The Lost Weekend: A Brilliant Darkness

Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945).

“It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night, so good night.” – Bellevue Nurse Bim, in The Lost Weekend.

The Lost Weekend, released November 29, 1945. Paramount Pictures. Directed by Billy Wilder, Produced by Charles Brackett, Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on a novel by Charles Jackson. Cinematography by John Seitz. Edited by Doane Harrison. Music by Miklos Rozsa.  Duration: 101 minutes. Featuring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen. Wilder has explained that part of what originally drew him to this material was having worked with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity, subsequent to Brackett’s brief vacation. Chandler had been a recovering alcoholic during that stint and claimed that the stress and tumult of his working relationship with Wilder (actually not that much different from Wilder’s relationship with Brackett) caused him to start drinking again to survive the collaboration. Wilder has claimed that he made the film, about a drunk with chronic writer’s black, at least partly in order to explain Chandler to himself.

One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd: that could be the business card logo of struggling novelist Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, but also of his real life alter ego Charles Jackson, author of the novel on which Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett based their Academy Award-winning 1945 cinematic study of the struggle to outrun your own shadow. This unsettling masterpiece of internalized noir is an example of a certain brand of dark cinema at its finest, and when it was shown recently on the TCM network we got to see exactly why that is: it’s a kind of exotic corporate merger between personal and professional angst, exploring two competing compulsions, writing and drinking, and it takes no prisoners in exposing the raw nerve inhabiting and inhibiting the urge to tell stories. Ironically, it also demonstrated to Brackett and Wilder that, at least for the time being, they were stronger working in tandem than apart, despite the fact that they could barely stand being in the same room together.

Double Solitaire: Creative Partnerships Made in Hell

William Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950), written by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder, directed by Wilder.

“When two great saints meet it is a humbling experience." – Paul McCartney, 1968.

1. brackettandwilder

It was called the Golden Age of Hollywood for good reason. The early evolutionary phase of the film industry, which I personally designate as roughly being from 1929 to 1959, immediately established the stylistic devices, narrative techniques, creative content and future direction that cinema would take as both a visual art form and a commercial business enterprise. Most importantly, perhaps, the paradoxical fact that cinema could be both entertaining and profitable, as well as both philosophically challenging and emotionally comforting, was etched in celluloid almost from its beginnings at the turn of the century. Fine cinema is quite simply the best of both worlds.

Among the many screenwriters, producers and directors who blazed that ever-expanding trail, few would have quite the lasting impact on both comedy and tragedy as impressive and influential as the iconic achievements of the volatile collaborative partnership between writer-producer Charles Brackett and writer-director Billy Wilder.

Tales from the Making of Niagara, 1953 by Richard Shmelter

Publicity still from Niagara (Photo by Gene Korman).

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara Falls, a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control.” – Boisterous but accurate publicity poster for the film’s release.

“I only stop when I’m done.” – Equally accurate self-analysis from Marilyn herself. 

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Niagara, though some friends prefer to refer to my ardor for it in other ways: obsession, fixation compulsion, fetish. They’re quite right, of course. Maybe it evokes the frequent family road trips I took as a youngster from Toronto to Niagara Falls, or perhaps it was the obvious increase in temperature provoked in a ten-year-old boy caught in the torrential environment of Marilyn Monroe. Guilty as charged. I also enjoy reminding such friends that all those states of mind they teasingly attribute to my passion for this film are essentially the core features of the film noir genre itself.

I can’t count the number of times an argument, or let’s call it a heated disagreement, ensued between myself and other viewers or reviewers who took the noir genre more literally in its black and white, dark urban streets, femme fatale and psycho-thriller overtones. Some friends were underwhelmed by the splashy aura of the falls motif in Niagara, the nearly rural touristy setting, and of course the palette, even if they were mutually taken with Marilyn’s Rose and her sinister appeal. I’m a huge fan of all of those nourish aspects too, but I’m also a huge defender of Niagara as a late-blooming and innovative exponent of the genre that becomes all the more obvious if you simply watch it in black and white as a viewing experiment.

