One of the few redeeming qualities of the asshat who owned the video store in which the young cinetrix once labored was that he'd assembled a truly sterling collection of rare jazz VHS tapes over the years. [He was also a musician.] On the Sunday mornings I could persuade Seaghan not to watch MST3K or Mystery Men--again--we'd convene a jazz brunch featuring Art Blakely, Big Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Monk, and Mingus, and many others. As long as we avoided hard bop, our hangovers were made that much more tolerable. Music soothes, etc.
So when the cinetrix stumbled across the Rhapsody Films site today, she was delighted to learn that many of her old out-of-print VHS favorites are now available on DVD, including this double feature directed by Dick Fontaine:
SOUND??
Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage
1967 B&W 27 Min $24.95 (double feature DVD)
Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage's enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk's more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music. Kirk plays three saxes at once, switches to flute, incorporates tapes of birds played backwards, and finally hands out whistles to his audience and encourages them to accompany him, "in the key of W, if you please." Cage, on the other hand, is preparing a work for musical bicycle with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham at the Seville Theatre in London. Cage meets Rahsaan's music in an echo chamber, and he ends his search for the sound of silence in his favorite spot -- the anechoic chamber -- where it turns out to be the uproar of "your nervous system in operation."
DAVID, MOFFETT AND ORNETTE
The Ornette Coleman Trio, 1966
1966 B&W 26 min. 24.95 (double feature DVD)"Director Dick Fontaine set out to catch the music, the thoughts and the personalities of Ornette Coleman's mid-1960s trio during two days in Paris while they worked on scoring a film. He did that job exceptionally well. There is a memorable performance of Ornette's 'Sadness' (complete and uninterrupted from David Izenzon's bowed introduction to the end!) during which Fontaine quickly cuts away from images of the musicians responding to the movie screen to concentrate his cameras directly on the players' serious, passionate involvement with their improvisations. It is one of the best filmed jazz performances I have ever seen." -- Martin Williams, JAZZ TIMES
Perfect, as they say, for gift giving.
