Oregon Music News

A man called “the Salvador Dali of Reggae,” Lee “Scratch” Perry is a Jamaican Rastaman, a producer, and a performer.  Like so many revolutionary artists, he teetered between genius and lunacy.

The Upsetter: the Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry is the first feature-length documentary about the story of a dub music pioneer–a man who “mentored a young Bob Marley, shaped the reggae sound as we know it today, pioneered a new genre called ‘dub,’ and invented what would become ‘the remix.’”

The Upsetter shows us Perry’s life–from rural youth to musical heights in Kingston to the acceptance of reggae overseas–including his production of hits for artists like Paul McCartney, Junior Murvin, The Congos, and The Clash from his hand-built shack christened Black Ark in Jamaica, which he ultimately burned to the ground in an erratic rage.

The film combines old stock footage, concert video, photographs, audio and music clips, and an interview with Perry himself at his current home in Switzerland.

“Some call Lee Scratch Perry a prophet; others claim he’s a madman.  But all agree a film of this true artist’s life is a long time coming; the Upsetter has arrived.”

—
Thursday, January 28 at 8:30 PM
THE UPSETTER: THE LIFE & MUSIC OF LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY [90 mins.]
US 2008 | DIRECTORS: ETHAN HIGBEE, ADAM BHALA LOUGH
More information on NW Film Center

VENUE :
Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205

ADMISSION PRICES :
$8 General
$7 PAM Members, Students, Seniors
$5 Friends of the Film Center
Double features are an additional $2 per ticket.
[cash or checks only]

Robert Knight with Slash. Photo by Maryanne Bilham.

Rock Prophecies is the story of Knight’s past career–an archive that contains the likes of Hendrix, Zeppelin, Elton John, Jeff Beck, ZZ Top, Santana, The Rolling Stones, and the last photographs of Stevie Ray Vaughan alive–as well as his present and future.

Knight has a knack for guitarists, so much so that he becomes personally and emotionally involved with several rising artists, helping them break into the merciless industry.

He guides Aussie rockers Sick Puppies to the USA for the first time, helping them score TV exposure and a top 10 hit.  And he feels like a paternal connection to burgeoning 18-year-old Tyler Dow Bryant, the winner of Robert Johnson Blues Foundation’s New Generation Award and a blues guitar phenom.

Rock Prophecies is a star-studded cinematic and photographic ride with a killer soundtrack, including performances from and interviews with many of the aforementioned artists.

Knight continues discovering himself at age 60 while supporting an aging, Alzheimer-plagued mother, but, nevertheless, continues his hectic lifestyle going backstage, traveling the world, unearthing young talent, and entering into the intimate lives of guitar heroes, producers, and music biz personnel.  And of course, documenting it all.

All Tomorrow’s Parties is a song by The Velvet Underground, a novel, and an English music festival.

This film is about the latter, a music fest that was founded as an alternative to the UK’s massive festivals and featured a lot of what falls under our all-encompassing indie rock umbrella–in the beginning post-rock, avant-garde, and underground hip-hop was often featured.

This 2009 documentary is a “post-punk DIY bricolage”and was made using fan and musician-generated footage filmed live at the events with formats ranging from Super8 to camcorder to mobile phone.

ATP covers the history of the event while documenting the creative madness and merrymaking of a music festival.  It features :

Belle And Sebastian / Grizzly Bear / Sonic Youth / Battles / Portishead / Daniel Johnston / Grinderman / David Cross / Animal Collective / The Boredoms / Les Savy Fav / Mogwai / Octopus Project / Slint / The Dirty Three / The Yeah Yeah Yeahs / The Gossip / GZA / Seasick Steve / Iggy And The Stooges / A Hawk And A Hacksaw / Fuck Buttons / Micah P Hinson / Two Gallants / Akron/Family / Jah Shaka / Saul Williams / Shellac / Patti Smith / John Cooper Clark / Lightning Bolt / Roscoe Mitchell / The Mars Volta

Wow.  Need I say more?  Here’s a preview that looks like it was created by Stanley Kubrick.

As previously reported, the Burn To Shine series pays tribute to a particular city’s music scene by picking a curator to invite his/her favorite bands to perform some songs in a house that is about to be burnt down or otherwise demolished. It’s an idea that gives the live performances that are captured on video a strange urgency or poignancy. Both the viewer and the musicians know that this moment will never be repeated. No matter how many times they watch it on the DVD, it will always be held at a remove from the actual day that it all went down.