So I’m delighted to report that Richard Shmelter, author of the thoroughly readable and charmingly obsessive Tales from the Making of Niagara, 1953, published by Malibu Sunset Media, not only shares my sense of its brilliantly noirish sunlit darkness, but also acclaims it as the film that first put Monroe on the stellar star map and also made her what she clearly was, has been and I suppose always will be: what he calls an iconic influencer. The fact is that, in the absence of a historical context back then in the 50’s for the very postmodern social media concept of what an influencer is and does, Shmelter demonstrates that the impact of her persona and gravitas makes it not only acceptable to call her that, but almost imperative. I guess that kind of makes her a posthumous influencer.

The Big Carnival: Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951)

Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. (All movie stills courtesy of Paramount Studios.)

“The biology of the shadow has yet to be fully explored.”

Andrei Biely, 1913

“We are a nation of hecklers. The most hard boiled, undisciplined people in the world.”

Billy Wilder, 1950

I think it’s fair to say, at least from my perspective, that someone has finally come along and fully studied the biology of the shadow. After their divorce as filmmaking partners, both Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder went on to make solo efforts that pushed film noir even further towards an unexpected edge. Brackett produced Niagara with Marilyn Monroe in 1953, and Wilder created Ace in the Hole (a.k.a. The Big Carnival) with Kirk Douglas in 1951. By a strange coincidence, unless it was synchronicity, just after writing the section of the tumultuous story having to do with their final noir masterpiece as collaborators, Sunset Boulevard, I happened upon a TCM broadcast of Wilder’s first independent effort after their break-up. I had seen Ace in the Hole several times previously; however, it had seldom resonated in quite the same way as it did while I was watching it from a retrospective point of view. So I sat back with a glass of wine and my notebook, prepared to venture once again into Billy’s post-Brackett domain. My instinctive initial response was even more severe than my first viewings had been.

The Brain Doctor: William Burroughs (1914-1997)

Portrait of William S. Burroughs by Lance Austin Olsen.

“Language is a virus.”

W. B.

William S. Burroughs’ supernal and subterranean Beat influence on Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac alone would secure him a stable place in the modernist canon of American letters, as would Norman Mailer’s prescient early acclamation, “Burroughs might be the only American writer of sheer genius.” For me, Alexander Kafka penned what I’ve long felt was an ideal characterization of this experimental literary legend: “Burroughs was an ethereal intermediary between the here and the fiery beyond, pausing to give us the purgatorial skinny.” That skinny was transmitted in haunting and disturbing novels such as Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), among many others. However, it was through his influence on every other aspect of 20th-century culture in all media that his spectral presence as a testifier was most perhaps most long-lasting.

Object Lessons: Videotape

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Objects have the longest memories of all. Beneath their stillness, they are alive with all the experiences they have ever witnessed.”

--Teju Cole

Object Lessons, published by Bloomsbury Books, is an illuminating series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy’s incisive biography of this impactful technology reveals, over the span of a single decade, the VHS format changed the privileged relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then mysteriously sank back into oblivion. Although what we now call streaming has assumed prominence, the legacy of the humble videotape still continues to inform modern entertainment. And I’m delighted to say that both Godeanu-Kenworthy and I appear to share a similar, if not parallel, fondness for the technology that preceded our present stream-mad dimension. Here’s my outset admission: I’ve always been a huge fan of the analog world, its haptic tone and the various shapes it took, and I still am. The author of this charming little book, which has a giant subject and theme that belies its scale, also shares in her book’s beginnings what might account for her fondness. Our first exposure to any given medium of expression is often the most effective for our successive modes of experience.

At the Threshold: The Unmoored Dreaming

Album cover art: Bjorn Vandenneucker

“What is typical of our century and largely promoted by the media, is the general belief that everything that is broadcast or distributed must be instantly comprehensible. But that is an enormous misconception. It is rooted in the assumption that there is such a thing as an audience. We must correct this view and make it clear that people are individuals, each of whom is following a unique path toward learning and development and free to make personal choices. So let us be less eager to teach and to prescribe rules, and rather just say: ‘If you want to listen, you can; here are the recordings and scores. We give concerts; we will provide information. But whether or not you come or you are interested is your own business.”

– Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Every Day Brings New Discoveries” (1991)

New music, and I do mean new, has arrived in our space-time continuum. And poised, rather gracefully I might add, somewhere between the free jazz traditions of Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton, and the new music domains of George Crumb and John Cage. Yes, this is lofty territory, but these two composer-performers hold their own in the rarified atmospheres I’ve often delineated as soundtracks for an imaginary film, or national anthems for a utopian country. In this case, the country is a multi-cultural effort. The Unmoored Dreaming is a free jazz group consisting of Goncalo Oliveira, a Portuguese guitarist based in Den Haag, and Bjorn Vandenneucker, a double bass player and composer based in Brussels, that explores its mutually created repertoire in an expansive and open format. Open is the operative word here, since their charming music doesn’t so much begin or end as simply happen. And elegantly so.

The Unmoored Dreaming is also the title of their eleven-piece debut album, the result of what the duo call their “reinless traveling through sonic landscapes,” which was released on Bandcamp in April of 2023. As disparate as jazz and serialism might at first appear to be, the tangible and even haptic link between them is clearly the delivery of multiple tempos played simultaneously. The individual pieces in the recording from this daringly confident collaborative duo are also linked as in a suite of sonatas, though each work also stands comfortably alone on its own. Their partnership itself is also identified with and embodied by that evocative name, which captures the shared motive and aesthetic agenda of their initial release, recorded, mixed and produced by Manolo Cabras at Studio Noyer in Brussels.

Tina Bids Farewell: The Exuberant Buddhism of the Late Tina Turner

Tina Turner, in 2018. (Photo: Charles Gates)

“The Buddhist concept of changing poison into medicine works. My life has proven it."  – Tina Turner, Living Buddhism, July 2018.

As a Buddhist, I don’t, of course, believe in the customary concepts of heaven or hell, since as fellow practitioners well know, we humans do a pretty good job of manufacturing our own versions of those two domains right here on earth while we’re alive in this material world. Like many of you, though, I do, however, believe in reincarnation, and that’s where my mind first went when I learned of the passing of the great Tina Turner at the age of 83 at her home in Switzerland on May 23, 2023, with her beloved second husband Erwin Bach at her side. Her first husband, the notoriously abusive Ike Turner, whose sole role in history has become his introduction of a shy sixteen-year-old girl named Anna Mae Bullock to the recording industry and his transformation of that girl into Tina, the larger-than-life talent we all came to adore, has drifted off into whatever hellish domain awaits the cruel and inhuman among us. But Tina, she might well have gone elsewhere.

Time Transfixed: The Momentary Music of Hemisphere

“My desire was not to compose, but to project sounds into time, free from any compositional rhetoric. Music which specifically defined pitch but allowed the temporal dimension to remain indeterminate, thus creating a sonic world where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.”

Morton Feldman

To become transfixed is to be rendered motionless with wonder, to be immobilized by astonishment. To some extent it touches upon the condition which in more classical eras was associated with what was known as the sublime, a state akin to awe. The sublime is still with us, of course, but it is often sublimated since the course of modernism conducted its now well-known radical discontinuity. This was especially the case in the domain of music, which is a durational art, one occurring strictly as momentary sonic situations, relying historically on the laws of harmony in order to soothe the savage breast. The aleatory and organic flow of what became known as “new music,” however, tended to naturally embrace dissonance in a manner which celebrates time transfixed. If we try to imagine the notion of time transfixed we can also determine how frozen time might amount to space itself: to hear and see them as one in the same quantum thing, or, in Zen terms, no-thing.

Iconosphere: Cinema in the History of Art

William Holden, Sunset Boulevard, 1950.

“Movies are magic” – Van Dyke Parks

When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, growing up in the wasteland suburbs outside Toronto (Don Mills was, by the way, among the first such planned outliers in North America; it looked rather pleasant and was a splendid locale for experimenting with Aldous Huxley’s spiritual vitamins) and where I spent much of my time watching television like most of my fellow baby boomers, I was also treated to a rather unique experience that my fellow truants were not.

While whiling away the dreamy hours in front of that magic flickering box I would occasionally be taken aback by the sight of my own surname on the screen as the writer and producer of many a classic black-and-white film being screen on the new medium of TV.

There was, in those days, an almost total absence of the specifically programmed content we take for granted today, and instead the new-born networks would recycle movies from the early age of cinema for unsuspecting viewers such as myself. And when I asked them who this “Charles Brackett” was, their perhaps too-casual, somewhat innocent suburban response was something along the lines of “Oh ,yeah, I think he was part of the American branch of the family who had something to do with Hollywood.”

