Boombox Serenade

Film-Music Moment of the Day: The Spinners Take the Stage at Zaire 74

In late September 1974 a historic three day music festival took place in Kinshasa, Zaire and Soul Power is the hyper-vibrant, soul-drenched account of that event. Thirty one acts participated in the festival—17 from Africa and 14 from the U.S. and elsewhere—and this documentary features a double fistful of the very best, including the moment when the Detroit based band The Spinners took the stage to perform "One of a Kind Love Affair" to a stadium audience of 80,000 Africans.

The Zaire 74 festival was conceived by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and American record producer Stewart Levine. It was supposed to be a promotional vehicle for Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman, but when an injury forced Foreman to postpone the fight by several weeks, the festival's intended audience of international tourists evaporated. Event producers Lloyd Price and Don King made the bold choice to go forward with the event and while final ticket sale numbers fell short of expectations due to the delayed fight, Zaire 74 was declared a resounding success in its promotion of racial and cultural solidarity between African American and African people.

The New York Times quoted Price as saying "Our purpose was to document the history of the beat. We want to...help blacks in America, strangers in a strange land, to grasp the strand of the motherland—the musical beat." In this sense, The Spinners' performance is particularly stunning. By 1974 their music was a lush blend of doo wop and the Philly-style soul that was becoming popular, and to hear that satiny sound in an African context is a revelation—a living map of black music's breadth and scope...its journey. Even the group's choreography seems to speak volumes, the quick darting movements and graceful side-leaps contain echoes of traditional African dance, but distant ones; there's disco, Motown, gospel and a dozen other influences in there—the cultural nuances layered like geological strata. The word "summit" is often applied to dry-as-dust gatherings of academics and officials, but Zaire 74 was a summit in the true sense of the word; it was an acme, a crest, a crown.

It's difficult to pick other highlights from Soul Power, because there are so many. Miriam Makeba radiated joy and tenacity as she sang the unforgettable "Click Song," a traditional South African tune sung in the Xhosa language. Tabu Ley Rochereau's dancers were hotter than Georgia asphalt, and the billowing ruffles of Celia Cruz's dress could make the Pope want to salsa dance. Bill Withers was polished and powerful in a solo acoustic performance. He recounted being asked if he was planning on bringing back any souvenirs from Africa and said, "What I want to bring back is the feeling." In fact, given how keenly felt the performances are throughout this documentary, it's a little surprising that James Browns' big finale seems just a touch phoned-in at the end, but his music was all about the prolonged groove—a deep funk trance state—so it may have just been difficult to capture in concert clips.

Overall what comes through in Soul Power is a deep sense of resonance and excitement among performers and concert-goers alike. Some of the best moments in the documentary are the spontaneous performances that break out all over the place—the improvised jam sessions on the flight to Zaire, a sing-along with the greeters on the runway, the random live performances that spring up all around May Stadium. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte deserves a lot of credit for rescuing this footage from the cutting room floor of the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings and seeing it through a long and no doubt arduous production process. He's preserved an important piece of cultural history and cast new light on an event of resounding significance. 

Fourteen Fall Film Picks

The fall movie line-up looks bright, and here are our picks for the best of the upcoming releases. Of the films that don't yet have U.S. distribution, we want to highlight The Illusionist by Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville), The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (by Terry Gilliam), and the documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo by newcomer Jessica Oreck as those we're particularly hoping get deals.

1. Inglourious Basterds. August 21. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (Resevoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction). We don't care that the reviews from Cannes were mixed. Tarantino has a great way with revenge fantasies and this one is juicy: Jewish-American soldiers are chosen to spread fear among the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. Here's the trailer.

2. The September Issue. August 28. Directed by R.J. Cutler (American High). "Hoopla attendant" upon the arrival of this brisk, glittering documentary, the result of Cutler following around American Vogue Editor Anna Wintour (the inspiration for the despotic Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada) for most of 2007 while she and her staff created the largest edition ever of the influential fashion magazine. We predict healthy box office for this one. Watch the trailer.

3. Bright Star. September 18. Directed by Jane Campion (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady). There's major buzz attached to this film about the three-year romance between the 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Campion has proved that she can put her own stamp on period pieces, including a uniquely intimate sense of sweep. Watch the trailer.

4. Jennifer's Body. September 18. Directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight). Say what you will about Diablo Cody's kitschy dialogue, but we're totally on board for a film about a murderous, demonically possessed man-hating cheerleader...no matter what. We might even brave the sketchy drive-in theater in Concord for this one. Watch the trailer.

5. A Serious Man. October 2. Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen (Fargo, The Big Lebowski). If the Coens can do any wrong, we have yet to see it. This one is a black comedy set in the late 1960's about a Midwestern professor whose wife is leaving him because his brother won't move out of the house. The Coens selected a cast comprised entirely of unknowns for this film. Kudos them. No trailer yet.

