Gamera vs. Barugon
Posted on | August 17, 2011 | No Comments
I’m very excited to announce a show coming up at the Hollywood Theatre the 26th and 27th of this month that I’ve been working on for most of the summer. FILMUSIK, a fantastic local organization, commissions new scores for old movies and then presents a live performance of the music along with voice actors, sound effects artists, etc. The film I was luckily asked to score is a 1966 Japanese monster movie Gamera vs. Barugon. The performance will feature The Ocular Concern (me, Dan Duval, and Stephen Pancerev) along with everyone’s favorite clarinetist David Evans. Here, have a look at the trailer:
FILMUSIK: Gamera vs. Barugon from Galen Huckins on Vimeo.
Here’s the FILMUSIK writeup with all the details. Pick up your tickets here, this will be a great show for sure!!
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FILMUSIK joins forces with composer Andrew Oliver to create a new soundtrack for the 1960’s rubber-suit kaiju monster-piece Gamera vs. Barugon. Live voice actors dub the film into english with the original 1966 script and The live ensemble performs the score live at the Hollywood Theatre.
Filmusik: Gamera vs. Barugon
August 26th, 27th
8pm – Hollywood Theatre
Tickets $12/10 Students/seniors
More info at WWW.FILMUSIK.COM
PICK UP TICKETS FOR THE SHOW
Everyone’s favorite incompetent-but-persistent Hero Turtle returns to the Hollywood Theatre in the epic Japanese monster mash Gamera vs. Barugon. After a scientific expedition gone awry, a vicious beast is wreaking havoc on Japan. With its whip-crack tongue, razor-sharp horns and deadly Binaca breath, Barugon is all your childhood nightmares rolled into one badass dinorhino.
Vanquishing Barugon is a tall order, even for a Hero Turtle like Gamera. Luckily, Filmusik has his back. A crew of voice actors, musicians and foley artists provide a live soundtrack to the film, adding new life to every roar and playing up the camp in every straight-from-the-script line of dialogue. Filmusik’s original score, composed by Andrew Oliver and performed in the pit by the Ocular Concern, is guaranteed to get Gamera – and you – all pumped up for the big showdown. Don’t miss the chance to add your cheers and jeers to the soundscape in this dazzling reimagining of a classic film. Gamera can’t do it without you!
ABOUT FILMUSIK: Based out of Portland, Oregon. Filmusik is a collaborative performance group of musicians, composers and actors creating a unique movie experience by performing a new soundtrack for classic films live in the pit.
Whether it’s a vocal chorus wailing away to a spaghetti western gunfight, voice actors dubbing the cartoon characters of Gulliver’s Travels or sound effects (foley) artists smashing crates together for a Japanese monster invasion, seeing professional performers creating sound for the movies live makes for an unforgettable experience.
ANDREW OLIVER is a pianist and composer from Portland, Oregon. He lived in New Orleans from 2002 until 2005, where he studied jazz at Loyola University and performed as both a bandleader and sideman. After evacuating from Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005, he returned to Portland. He has performed throughout the Northwest and Europe with various musicians and groups, and in 2007, as pianist for Devin Phillips and New Orleans Straight Ahead, he was was selected to tour West Africa as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. under the State Department and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s “Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad” program. He co-directs the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, a 14-piece group performing and commissioning new music by jazz composers in the region, as well as directing the Kora Band, a Seattle-based ensemble fusing jazz and west African musical elements which has recently won “2010 NW Jazz Album of the Year” from Earshot Jazz for their album “Cascades.” He is also the recipient of a 2011 ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Award and a 2011 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship.