Something to do with Hollywood? He was, in fact, a member of Hollywood royalty, having also been a member of the Lost Generation in Europe along with Hemingway and Fitzgerald (both of whom he knew and nursed through their hangovers) before coming to New York and being a member of the Algonquin Room circle along with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley (more help with hangovers, Charlie being teetotal) while also serving as the drama critic for The New Yorker.

Like other talented writers (including of course, Fitzgerald and Faulkner) he was eventually financially lured to Hollywood, where he was teamed up by Paramount Studios with a recent émigré from Austria who barely spoke English, to write screenplays for the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Deep Listening: The Immersive Music of Rosanna Gunnarson and Karin Johansson

Cover: Dan Froberg

I Grunda Vikar Ar Bottnarna Mjuka, 2024
(Outerdisk Recordings, Gothenberg Sweden)

 

“When they trailed their spikes over the strings, the strings sounded again; but they played in a new way, for now they were tuned to another pitch.” – August Strindberg

“The rest is silence.” – Hamlet’s last words

I once knew an artist, Mario Reis, who told me in a sotto voce tone that he desperately wanted to capture what he called the slow accretion of time, in a painting that would contain the true sediment of time. Not a mere representation of that phenomenon, mind you, he emphasized, but the actual sediment itself, splayed out on the canvas for onlookers to behold in all its fleeting and melancholy essence. He then proceeded, over the course of several years, to immerse his large stretched canvases in rivers, lakes, bays and occasionally oceans, allowing the silt to autograph his paintings, using the riverbeds and rocks as living brushes to establish a base upon which he would subsequently improvise his own subtle stylistic markings. His pictures thus became snapshots of time itself, and also left a residue of flowing watery movements amounting to frozen music. They stunned me in their beauty as artifacts which skillfully narrated nature as a sequence of uncontrolled and uncontrollable moments.

Argonaut of Modernity: Impersonating Pessoa

“You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely.”

--Machado de Assis

Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.

This new entry into the modernist archive by CultureLab member Bartholomew Ryan, Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa, sheds fresh and welcome light on one of the most mysterious and elusive figures in the annals of contemporary literary culture. He was, in fact, not only a prototypical modernist, but also a stylistic harbinger of the amorphous postmodern ethos long before it even existed. The French writer Jules Michelet once declaimed, “Each epoch dreams the era to follow it.” Pessoa seems to have been the brilliant dreamer who imagined the relativistic and quantum-drenched psychological environment in which we currently dwell. Assis certainly knew whereof he spoke, for both he and his younger countryman Pessoa may have bravely contemplated the very shaky future we all live in now as a wobbly present.

Stoner by John Williams: The Most Famous Unknown Novel in the World

NYRBooks Classics.                University of Texas Press.     

“But first, are you experienced? Or have you ever been experienced?”

--Jimi Hendrix

Like most folks who read books and watch films as a professional activity, it can sometimes feel as if we’re expected to pass cogent judgment on all books or films (or in my case also on music, visual art and buildings) to discern and share whether something is worth reading or watching. To me, however, life is too short to advise people on what to avoid, what didn’t work, succeed or achieve its creative aims, and what the artistic flaws were that made it a failure. There are plenty of good critics who do that to some degree, and I too enjoy reading their opinions, but I’d much rather talk about films, music or in this case books, that are so marvelous that they can or might actually alter the course of your life in some significant way if you read them. Stoner, released by John Williams in 1965, is just such a book. So is the book about his book, written by Charles Shields in 2018. In fact, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel might even be that rare case of a work that will really help readers to appreciate the whereof and what-for of the book it examines, in such micro-detail and macro-fondness, that it could even benefit from being consumed prior to Stoner itself.

Imaging Irony: Without Empathy / 8 Filmmakers

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.”

Jorge Luis Borges

It’s always heartening to encounter other lovers of cinematic art who resonate with one’s own passions for moving pictures that speak in a kind of secret language that we alone can fully understand. Even if that we is a large multitude of sorts, the pleasures we share in the brilliant darkness of movie theatres still seem to situate us in a private world unfolding before our mesmerized eyes. Between the flickering screen and our witnessing selves there is a shared bond which speaks to us in a dialect constructed from images that often tell a story somewhat different from the linear narrative of the screenplay script.

