by his solo, and away into a distant fairway, from which he yet came back.


They finished with nothing as late as a tune from 1927 (Tommy Smith had managed to suggest, earlier, that one’s relation to a date subsequent to one’s birth made a song from that year not earlier, but a later one), but from around five hundred years ago, whose title, in Gaelic, he did not try to pronounce. The meditative tone of the piece and its playing brought the gig to a different type of close, where each, as we applauded, could celebrate the other’s artistry and the whole evening.


On leaving The Stables, they were getting into their hire-car (Tommy Smith behind the wheel), so they were saluted – next stop was Brighton, and one wished them well for that.


End-notes

* Which Tommy Smith was getting at, in the second set, when talking about musicals and ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’ (from Oklahoma (Rodgers and Hammerstein)) : revealingly, given that he has even less reason to be called what he is than Chick Corea** (Tommy Smith is not his real name), he told us that he had had to watch his uncle in Les Misérables, as Jean Valjean, fifteen times, because he had been in the show as many times (although he begged to see the backstage effects on the last occasion...).

We also learnt that he had been forced, in childhood, to side with his father against a maternal predisposition towards The Stylistics, and (to which Tommy Smith ascribed a painful side) The Twist, in favour of Glenn Miller and other jazz influences, so we had a lively take on a well-known Miller number :



** Especially so in a Rumba by Chick Corea called Armando, which, as was rightly suggested, is his Christian name ('Chick' is a nickname that has stuck, not uniquely in jazz).

*** In their final collaboration, and also in the concert after which the singers were to cease being a vocal quartet : until one first saw them, it was barely credible that just four men could produce such a rich and consistent texture.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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