This is never more apparent than on the Seattle edition of this series. Death Cab For Cutie front man Ben Gibbard went to great pains to bring together the two disparate sides of his hometown’s musical personality. In the aggressive pop-inflected rock corner are groups like Minus The Bear, Kinski, and Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive To Death. In the moody, melodic folk-based category, you’ll find Tiny Vipers, David Bazan, Cave Singers and Gibbard,  himself, performing a solo number on acoustic guitar.

It’s a great representation of talent, but the best material comes from those groups that either try to straddle the two worlds or eschew them completely. The now defunct Harvey Danger show up for a particularly affecting performance of the song “Little Round Mirrors”, a track that starts off beautifully moody and slow but builds to a glorious pop/rock crescendo. And there’s the sole hip-hop representative (would this DVD have been compiled today, rather than in 2007 when it was filmed, that number would be much bigger considering the wealth of Seattle-based hip-hop talent that has come into their own in the past three years) Blue Scholars who showcase the melodic, politically-tinged grooves that they have only improved on in years since.

As with all of the discs in this series, the musical complexion of Seattle has changed in many ways since this was filmed, and in a lot of ways it has stayed exactly the same. It’s a shame that we might not see any more of the Burn To Shine series. It would be a fascinating exercise to have them fold back and return to the cities that they already visited, picking up on new trends and exciting new bands along the way. In lieu of that, let’s just be happy this snapshot is going to fade away any time soon.

Burn To Shine Seattle will be preceded by The BQE, a film that Chris Young previewed for Oregon Music News

Saturday, January 23 at 9:15 PM

BURN TO SHINE SEATTLE [60 mins.]
US 2009 | DIRECTOR: BRENDAN CANTY/CHRISTOPH GREEN
More information on NW Film Center

VENUE :
Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205

ADMISSION PRICES :
$8 General
$7 PAM Members, Students, Seniors
$5 Friends of the Film Center
Double features are an additional $2 per ticket.
[cash or checks only]

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Sufjan Stevens’ The BQE is an optic triptych, a symphonic masterpiece, a mixed-medium artistic exploration into a maze of concrete, pavement and steel.

It is an 11.7-mile stretch of highway that spans narrows and canals, digs trenches and tunnels, and crawls through tolls and rush hour congestion called the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in NYC.

Directed and composed by Sufjan Stevens, filmed and edited with help, the project was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and originally performed in January 2007 with a live orchestra backing the film for the Next Wave Festival.

Three is symmetrical.  Everything was shot three times.  Three square frames were lined up side by side across the screen, sometimes creating a seamless skyline, other times reflecting reorganized roads.  And three Hooper Heroes, Botanica, Quantus and Electress, are your hosts on this journey.

Sufjan Stevens takes us through the city on the infamous expressway–known to have isolated neighborhoods and shaped waterways with harsh urban planning.  The BQE is easy to spot but difficult to enter… and maybe impossible to understand.  That’s why Sufjan is here.

He takes us through time.  Before there was traffic, there were buildings.  Buildings don’t move, traffic does.  The city is calm like delicately plucked piano strings.  The traffic is not.  Reeds blare like horns, traffic builds, red and yellow tail lights swarm like angry wasps to mallets rolling over disturbed hives.

He takes us through the emotions of daily strife, monotonous treks that never end.  He shows us monstrous structures–constructions and destructions–that never end, yet with a musical and visual flair that imparts a sense of exploration, admiration, wonder, curiosity.  French horns waffle, flutes flutter, oboes honk.

With childlike joy, hula hoops spin like perfect wheels, changing suddenly from carefree to tortuously slow and grinding full of crescendoing highs and depressing lows.  Along corrugated aluminum, below steel beams, beside concrete embankments, semis, mini vans, yellow school buses, cement trucks, SUVs zoom.

Twenty minutes into the performance, Sufjan discretely melds in “Movement IV: Traffic Shock,” a maddeningly fast, schizophrenic electronic breakdown that hardly isolates itself from the rest of the symphonic composition.

The three frames melt and merge with distorted precision using slow and fast motion to slingshot curves, navigate narrow lanes, and cross bridges to the city’s famous skyline on the water.  If there were just one square frame, it would be dull.  If there were two, it would generic and grainy.  But with three, it is utterly breathtaking.

In the city that never sleeps, life happens at night along the BQE.  The in-camera editing and time-lapse photography gives movement to the night as lightning bugs of luminosity come alive, zipping and speeding as traffic thins.  And it ends, with pomp and a different set of spoked wheels.

Sufjan Stevens reflects American life through our expressways and bridges, toll booths and taxis–a life that flies and crawls, hovers and blurs–by taking an urban obscenity and metamorphosing it into a thing of unique beauty through symphony and cinema.

