Here on You tube you can watch the whole Let’s Get Lost, a beautiful documentary on the late great musician Chet Baker. Made by the great photographer Bruce Weber, this film is a minor masterpiece. Edited beautifully by Angelo Corrao, it is a real pleasure to watch. When I lived in NYC I was friends with a wonderful guy named Leo Mitchell, a jazz drummer, he always wanted to play Rock and Roll music with me because he had grown up as a Jazz musician and never played straight ahead Rock. What a great guy. He toured with Chet Baker in Europe several times. Years later I asked my friend Jack Nitzsche about an album he had done with Chet Baker called A Taste Of Tequila” or something like that. He said “Don’t listen to that album. It’s horrible. Chet and I both needed the money.”
Here is a cool documentary, shot on the set of the seminal film Silent Running. I saw this in the theater when it came out and really enjoyed it. Ahead of it’s time, the environmental message that’s even more relevant today. Bruce Dern is great and the double amputees that play the robots are really cool. They’re all teenagers, who knew. I later worked with two key players from this film, Michael Cimino, who was one of the writers and John Dykstra a VFX supervisor. Anyway check it out and see the film!
Here is a surreal Fairy Tale in Stop motion Claymation that freaked me out as a young kid. Gumby always had elements of strangeness. There’s one about Indians thats also pretty deep. These were made by Art Clokey, who I hear tell, dropped LSD and became a free love hippie type , abandoning his middle class family and chasing teen aged chicks, at least so the legend goes.
Sneaky Pete Kleinow
One of the animators on Gumby was the amazing Sneaky Pete Kleinow, who later went on to animate the Terminator metal monster in the first Terminator film. He also did the Pilsbury dough Boy, Poppin Fresh, a lot of commercials. But he was also an amazing pedal steel guitar player! Check out his playing on Frank Zappas Waka Jawaka album, Outstanding. And he played on a lot of C&W records, plus he was a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers. What an unsung genius!
Here is a video of the great Alice Coltrane playing her harp, which her husband John Coltrane gave her. It cost &50,000, some of his profits from A Love Supreme. Alice is ba spiritual musical master, she forged her own direction in music and founded an Ashram in Los Angeles. An amazing woman and a great artist. She is also the great aunt of contemporary musicia Flying Lotus. Check out her albums, she had a long creative history with Pharoah Sanders as well, another giant on the jazz scene.
Fatou Seidi Ghali, one of the only Tuareg female guitarists in Niger, leads Les Filles de Illighadad during a Homegrown Concert Series performance, September 19, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress…Note: Privacy and publicity rights for individuals depicted may apply.
Here is a great band from Niger, they play and sing beautifully. Music can transport you to another dimension,they show you how.
If you like Rap music, Hip-Hop, remixes then you should know it all started with King Tubby, a Jamaican electrical engineer/Artist. Working in a small studio he built in his mother’s house he changed music all over the world by creating Dub Plates, remixes of songs mainly without the vocals and using echo, EQ and reverb in a new unique manner. What a genius! Certain artists not only create great works, they also create whole new Genres of Art. I’m thinking of people like Fritz Lang, Mario Bava and King Tubby. Here is a documentary about him. Check it out, mon.
A Young Thelonious Monk playing at the legendary Minton’s, where BeBop was born. Dizzy Gillespie ripped off his look.
Here is a cool documentary on the great composer/musician Thelonious Monk. I always liked Monk but it was after working with Bob Downey that I really became a Super Monk Fan. Because Bob loved Monk, as a young guy in Grennwich Village he was in aqwe of the great Maestro. He saw him walking doen the street one time and was so im pressed by his bearing, his coolness, his genius. He told me he even got a job as a waiter at the 5 Spot, where Monk had a long residency and worked up the nerve to say hello to Monk one evening in the kitchen. To which Monk reponded, “Where’s the fucking orange juice!” I edited a film for Bob called Hugo Pool and we got Danilo Perez, a great Pasnamanian pianist to record a Monk influenced score for it. Anyway I coulsd go on and on about Monk but here watch this doc for yourself and dig the man in action.