Interstitial Music: The Space Between the Notes

Arnold Schoenberg, MS 96.

“It’s all about starting in the middle of a musical sentence and then moving in both directions at once.” – John Coltrane

Man, we are a long, long way here from the dreamy and wistful harp pieces of the classical age, and it’s a fine thing too. In the hands of a masterfully gifted contemporary jazz composer and improviser such as Maria-Christina Harper, this historically tinged musical instrument acquires a whole new meaning. And the muscular heft to go along with it, as she pulls it further and deeper into the postmodern age, while still remaining true to the roots of its inception in a subtle way that honours her harp precursors, Dorothy Ashby in 1957-58, and Alice Coltrane in 1967-68. The blessing here is that on the new album release Passing By from Little Yellow Man Records, Harper (yes, in a delightfully charming piece of synchronicity, this edgy harpist’s name is actually Harper) is accompanied by the recently formed eponymously named Trio and joined by the restrained brilliance of Evan Jenkins on percussion and the fluid elegance of Josephine Davies on saxes. The results are stunning, in both their aggressive reach into a sonic future and their respectful evocation of a circuitous past. Together, they slam it.

Bygone days of the gilded age.

An instrument which sounded and felt so sweetly gentle in the hands of the younger son of Sebastian Bach in his Sonata for Harp in G Major, or enigmatic in Beethoven’s Six Variations on a Swiss Song, had even evolved eventually into a 20th-century modernist experiment in atonality in the visionary fingertips of Luciano Berio or Elliott Carter. But it was in the jazz canon that the harp suddenly assumed a truly startling arrival into Nowness, first in the still wistful but advanced Dorothy Ashby, followed by the cosmic vibrations of the great Alice Coltrane a decade later. And now we are permitted an even deeper dive into the Now, with Harper’s trio of ideally matched musical partners. Their debut release as a trio (which follows on the heels of her solo album Gluten Free and a duet album with lute player Yiagos Hairetis called Draft) features her uniquely tuned electric harp in tandem with her subtle sonic effects and bowing. I thought there was a bass player until I realized Harper was supplying it in her spare time.

The composer is here sharing space and time in an exemplary fused fashion with Jenkins and Davies. Far from this accomplished sax player and versatile drummer accompanying the harpist, however, here they are all engaged in a three-way conversation taking place in the space between their notes. Their jointly created music is perpetually beginning and ending at the same time, in keeping with that majestic insight expressed so well by Trane: the notion that sounds can be free enough to erupt from a shared centre (with the right partners) and then swiftly, or slowly, shift in either direction, towards a commencement or a conclusion, or both. This is interstitial music indeed, co-created according to what Trane also once referred to as “natural laws,” a sense of liberty within the form whereby content assumes its own austere gravitas, and I’m also reminded of his other amazing admonition, “Listen, you can play a shoestring if you do it with enough authenticity.”

Dorothy Ashby, 1958.

Alice Coltrane, 1968.

Maria-Christina Harper, Stavros Centre.

 The Harper Trio’s shared expedition into an exotic domain of melting away the sonorous time in between their notes, a constantly shifting sonic plateau that occasionally evokes the ambient poetry of Harold Budd or Jon Hassell, while still remaining embedded in a raw free jazz neighbourhood, is punctuated with emotive renderings that occur at the very edges of each instrumentalist’s impressive capabilities. Perhaps for that reason, I was struck by a visual depiction by the revolutionary composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose untitled ‘drawing’ on music composition paper features dramatic cut-out shapes periodically interrupting the flow of notes. Which is a virtual emblem for the music birthed by this talented combo (three musicians, seven pedals). These spaces, or silences physically removed from his notations, seem like a kind of echo in reverse of the Harper Trio’s interest in the subtle aural action taking placed in between the shared notes they are playing. This is music where the makers are leaning towards each other as performers.

Another of Trane’s characterizations, that of permission to play absolutely anything as along as it is also found in nature, is marvelously illustrated by the trio’s video for the title track, “Passing By,” performed together in a farm field somewhere, with spaces between the players mirroring the spaces between them in the album’s cover image, and, once again, of the spaces between the notes they emit together. Although I myself am personally at two with nature I do understand the fact that those who are at one with it find a symphony of sounds emerging from the lurking silences hovering around them when they sit in fields, or riverbanks or forests. There is clearly a pristine order in the disorder of sounds populating the natural environment, where simultaneous songs chirped by birds or insects all merge into one wavelength. Here, it’s almost a sonic storm of sorts, with notes, riffs, solos and melodies replacing the bird flock.