6. An Education. October 9. Directed by Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) and written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity). This coming-of-age story set in 1960's London did well at Sundance and seems like the perfect cardigan-clad fare for early fall. It has great cast including Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson, and Sally Hawkins. It'll be interesting to see how Scherfig and Music Supervisor Kle Savidge approach the soundtrack. Watch the trailer.

7. The Informant! October 9. Directed by Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven, Sex, Lies, and Videotape). Really nice to see a comedy coming down the pike that doesn't revolve around weddings or getting stoned. Instead this one hinges on a corporate VP turned informant (played by Matt Damon) for a federal price-fixing case against an agri-business giant. Yes, it's really a comedy and a hilariously funny looking one at that. Watch the trailer.

8. Where The Wild Things Are. October 16. Directed by Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). We've been foaming at the mouth for this one along with everyone else, and the fact that Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is collaborating on music hasn't done much to make things less foamy around here. Watch the trailer.

9. Antichrist. October 23. Directed by Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves). Yes, we are so very up for this totally crazypants art-horror flick. Bring it Lars! Watch the trailer. 

10. Gentlemen Broncos. October 30. Directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre). Our highly trained surveillance does have spotted some extreme goodness on the horizon, and it goes by the name of Gentlemen Broncos. Watch the trailer.

11. Precious. November 6. Directed by Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer). Christ on a bike, what an emotional wallop! We can't remember the last time a trailer made us curl up into the fetal position and sob. This film is an unflinching look at what happens when an overweight, pregnant, illiterate teen with an abusive mom is given the chance to enroll in an alternative school. Promises strong performances and a 100 percent chance of you crying. Watch the trailer. 

12. Nine. November 25. Directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago). The trailer makes it very clear that this film is going to deliver some straight up, old fashioned entertainment in a big way—complete with big, glitzy musical numbers performed by A-listers in sexy get-ups. Lush, lusty, decadent. If this film were a dinner course, it'd be dessert. Watch the trailer.

13. The Lovely Bones. December 11. Directed by Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, the Lord of the Rings trilogy). If anyone can translate the story about a murdered girl who watches over her family and her killer from heaven, Peter Jackson can. No trailer yet.

14. The Illusionist. No U.S. release date yet. Directed by Sylvain Chomet (Triplets of Belleville).  Triplets of Belleville was an unforgettable masterpiece, so it's with a sense of childlike glee that we're looking forward to The Illusionist. It's about a stage performer "of a dying breed" who meets a young fan and is forever changed by the experience. No trailer yet.

Films We'd Really Like to See That Don't Yet Have Distribution:
--The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Trailer.
--Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Dir: Jessica Oreck. Trailer.
--Le Donk. Dir: Shane Meadows. Trailer.
--Mary and Max. Dir: Adam Elliot. Trailer.
--Guy & Madeline on a Park Bench. Dir: D. Chazelle Trailer.
--The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. Dir: David Russo. Trailer.

More Upcoming 2009 goodness...?
--Paper Heart. Director: Nicholas Jasenovec (Aug 7) Trailer.
--Julie & Julia. Director: Nora Ephron (Aug 7) Trailer.
--Beeswax. Director: Andrew Bujalski (Aug 7) Trailer.
--Extract. Director: Mike Judge (Sept 4). Trailer.
--9. Director: Shane Acker. (Sept 9) Trailer.
--Coco Avant Chanel. Director: Anne Fontain (Sept. 25) Trailer.
--Capitalism: A Love Story. Dir: Michael Moore (Oct 2) Trailer.
--Whip It. Director: Drew Barrymore (Oct 9). Trailer.
--Cold Souls. Director: Sophie Barthes (Nov 6). Trailer.
--The Fantastic Mister Fox. Director: Wes Anderson (Nov. 13)
--Invictus. Director: Clint Eastwood (Dec 11)
--Avatar. Director: James Cameron (Dec 18) Trailer.

Which films are you looking forward to this fall? Let us know!

"And it thrilled my soul." Lynch gets turned onto opera.

We're big ol' dorks for David Lynch here at Boombox Serenade, so we have—of course—been idly wondering where the Renaissance man will go after having written and recorded some of his own music for INLAND EMPIRE as well as inspiring and co-creating one of 2009's best albums, Dark Night of the Soul, in conjunction with Dangermouse and Sparklehorse. Here's what Lynch had to say about his ever-deepening relationship with music during a recent guest DJ stint on KCRW:

"I always of course loved music but was way more involved with sound effects because of film, and I loved sound that approached music. I'm not a musician but I love to play and I love to experiment. And I love musicians. Musicians are, generally speaking, like children. They love to sleep late. They're happier than most people. They get along well (unless they're in a band and then they start fighting). They're very special people and I love to be in the studio with musicians. It's a thrilling, thrilling thing and it all led to more experiments with music."

