So, I never did say anything about Speedy and Alloy Orchestra from Saturday. Mucho fun. I should have brought a chair, as I didn't realize the movie screen was against the wall of the museum and not over in the amphitheater. But that's only a minor quibble. The movie was great. Very fast-paced, very funny, with a several amazing set pieces, including a tour of Coney Island (filmed on location I assume), a huge fight scene that highlights the degree to which Jackie Chan is working in the same tradition as Harold Lloyd (plus trained dog fu, flatiron fu, and wooden leg fu!!), and a wild chase thru Manhattan with a horse-drawn trolley. It doesn't look like Speedy is available on DVD yet. Hopefully it will be released. And hopefully with the music by Alloy, which was a perfect match. This was the 2nd time I'd seen a silent movie with a live band providing the score and I must say, even having read that Alloy Orchestra was the gold-standard in the field, and even knowing that Roger Miller (Mission of Burma) was the keyboard player, I still had some trepidations. I can't remember the band that accompanied Page of Madness when we saw it at Duke a few years ago, but their score was clanging, loud, dissonant, and mostly unpleasant. Probably that marks me a some sort of philistine. But the Alloy performance on Saturday was outstanding. Everything seemed to fit. It's hard now to imagine the movie with any other music.
(recent title references: Wonder Stuff, Manu Chao, John Wesley Harding, none, Orbital, Cabaret Voltaire, Calvin & Hobbes)
A Page of Madness. That was a brilliant movie. Too bad I mostly remember the headache I got from the suck-ass live score. I can't remember who the musicians were either. Some noisy jazz act with a name like "Invisible Quartet" or "Transparent Quintet" or something like that. But not the Microscopic Septet, there definitely weren't 7 people making that horrible noise.
Transparent Quartet. I am friends with one of them, Phillip Johnston, and I ate with them at The Blue Nile after that performance. But yeah, it was dissonant, moreso than their normal stuff for sure.
Phillip used to be in the Microscopic Septet and mostly he makes very catchy jazz music. His website, the Home Page of Madness, can be found at http://www.phillipjohnston.com/
Whoops! Sorry, I didn't know they were friends of yours. I'm just not a fan of dissonant jazz. As new scores to old silent movies go, my favorite is Cinematic Orchestra's score to Man With a Movie Camera. I love the album of that & listen to it all the time. In fact, I think I'll put it on right now.