And so it is with the Harper Trio’s new album. The title piece in particular seems to embody that flight pattern between the performers, as do “Castle Hill Road” and especially “East Hill Meditation,” which feels to the bloodstream of the listener precisely like what its title suggests. In each case, the three players, each of whom is actually in the middle of their structural unit, all move in both directions at once (pace Trane) towards the other two members of the trio. The resulting shared murmur, a cluster of notes touching each other, a constellation of flickering sounds coming and going, is a veritable reverie for the ears. Sometimes, as in “Standing Alone,” there are big bonfires of silence embedded in the player’s interactions. While in “In Cairo/Grandma’s Coat,” the languid piece unfolds like a still smoldering campfire after the sitters have all gone to sleep. And “A Greek in Spain” spins a mesmerizing web of fine translucent threads as it slowly engages the trio in a subtle dance of instrumental intimacy of a sort one rarely encounters.

Harper Trio, 2023: Evan Jenkins, Maria-Christina Harper, Josephine Davies.

“A Greek in Spain” is also a piece that really breaks through to the other side. I don’t know how, but it’s as if a three-way love affair had been arranged between a flaming flamenco playing guitar and harp alternately, a tripping vagabond Art Pepper taking mystic runs and a lovely Max Roach stampede culminating back in the same quiet place everything inexplicably emerged from. While Ashby was lyrically daring in her tight combo setting, using only either her harp, a drummer and a bassist, or her harp and a flutist with no percussion at all; and while Coltrane was exuberantly insistent, propelled forward by the rhythm section of her late husband’s band, Garrison and Ali, Harper’s compositions and her deft, almost clairvoyant interplay with her fellow players plunge us headlong into the arms of what those two visionaries may have been pointing toward on the horizon.

Indeed, with this new triumvirate departure, which can accurately be called a selection of ‘cinematic soundscapes’, Harper and her fellow musicians take us to an entirely new place, even within the borders of what we customarily call the new music idiom. She has asked sincerely, “Why shouldn’t the harp have its own Jimi Hendrix?” and the resounding answer is, no reason at all. Time for lift-off. Also accurate is the assessment that their music combines Greek and Eastern scales with Western advanced jazz, creating a fresh sound for which she expresses the hope that it isn’t “too harpy” (don’t worry, it isn’t). Based in London, the trio first encountered each other in the seaside town of Hastings, where a quieter lifestyle pace enabled an unrushed exploration of the edges they could travel together musically.

“We knew we were onto something special from our very first rehearsal. It was an exciting and special moment,” Harper has observed, expressing some of the combined gratitude for the synchronicity of their first creative voyage. When you listen to The Harper Trio’s new ideally titled album Passing By, you too will be invited into the unique space and time they concoct together. Somewhere, Alice Coltrane is smiling. This group has picked up her mantle and carried it forward into a new and compelling territory: far from monastic in tone, they are a quantum-level trio, conversing in an interstitial language of subtle thresholds, as they recursively pass by our world.

Little Yellow Man Records

Harper Trio is:

Maria-Christina Harper, an award-winning, Hastings-based, jazz, avant-garde harpist, composer and songwriter. She is the first prize winner of the Wales International Harp Competition (2010), performing her own compositions on the electric harp. She studied the harp with an entrance scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music and released her solo album Gluten Free as MC & the 7 Pedals with Valentine Records. She was also part of the avant-garde folk duet Hairetis Harper, who released their album, Draft (Same Difference Music, 2020), which received exceptional reviews. Maria-Christina has toured or collaborated with many artists, including Katie Melua, Soft Cell, Anni Hogan, Alani, Jeremy Reed, Ala.ni, Richard Strange, Pete Long, Georgina Jackson, and Psarantonis,

Josephine Davis, winner of the 2019 Parliamentary Award Jazz Instrumentalist of the year, is a musical artist at the forefront of the UK contemporary music scene, pushing the boundaries of jazz with an emphasis on extended and collaborative improvisation. As a saxophonist she is known for her melodic focus, versatility and unique style, which has been described as “consistently inventive” (Jazzwise Magazine), “strong and authoritative” (The JazzMann) and “with winning immediacy” (MOJO Magazine). Now becoming equally known as a composer, her unique voice is a blend of classical, jazz and folk music, creating an intensely dynamic sound infused with the Nordic quality of her Shetland roots. Deeply influenced by the American composer Maria Schneider, Josephine was resident composer and tenor player for the London Jazz Orchestra from 2011-2016, and now has her own big band The Enso Ensemble.