Modest talk for a man who is now inspiring entire albums' worth of material, who has himself recorded some of the most atmospheric music we've heard in a long time, and whose very name has become a cliche of music review—a shorthand way of saying "dark, mysterious, and a little perverse." Yet as always, Lynch seemed less interested in his own accomplishments than in new influences:

"I’m going to go to Richard Strauss. We’re getting into long haired stuff now. I was in a really swank Mercedes Benz in Germany one night. Black, deep black and snow flakes the size of silver dollars coming down. And I'd been left in the car -- I forget who I was with but they had gone into a building and I had been left in the car -- and I turned on the radio and I heard this thing. And it thrilled my soul. This particular piece of music at that particular time, I saw in my minds eye, my four year old son coming down a flight of stairs and it made me start crying."

It makes sense, of course, that Lynch would be drawn to a genre full of voices so rare—and rarely heard in mainstream culture—that they are, in their way, surreal. And he's always loved velvety textures, so what must it be like for him to enter an entire sonic world made of velvet and butter? I once had a fantasy of corralling an entire herd of electro-hippie ravers into a room and making them listen to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson perform Handel live, but I'll trade in this fantasy for one David Lynch film with lots of opera in it.

You can hear Lynch's full KCRW guest DJ spot here. And since KCRW couldn't be bothered to play the whole "Im Abendrot" track by Strauss that Lynch was referring to, here are a few links to some performances recommended by the excellent Opera Chic blog:

• Renee Fleming
• Jessye Norman

It's worth noting that "Im Abendrot" means "at sunset," and it's from a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff. Strauss happened upon this poem during his final days of his life and set it to music:

We've gone through joy and crisis
Together, hand in hand,
And now we rest from wandering
Above the silent land.
The valleys slope around us,
The air is growing dark,
And dreamily, into the haze,
There still ascends two larks.
Come here, and let them flutter,
The time for sleep is soon.
We would not want to lose our way
In this great solitude.
O vast and silent peace!
So deep in twilight ruddiness,
We are so wander-weary -
Could this perchance be death?

Wild Things Follow-Up: The Playlist Posts Sendak/Jonze featurette with Karen O (?) Strumming in the Background

We love what film-music nerds the folks over at The Playlist are. They just posted a great little clip featuring interviews with Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze, but what they're really breathless about is the fact that Karen O can be heard to be rehearsing some of the theme music in the background. She's worked on the film's original music along with composer Carter Burwell, with some help from Deerhunter/Atlas Sound frontman Bradford Cox and Yeah Yeah Yeahs/Folk Implosion collaborator Imaad Wasif.

Trailer for Where The Wild Things Are Continues to Thrill on the Big Screen

If you've already seen Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, then chances are you've seen the big screen premier of the buzz-making trailer for Spike Jonze's much anticipated Where The Wild Things Are, based on the classic childrens' book by Maurice Sendak. It's set to "Wake Up" by The Arcade Fire from the 2004 album Funeral, a big, gamboling anthem that perfectly suits Jonze's inspired blend of make-believe and naturalism (a sensibility that feels especially fresh next to trailers like Tim Burton's Alice and Wonderland, which appears CGI-ed within an inch of its life.) The Wild Things trailer, by contrast, has real roses in its cheeks thanks in no small part to Win Butler's passionate plea to children: "Wake up, hold your mistake up before they turn the summer into dust." The whole thing feels beautiful and bracing...filled with the forward motion that is childhood, but also with wistful awareness of what's being left behind.

More to be excited about: way back in 2007, Vanity Fair broke the news that Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would be contributing music to Wild Things as well (footnote: Jonze and O were once a couple) and later The Playlist blog reported that she is in fact doing "most of the music" for the film, including some original score work and an "upbeat" song at the end. Jonze has typically favored score for his films in the past and it's true that Carter Burwell of Being John Malkovich and numerous Coen Brothers projects did some score for Wild Things. It's also clear, however, that with Wild Things Jonze is reconciling his film work with his music video witchcraft, and hey speaking of which, have you seen his hypnotically gorgeous and death defying take on "Heaven" by UNKLE?

Film Music Moment of the Day: Psychotic Break Dance

Though at least one half horror film, the most disturbing parts of Adrian Lyne's 1990 masterpiece Jacob's Ladder are not his hallucinatory visions of blind, mutilated surgeons or freakishly contorted executioners. The real horror in this film comes from the post-Vietnam era sense of numbness and grief, expressed in a clinically depressed palette of browns and grays, and in the ringing absence of a golden haired child who has died by accident—the son of war veteran Jacob Singer and a symbol of an entire generation's lost innocence.