Jack Nitzsche told me he was there when the Rolling Stones asked for their idol Howlin’ Wolf to be a guest on Shindig when they appeared on the show. He said he was talking to Wolf when he noticed an older Black man sitting nearby, Wolf said” I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Son House.” So here thanks to the miracle of YouTube is that show from way back in 1965,
The great Mabel Lee has passed on at age 97, she was a great singer, dancer from Harlem. She appeared in many Soundies, short musical films that played in coin operated jukeboxes in cafes and bars. Here’s a classic example. The Chicken Shack Shuffle.
Damn! I really wanted to write a fan letter to Fred Katz! What a genius! He just died at 94 years of age, he really crammed a lot into his stay here on planet Earth, Classical musician, Jazz musician, Composer, Ethnologist, child prodigy on two instruments, maybe the first guy to play Jazz Cello! I grew up digging his score to Corman/Griffith movies like Little Shop Of Horrors, a great score, quirky, idiosyncratic, unique just like the movie. There is really no other score like it that I can think of. Plus he played with the great Chico Hamilton, he even appeared with Chico’s band in the sublime Sweet Smell Of Success ( a reference to the marijuana that features so prominently in the plot) .
Then he switched gears and became a professor of Shamanism, Mysticism, Magick! I wish I had taken one of his courses, I wish I had met him and told him how great he was. Too lAte! But maybe up in Film Music Heaven Fred can hear my compliments, I hope so. Dear Fred You were a giant talent and enriched my existence through your music, Fare Thee Well.
What a cool, crazy film. As the saying goes after you make a hit, you can make anything you want. Antonioni scored with BLOW UP so he got to make this non-commercial meditation on America, Death, Existence, Time, Humanity. The opening scne is a campus meeting of Radical Students and representatives of Black Power, talking about shutting down the campus, a common occurrence back in 1969.
The way the people talk and dress is so real, they’re not actors, Antonioni used real people that he felt were right for the part. Amazing Imagery, amazing music, Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia jamming out to images of a Love In in the desert. Roy Orbison singing about Zabriskie Point.
The desert imagery was definetly an influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, where The Bride goes out to Bud’s trailer and where she walks through the desert, even the music of that sequence seems influenced by Zabriskie Point. Here’s the Bootleg Trailer I cut with Quentin for Kill Bill , the opening music is the music I’m talking about.
Another thing, ZP ends with a big explosion, a similar ending , actually a very similar ending occurs in Robert Downey Sr.s GREASERS PALACE, a huge explosion and a very long shot of a sunset. In Zabriskie, Antonioni is playing with persistence of vision, the shot of the sunset is on the screen unchanging for a long time, then it suddenly cuts to black, this creates an afterimage on your retina, very cool, very painterly, kind of a Rothko type trick. Super Cool. Check it out for yourself. It’s a comment on how the message is getting through to us, Persistence of Vision is how movie work, or rather why they work.
Anyway I’m going to drive out to Zabriskie Point one of these days and check it out for myself.
Here it is, on Youtube no less, the doc I saw at the Rock and Roll Film Festival a couple years back,Nancy And Lee. A glimpse into the life of Nancy Sinatra and her musical guru, Lee Hazelwood, as they put on a show in Vegas with Billy Strange as their conductor. Strange supplied the guitar for Bang, Bang, You Shot Me Down and Theses Boots Are Made For Walkling. He also played on the duet between Nancy and her old man, Francis Something Stupid. Hazelwood wrote Boots and a bunch of other hits, many with guitar man Duane Eddy. He was a Producer’s Producer. But here he’s just part of the act. This is a great peek into American culture and backstage at a big Vegas show circa 1972. A follow up to their album of the same name from 1968. Check it out, it’s pretty cool. Thanks to Ken Adamson for turning me onto this Youtube find. We were at the Rock Film Fest together and saw this film projected at the CineFamily. Tres Groovy!