New Zealand-born Evan Jenkins studied jazz at the Western Australia Academy for Performing Arts and soon after was named Drummer of the Year at the West Australian Music Industry Awards.  During this time, he played with the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra, and toured the country with the late, great Ronnie Scott.  He has been a resident of the UK (now based in Hastings) for over 30 years becoming a much in-demand drummer. An original member of The Neil Cowley Trio, Evan’s recording/live credits also include performances with Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Robben Ford, Tom Jones, Bert Jansch, and Ben Watt.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work in progress is a new book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder.

Tania Giannouli: The Future is Always Arriving

“Silence is the potential from which music can arise.” – Keith Jarrett 

Meteors are among the rarest objects on earth and have left a pervasive impact on our planet and civilization. Arriving amidst thunderous blasts and flame-streaked skies, they were once thought to be messengers from the gods, embodiments of the divine. Prized for their outlandish qualities, they are collectible as objects of art, desire and literary muses. The scientific community had only a reluctant embrace of their interplanetary origins but now has surrendered to one of their key attributes, the power to awaken a precious and near-forgotten human trait – the capacity for awe. The astute reader will see exactly where I’m going with this apparent digression: Tania Giannouli is a musical meteorite. The great jazz innovator Ornette Coleman once summed up an ideal approach to music. “The theme you play at the start of a number is the territory. And what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure.” What a perfect place to begin to trace the trajectory of Giannouli, a talented composer, pianist, and, most importantly, solo performance artist.

Solo, the newest record release by this talented Greek musician, is also the next step in her ongoing journey into the origin of human-made sounds in a visceral location: an aural landscape situated somewhere equidistant between the heart and the mind. She is also a meteor inspired by a lengthy lineage ranging from both jazz and musique concrète to Scriabin and Tatum, yet I hesitate to say ‘influenced by’ simply because her approach is so distinctive that it reveals more of an open dialogue with the diverse constellation of composers who have nourished her unique sound. The muscularity of that sound shares a certain vibration with Keith Jarrett (especially with her latest venture into solo piano performance) while the depth of the sonic soul behind it has an alignment with the serial meditations of Terry Riley and LaMonte Young. If Sun Ra and Carla Bley went on a blind date with Cecil Taylor and Joanne Brackeen, their mythical love-child may have been named Tania.

Outlier/Indweller: Writing as Walking

Milkweed Editions, 2022.

 

“The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.” – Cheryl Strayed

In her 2012 memoir called Wild: From Lost to Found, the American writer Cheryl Strayed recalls taking herself off on a thousand-mile hike of self-discovery, observing, “I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.” She was also sharing her experience of wanting per se, almost as a location in space and time, one she could arrive at by escaping from its insistent desire, even comparing her wanting to a wilderness she needed to be liberated from. Unfettered physical space and its traversal are frequently perceived as a conduit to expanded consciousness, but the latter is, however, not the only way to free oneself from the sense of confinement which often ironically accompanies a heightened sense of self-awareness.

The Canadian poet and visual artist Adam Wolfond’s new book of mesmerizing poems, The Wanting Way, is perhaps an ideal example of how effectively a being who at first glance appears to occupy a profound sense of confinement can, upon reflection and closer observation, reveal himself to be freely traversing interior expansive landscapes of exquisite beauty with a charming sense of humility and grace. He has, in fact, clearly documented, in his own inimitable style, how he manages to travel as an exceptionally gifted poetic flâneur and arrive at an often poignant way out of the woods of wanting and also to arrive at a way into self-expression of a truly extraordinary sort. He explores an interior wilderness.

Painting With Sound: The Contemplative Music of Gabriel Vicens

Photographs courtesy of the composer.  Album cover by Krystal Pagan.