Lyne uses a party scene for the onset of Jacob's real free-fall into madness, a poppin' dance floor sequence in which folks are grooving hard to James Brown's brilliant "My Thang," a searing, relentless track from his 1974 album, Hell. The script describes the dancers in this way: "Their movements are loose and getting looser," a parallel to Jacob's increasingly slack grasp on reality. The smoke in the room erases detail from the faces of the people around him. His girlfriend (played by the absurdly sexy Elizabeth Pena) is pressuring Jacob to dance, despite his reluctance to do so.

Suddenly the music seems overly insistent, and the scene grows uncomfortable. The dance floor is too hectic; the dancers are gyrating too hard. In the shadows Jacob glimpses a woman squatting and urinating on the carpet. In shock he turns away only to catch sight of a man whose head seems to twist and vibrate at such speed that it loses all definition. Jacob screams, but his friends just laugh. His girlfriend Jezzie guides his hand inside her dress, where he feels alien, bony protrusions. He jerks away in surprise and his glasses are knocked from his face. When he puts them back on, she's in an erotic embrace with another dancer whom he cannot entirely see, but who has tentacles that appear to be penetrating her from behind while she writhes in delight.

Meanwhile the music is so funky, so mercilessly driving that you can almost smell the speed in James Brown's sweat as it soaks through his denim jumpsuit. It brings to the fore what's truly grotesque about the people at this party: an overly adulterated, deeply dosed sense of fun—one that barely conceals their weariness, cynicism, and sorrow. It's worth noting that the cover of James Brown's Hell is a kind of modern version of the "damnation" panel of 15th century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch*, that terrifying depiction of life in purgatory: bird-headed monsters feasting on human beings, a sow wearing the veil of a nun, naked men impaled on mandolins. The Hell cover features, among other things, a wounded war veteran, a junkie shooting up, and man with a gun to his head. Lyne too has created his own Bosch-like vision, invoking all the dread and denial of a time when people were hell-bent on keeping the party going, but ideologically adrift and helpless to prevent intrusive memories of war. 

*Thanks to the interestment.co.uk blog for its "Album Covers Analyzed" feature.

Film Music Moment of the Day: The Coronation of Marie Antoinette

Displaying exquisite sensitivity to its grandly sweeping melody, Sofia Coppola creates a masterful film-music moment by setting Marie's post-coronation procession to "Plainsong" by The Cure—cutting into and out of the tableau in a confident, decidedly postmodern way. Coppola has said that she wanted to explore both the similarities and differences between life at Versailles and the way we live today, and accomplished this through juxtaposition of rich period imagery and emotive, contemporary music—showing us how immediate the feelings of an 18th century queen could be, and how regal rock.

Film Music Moment of the Day: Johnny Meets Billie in Michael Mann's Public Enemies

Resplendent with rich lines, textures, and sounds, Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a feast for the senses, and at the center of this feast is the gaze John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) lavishes upon Billie Frechette (played by Marianne Cotillard)--one that more than lives up to the real life Frechette's description:

"There was something in those eyes that I will never forget. They were piercing and electric, yet there was an amused carefree twinkle in them too. They met my eyes and held me hypnotized for an instant."

Depp absolutely nails that characterization and gives us a Dillinger so transfixed by Freschette that he allows himself to be led out onto a dance floor shortly after meeting her, despite not knowing how to dance. There they're enveloped by an especially velvety rendition of "Bye Bye Blackbird" by Diana Krall, and it's one of the many moments in the film that draws you right into the action, making the moment seem both immediate and iconic.

Mann has never been afraid to let music take over a scene, and in Public Enemies does so with his usual panache. Another standout is Otis Taylors' "Ten Million Slaves" as a backdrop for the scene in which Melvin Purvis (played by Christian Bale) pursues and guns down bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd. Mann rounds out the soundtrack with a little Billie Holiday and Blind Willie Johnson, and even if Coen-esque moments of greatness are never quite achieved via the music, Mann--like Dillinger himself--has style to burn, and has given us a memorable portrait of a charismatic criminal.

Film Music Moment of the Day: Food Inc.

Robert Kenner's powerful documentary on the U.S. food industry, Food Inc., is made all the more powerful by the epilogue to the film, set to Bruce Springsteen's live version of "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie wrote it in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which he considered unrealistic and complacent, so it's the perfect choice for a documentary that strips away the pastoral marketing lies of the food industry to make a very direct appeal to audience members to change our incredibly screwed up food system. The instrumentation on the song is minimal, which makes this entreaty even more immediate and personal. Very, very effective.