—
Saturday, January 16 + Saturday, January 23 at 9:15 PM
THE BQE (BROOKLYN-QUEENS EXPRESSWAY) [40 mins.]
US 2009 | DIRECTOR: SUFJAN STEVENS
More information on NW Film Center

VENUE :
Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205

ADMISSION PRICES :
$8 General
$7 PAM Members, Students, Seniors
$5 Friends of the Film Center
Double features are an additional $2 per ticket.
[cash or checks only]

Do you love Tango? I mean really love Tango? To dance? To listen? How much do you know about the superstars of Tango from decades gone by? If you answered yes to the first four questions but no to the last, you will absolutely wallow in this film which reunites over a dozen of the world’s greatest Tango musicians.

It screens on Saturday, January 16 at 4:45pm

Director Miquel Kohan’s subtitled film introduces us (or reintroduces, if you’re very knowledgeable) to these stars, many if not all of whom are over 70 years of age. He follows them through rehearsals to a grand performance. I wish there had been more performance and less rehearsal, but Tango fans will marvel at these masterful players.

“Tango is Argentina’s great gift to the world, and here we see why we should all be grateful. Twenty-two ‘maestros,’ singers, musicians, and composers from tango’s glory days (roughly the 1930s to the 1950s), are brought back for a grand performance and recording session. The performers—some of whom must literally dust off their tuxedos—are in fine form, demonstrating the passion at the core of the form. ‘Tango is music, song, dance. Three-minute stories of the people,’ says one maestro. ‘You can’t separate dance from life,’ adds another. While preparations for the concert and recording sessions are under way, people of all ages dance the tango in clubs, restaurants, grand halls, and in the street.”—Dave Nuttycombe.

Watch the trailer:

See the whole Reel Music 27 schedule here.

Oregon Music News is happy to be a sponsor of Reel Music 27.

The 27th edition of the Northwest Film Center’s Music series, an annual January-February event begins this Friday, January 8 with Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Trunk Show at 7pm and Ashes of American Flags a documentary on Wilco. See Chris Young’s preview.

Here’s the trailer from the Neil Young film:

Reel Music 27 ends Sunday, February 7.

Find the full schedule here.

We are very happy to be sponsors for the following films:

JAN 16 SAT 7 PM THE JAZZ BARONESS

–Trailer:
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

GREAT BRITAIN 2009 | DIRECTOR: HANNAH ROTHSCHILD

In the 1950s, Pannonica “Nica” Rothschild, British heiress to one of the world’s largest fortunes, had it all. But one day she happened to hear a jazz record by a struggling piano player. She was completely taken by his music, and thus began a saga of social censure, and even jail, due to the cultivation of the now-legendary Thelonious Monk. Rescuing instruments from pawnshops, even shepherding bands to gigs in her Bentley, Rothschild became an unlikely freedom fighter for a generation of black artists and a patron saint of bebop. Combining interviews with Quincy Jones, Sonny Rollins, Chico Hamilton, and Clint Eastwood with Nica’s personal letters read by Helen Mirren, Hannah Rothschild (Nica’s great-niece) crafts a fascinating love story between an indomitable woman, a musical giant, and the jazz that bewitched them both. (82 mins.) Sponsored by Oregon Music News

JAN 21 THUR 7 PM I NEED THAT RECORD

- Trailer:

US 2009 | DIRECTOR: BRENDAN TOLLER

While Portland’s independent music stores survive (not to say flourish), the situation is much bleaker nationally. In the past decade, over 3,000 record stores have closed, the result of record industry greed, corporate consolidation, new technology and marketing hype sometimes inversely proportional to the quality of music. Exploring the trajectory from the vinyl glory days of old to a fractured digital culture, Toller enlists the viewpoints of small record store owners across the country, social observers such as Noam Chomsky, and musicians such as Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Ian MacKaye (Fugazi), Mike Watt (Minutemen), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Chris Frantz (Talking Heads), and Pat Carney (The Black Keyes), to reflect on why the cultural oasis of the local store matters and why it must survive. (77 mins.) Sponsored by Oregon Music News