 

“You can’t judge a mosaic properly unless you observe it carefully from a distance." – Hiroshi Teshigahara

Allow me to observe the mosaic of Gabriel Vicens’s music carefully from a distance, and to invite you to do the same. Music is primarily a state of mind. Regardless of whether you listen to classical, blues, jazz, rock, or what used to be termed new music, the essential element is the same: we are transported to another dimension, one possibly inside ourselves, on a journey fueled by a joyful power source evoking the same result from all these disparate style territories. The arrival at an exhilarating and abrupt awakening: that is the same destination, whether it is conveyed by the operatic overload of Pink Floyd or the austere minimalism of John Cage. The joy of being liberated is what matters, much more so than the practical tools utilized for the purposes of that liberation.

Elsewhere I have written about the clearly evident potential for the somatic effects of sonic energy, and the fact that music, certain music at least, can serve as the architectural structure within which profound experiences can be contained and transmitted, virtually across time and space. This notion that music can buttress meditation, or contemplation, or whatever you choose to call the oceanic feeling that arises from losing the illusory sense of an individual and separate self, can most simply be characterized as erecting a sonic building that we can live each inside of for a while. The new album of Vicens music, appropriately titled Mural, owing to what I consider its large-scale panoramic approach to composition and performance, is just such a building of breath and reflection: a temporal dwelling.

So it Goes: Accommodating the Sublime

W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

“Having looked at a work of art, I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively enter the studio in which it was made. And there I wait in hope of learning something of the story of its making.” – John Berger

Where to begin with the two greatest English landscape painters in history? So great that even an art critic is challenged to find the most accurate ways to extol their truly magnificent achievements? Well, in a diversionary tactic during which I can gather my far-flung thoughts into something resembling coherence, I may start by mentioning that persistent readers of Critics At Large, or even occasional readers with a canny eye, will notice that I have long been intrigued by dualities, polarities, alternates, dichotomies, parallels, binaries, opposites and what Dr. Jung called synchronicity. Far from being merely coincidence, or even what the good doctor called meaningful coincidence, he further explained that synchronicity occurs when two archetypes (images or ideas shared by all of us in the collective unconscious) arise at the same time in roughly the same place.

And so it is with two great painters, Joseph Turner (1775-1851), more commonly identified by the way he signed his works, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable (1776-1837), the paired and most recognizable icons of landscape representation and also the two most daringly innovative risk takers in the history of painting. That history contains a basic template for presenting images to our insatiably hungry eyes: portrait (close to), still life (nearby), landscape (far from). But in the case of these two exemplars, both of whom were surprising emissaries for a fledgling modernism just then on the cusp of occurring with the advent of the French invention of the camera in about 1839, and the resulting plunge into overall pictorial abstraction continuing to this day, we have a unique case of merging the three formats into one single vertiginous entity.

Inner Sanctum: The Star-Crossed Music of George Crumb and Yoshiko Shimizu

KAIROS Records, 2023.

“Whatever you think can’t be done, someone will come along and do.” – Thelonious Monk

“Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that, and don’t listen to me: I’m supposed to be accompanying you.” – Thelonious Monk

This new KAIROS recording of works by the esteemed American composer George Crumb, played by the stellar Japanese pianist Yoshiko Shimizu, is a poetic work of the highest order. In addition to being an intensely uplifting collaborative love letter between a composer and his primary performing interpreter, it also contains one of my favourite musical titles ever, Celestial Mechanics, composed by Crumb in 1979, which might be a pinnacle in the annals of works for piano in the four-hands format. It is not a stretch in this case to claim that Crumb’s challenging but rewarding works constitute a unique domain: astrophysics for piano achieved via contemporary recording technology. If that sounds somewhat scientific, allow me to return to my preferred poetic license: these are diagnostic investigations into the human heart. Even friends or readers familiar with my reasoning may pause and ponder: astrophysics for piano? How does this work? Well, it works exactly the way it sounds. The movements of interstellar masses in space through time usually refers to large objects such as planets in their elliptical guided tours of various galaxies; however, it also occurs within an inner sanctum of silence where microscopic movements of sub-atomic particles collide with each other in a kind of unexpected resonance. And they all dance to a sacred tune, one Crumb calls “Cosmic Dances for Amplified Pianos.”