GAMERA vs. BARUGON. After a treacherous expedition to retrieve a giant opal, disaster strikes as the opal reveals itself to be an egg which spawns Barugon, demon dog from Hell! Armed with a deadly tongue and cold beams, Barugon wreaks havoc on Japan. Gamera comes to save the day
Kora Band Friday at Jimmy Mak’s
Posted on | August 3, 2011 | No Comments
Always a pleasure to play at Jimmy Mak’s and to share the bill with Ben Darwish! Hope to see you there:
Bridgetown salutes Fats Waller this Friday
Posted on | July 7, 2011 | No Comments
It’s always a pleasure to play at Tony Starlight’s supper club and lounge in Portland’s fine Hollywood district, and a plus that I can practically walk to the gig! Anyhow this will be a fun show coming up on Friday, the Bridgetown Sextet will be paying tribute to the great Fats Waller with a number of his famous tunes as well as other more obscure ones we’ve pulled from his band’s book. His small ensembles of the 30′s were one of the main inspirations for Bridgetown back when Scott and I started it a few years ago, so it’s great to come full circle, as it were, and feature some of his music and stylings. Hope to see y’all down there!
poster by tinylittlehammers.com
“Today’s Young Writer”
Posted on | June 17, 2011 | 2 Comments
Shelly Manne
Yesterday I picked up a 10-inch record on Contemporary from 1953 simply entitled “Shelly Manne and his Men” with 8 great, highly arranged tracks with a septet led by Manne and featuring a bunch of West Coast guys, composed and arranged by four West Coast arrangers of the time: Bill Russo (who apparently worked with the Kenton band), Shorty Rogers, Marty Paich (a young pianist), and Jimmy Giuffre. I started to read the liner notes and was immediately struck by a sort of weird deja-vu with a lot of stuff I have been both reading/hearing and thinking about in the past year or so, though this text is indeed a bit old-school in several ways, and as my wife pointed out, makes it sound like a bunch of privileged white guys being somewhat racist and/or snobby. However, filtering that tone out, the point of it is quite interesting and I thought it would be interesting to post an excerpt of it, so here goes:
Today’s young writer is thoroughly familiar with classical music, especially when it’s contemporary. He has had academic training, and is probably pursuing advanced studies in composition, either in a conservatory or with a well-known teacher. He wants to find ways of uniting elements of classical music with jazz. He is extremely articulate harmonically; he feels jazz needs a form and a discipline it cannot achieve without composition, and that a jam-session type of totally improvised music is no longer satisfactory. He wanys a proper balance between the arranged and improvised parts, the improvisation always being closely related to his composition and springing directly from it; in this fashion he feels jazz will have a structure that was missing before.
From the jazz tradition he accepts much and rejects much. He isn’t interested in forms of music he considers harmonically too elementary, but he is always attracted by rhythmic vitality and inventiveness, and his main objective is to incorporate the infinitely varied rhythms and timbres of jazz with the harmonic richness of modern classical music. His masters, then, are as much Bartok or Schoenberg as Count Basie or Charlie Parker.
He is a new kind of composer, who doesn’t accept arbitrary separations between jazz and classical music, who strongly feels he is writing modern music, open to all musical currents, whatever their source. He doesn’t want his music to be categorized, because his interests and training aren’t; he wants to stand or fall as a composer.
I have recently been feeling that perhaps my complete ignorance of the West Coast jazz scene of the 50′s and 60′s has ben perhaps in error, despite the various biases of the “jazz establishment” or maybe “jazz education establishment” about the problems with the perceived whiteness or blandness of the scene. Admittedly there is plenty of bland music that came out of that particular time and place, but as I check it out little by little, I have also started to discover how tight and swinging a lot of that material is, despite its inherent “lightness”, which was certainly a turn off to me when I was a few years younger. There was also a lot of experimentation in the improvisation / composition dichotomy, one of my main points of interest these days, as obviously evidenced by the little essay above.
In case you were wondering, the Shelly Manne album is quite good, a strange but somehow effective mix of strange atonal Jimmy Giuffre fugal material and very harmonically “in” swingers. Anyhow, what do y’all think about all this?
Tunnel Six!