JAN 21 22 THUR 8:45 PM, FRI 7 PM

BILL FRISELL MEETS BUSTER KEATON

In the early 1990s, jazz guitar innovator Bill Frisell composed evocative new scores for six films by Buster Keaton. The music was released only on CD. But now Frisell, with bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron, has combined the scores with the silent films, creating a magical marriage of two masters of Americana—one of sound, one of image. Keaton’s ONE WEEK (1920) and THE HIGH SIGN (1921) are non-stop barrages of visually striking and perfectly executed sight gags. GO WEST (1925), which displays Keaton’s pathos as much as his humor, finds the great comedian doing his best to wrangle cattle. Frisell’s take on Keaton’s surreal mix of slapstick and melancholy is at once vintage Frisell and a treat for anyone who appreciates the timeless brilliance of Keaton. “Frisell’s scores perfectly balance the need to be abstract and the need to be literal. . . [He has] recurring motifs that suggest the new American possibility of the time, motifs redolent of the sort of optimism heard in some country music, blues and jazz.”—New York Times. (90 mins.) Sponsored by Oregon Music News

JAN 29 FRI 7 PM RETAKE PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS: SCORING THE CLASSICS

DIRECTORS: VARIOUS

Portland-based film scoring ensemble Retake Productions presents an evening of film with live original musical accompaniment. The seven-piece ensemble—violin, cello, trumpet, two guitars, acoustic bass, and drums—accompanies some of the most striking films of the silent era. The program includes Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s surrealist masterpiece UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), Joris Iven’s visionary rainscape REGEN (1929), and excerpts from Robert Flaherty’s timeless NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922) and Alexander Dovzhenko’s Soviet cinema classic EARTH (1930). Special Admission: $10 general, $8 Portland Art Museum members and SSC Friends; Silver Screen Directors, Producers, and Benefactors free. Sponsored by Oregon Music News

JAN 29 FRI 9 PM

BOB MARLEY: EXODUS 77

GREAT BRITAIN 2008 | DIRECTOR: ANTHONY WALL

Drawing on a mind-boggling wealth of news and television archives from 1977, mixing in Marley’s music and words, director Wall (THE BRIAN EPSTEIN STORY, ONE IRISH ROVER) magically evokes a pivotal year in the life of this great artist. Time Magazine voted Marley’s album “Exodus”—which took reggae and the message of Rastafarian culture to audiences worldwide—Album of the Century that year, and Marley took up residence in London after an attempt on his life in Jamaica. He exploded with a creativity and force that made his true peers not only Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but also the likes of Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela. (90 mins. ) Sponsored by Oregon Music News

Jeff Tweedy in Nashville. Photo by Zoran Orlic.

“Our band has made its living on the road from the beginning,” states Jeff Tweedy.  It’s a road that has explored America’s interiors and exteriors shaping the explorers and inspiring the distinct sound we call Wilco.

In a time of mash-ups and MySpace superstars, unidentifiable noise and vicious barking, Wilco are not a breath of fresh air, they’re a gale–followed by the uncertain calm after the storm.  Wilco masterfully combine timelessness with innovation, allowing us to reconnect with rock’n'roll in its simplest, purest form.

Directors Brendan Canty (the drummer from Fugazi) and Christoph Green take America inside America with Wilco steering the tour bus from Tulsa to New Orleans, Mobile to Nashville to Washington, D.C.

Ashes of American Flags, filmed in February and March of 2008, takes us through cow pastures, past semi-trucks, and into the band’s life on the road–from sound checks to banter to backstage.  Tweedy’s white suit embroidered with roses and rhinestones sparkles in the subdued blue and red hues of the stage while his gravely, straightforward voice runs lyrical circles.

Touring takes tolls on their bodies as Tweedy shoots steroids, Glenn Kotche grinds his hands raw on his kit, and guitarist Nels Cline self induces whiplash but displays solos and whammy-work that flutter faster than a humming-bird–hands a blur as HD film can’t capture his sheer velocity.

The only compliant is that Canty and Green leave me salivating for more spectacular concert footage.  With Tweedy in his cowboy hat, Mikael Jorgensen adds organ-ic yet electrifying keys to Wilco’s unrefined tones.  Horns blast from the balcony as the band nods beneath New Orleans’ fleurs-de-lys while showing us America reflected in their eyes.

It’s easy to forget that old formulas still solve problems.  Beautifully merging country, rock, indie, folk, alt, pop, and blues, Ashes shows us something natural, classic.  Tweedy exhales life onto the screen, telling stories with his lyrics, creating landscapes in our minds, while the band flourishes on the road entering our cities and homes.

Watch the trailer here.

—
Friday, January 8 — Saturday, January 9 at 9:15 PM
Wilco Live : Ashes of American Flags [88 mins.]
US 2009 | DIRECTORS: BRENDAN CANTY, CHRISTOPH GREEN
More information on NW Film Center

VENUE :
Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205

ADMISSION PRICES : Buy tickets online
$8 General
$7 PAM Members, Students, Seniors
$5 Friends of the Film Center
Double features are an additional $2 per ticket.
[cash or checks only]