Posted on | May 5, 2011 | No Comments
I’m happy to be back on the road again with Tunnel Six, a great Canadian-American collaboration that began by a chance meeting at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada in 2009. We did a relatively extensive Canadian tour last year that dipped down into the US last spring ending in Portland, where we recorded an album for which we’re in the midst of another album release tour right now in Western Canada. The music is very melodic and accessible and it’s a fascinating project and great to be playing with these guys again after a year. There’s blog postings and photos at the Tunnel Six site, so stay tuned!
Traditional Jazz
Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 4 Comments
I’m very excited to be returning to Jimmy Mak’s this Friday with the Bridgetown Sextet + Midnight Serenaders double bill – we had a fantastic time last time we presented this exciting collaboration and are very happy to do it again.
Recent conversations with Scott Kennedy (stride pianist extraordinaire from Bridgetown) and Doug Sammons (Bridgetown’s guitarist and the Serenaders’ bandleader) have centered around how extremely hip, rebellious, innovative, and energetic this music was in the 1920′s and 30′s and how unfortunate it is that almost a whole generation of both musicians and non-musicians see it as some sort of historical relic only played by dogmatic preservationists and old fuddy-duddies. So both of these bands are more or less out to change that perception by attempting to imbue “traditional jazz” or “old-time jazz” or whatever you want to call it with its original spirit and energy.
As much as I am a modernist in some sense, I can’t help but feel that it is also an important facet of my musical life to be a steadfast proponent of the value of traditional jazz without being overly dogmatic – so often in the course of my musical education the music of the 1920′s and 30′s was presented as though it was just some bland history (with notable exceptions of course). There seems to be a perception among both musicians and non-musicians, promulgated by a certain type of commonly performed “Dixieland”, that all music from that era is indeed bland and uninspired. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my opinion. The musicians of that era were charting unknown territory far more than almost any jazz musicians have since, and they were as far ahead of the other popular music of their day as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was ahead of its contemporaries.
Let’s consider “Maple Leaf Rag” performed in its original version by Joshua Rifkin, then in Jelly Roll Morton’s brilliant transformation, and finally in a completely off-the-wall performance by Sidney Bechet, whose instrument is nearly blown to pieces during his last chorus (click to listen):
Joshua Rifkin – Maple Leaf Rag
Jelly Roll Morton – Maple Leaf Rag
Sidney Bechet – Maple Leaf Rag
Or, from a slightly different perspective, the white cornetist Bix Beiderbecke with one of the premier dance bands (read: 20′s pop) of the day, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, playing “Dardanella” (at least Bix brings in a tiny glimmer of hope to this one), versus Bix with his own small group playing “Riverboat Shuffle” (make sure to make it to the last chorus!):
Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra – Dardanella
Bix Beiderbecke – Riverboat Shuffle
Now I will acknowledge that it is difficult and indeed a bit strange to rail against dogma and preservationism while at the same time performing a style of music which has long since evolved into something else. However, what we are trying to accomplish with Bridgetown is perhaps slightly more multifaceted than simple preservationism or serving as our own amusingly anachronistic version of a “cover band.” The excitement, drive, and rebelliousness manifest in the recordings of the great musicians of the 20′s is undeniably compelling and to us exudes a timeless energy and good spirit. Of course we imbue it with our own sensibilities, techniques, and modern influences and indeed are more than willing to both acknowledge and experiment with those contemporary elements (thus we are manifestly not a “preservationist” band). At the same time, our focus remains on capturing the “rebellious, hip, high energy, hard-driving, untamed, unpredictable and unapologetically joyous” spirit of the music (in the words of Scott Kennedy).
This post also reminds me of my attempt to initiate a series of blog posts on Jazz Pioneers back in 2009, which unfortunately was short-lived. Maybe I ought to take it back up again! Meanwhile the Morton one contains some more thoughts on this very topic as well as some examples of his own evolution as a pianist: “Jazz Pioneers #1 – Jelly Roll Morton”
And of course the full details for the Jimmy Mak’s show this Friday (where this all started) are over at the “Events” page as well as at the Bridgetown Sextet Website!
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