Fretboard superheroes strut their stuff, and live-score unlikely silent movies, at New York Guitar Festival
Kaki King. guuskrol via flickr
11:04 am Jan. 11, 20121
A music festival is a music festival, and a film festival is a film festival—right? If South by Southwest says so—with overlapping but separate film, music, and interactive festivals every March—it must be. But not so for this week's New York Guitar Festival, where music and film are getting blended and combined in all sorts of exciting ways.
In addition to “Alternative Guitar Summits” on Friday (Nels Cline and Thurston Moore are the big guns) and Saturday (topped by Liberty Ellman accompanied by pianist Vijay Iyer), a tribute to jazz guitarist Jim Hall on Sunday, and a concluding Guitar Marathon celebrating Italian guitar music through the ages, the New York Guitar Festival’s big draw this year, as it was in 2010, belongs to the “Silent Films/Live Guitars” series, which features a clutch of Buster Keaton classics accompanied by player-composers ranging from kids’ music star Dan Zanes to Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo to Chicago rockers Califone.
John Schaefer, who hosts WNYC’s Soundcheck, co-founded the festival with David Spelman with a mandate to focus on the instrument’s expansive capabilities: “We quickly realized that the guitar almost alone among musical instruments allows you to put together programs and series of programs that will span every conceivable type of music from classical to rock to world to jazz, from improvised to composed, from acoustic to electric, and still have a kind of core audience that is at least willing to go to all these different places with you because there's some familiarity with the basic sound of the instrument.”
The 2010 Guitar Festival featured several of Charlie Chaplin’s early movies accompanied by varied six-stringers such as Grateful Dead associate David Bromberg (The Immigrant, 1917), Tom Waits and John Zorn collaborator Marc Ribot (The Kid, 1921), and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, who took on Chaplin’s One A.M. (1916). Those names drew crowds and got the festival some extra attention.
“Bon Iver was on everyone’s best record of the year list,” recalled David Spelman of Vernon’s involvement. “I thought it was a long shot. I love For Emma, Forever Ago, but I didn’t really see this guy scoring a silent film. Also, he’s on the top of his game, why would he do this little thing in a relatively modest intimate hall? He could fill a place five to ten times bigger—and has—in New York. But it was a pleasant surprise after a period of silence that we interpreted as a pass [when] he said, ‘Hey, let’s do it.’ So you never know who’s going to respond to this thing.”
Kaki King, an artist whose nontraditional playing style has brought her to Guitar Festivals around the U.S., is making her first appearance at the New York edition after many years as a spectator.
“The performances that are always interesting to me [involve] performers who do not play guitar the traditional manner,” said King, mentioning Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, who played the Festival in 2002. “I remember seeing her play a prepared pipa with paper clips on it. There were [other] guys who had a pick-up installed underneath the nut of the guitar, where the strings first meet the neck—a lot of, basically, people doing very strange things with the guitar and reinventing it.”
Silent films are always ripe for musical reinvention, or at least reinterpretation—that is, when they’re available.
“The surprising thing about silent films is how many of them are still under copyright,” said Schaefer, one of the big hands behind the festival. Harold Lloyd’s estate holds a firm grip on his films decades after his death, for example.
Luckily, Schaefer said, “The early Chaplin and most of the Keaton [films] are all fair game. They're all public domain. I've been doing silent films with live music at the World Financial Center for many, many years, and I can tell you this is always a prime consideration. You want a great movie, but you also want a movie you can get.”
Though Spelman had been behind the Chaplin series—he does most of the Festival’s booking, with Schaefer taking a less active role—he didn’t quite know what he was getting into when he embarked on the new film series.
“I’m embarrassed to admit, but until recently, I had mistakenly had the impression that Buster Keaton was perhaps a second-rate Charlie Chaplin. There was a curator at MoMA who straightened me out. I found that people thought him an equal, or even preferred [him]—thought Keaton at his best was the superior artist.”
As with the Chaplin films, Spelman had no trouble finding folks to work with. He typified this year’s lineup as “a mix of people who are sort of on the dream list and favorite collaborators of the past, or people who for no particular reason we haven’t been able to work with and wanted to for a while.”
Ranaldo is one of the latter, he said, while Zanes is “somebody I’ve worked with many times but who always surprises me pleasantly. He’s really known primarily as a kids’ music superstar. But when I mentioned this idea to him, he got it right away. And his enthusiasm was genuine—he would dive in deep, not just float on the surface.
“Of course, there’s people you approach who love the idea and just are daunted by it. A few artists initially agreed to do features, but once they got into them, they realized that scoring a feature-length silent film is really daunting. There’s an artists or two who jumped on the idea and then a month or so into it said, ‘Listen, I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew. Would you be upset if I just did a short?’ I think that’s a sign of how strong the material is: People take this seriously. It’s not just, Let’s show up and make sound effects while the movie is taking place.”
Spelman said that Chaplin shows last year were sellouts, with the Keatons also heading that way.
“These events draw from the cinema audience and they also draw from the music audience,” said Spelman. “Charlie Chaplin films tend to draw people—if they were screening them at MoMA, let’s say. There’s a huge audience for that. There’s a good-sized interest from musicians as well. Especially in the post-digital world, scoring has remained a consistent work source for players and composers alike.
“We've both been pleasantly surprised by the number of guitarists who have said, ‘Yeah, I often will just sit in front of the TV and kind of make up sounds and songs that go with whatever I'm watching,’” said Schaefer. “And to be even more specific, the number of guitarists who've said, ‘Yeah, I've been thinking about scoring this silent film.’ I think that the festival has tapped into something that's out there. It's in the air somehow that people have been thinking in terms of music, not just as an abstraction, but as something that can really kind of offer another level of experience. The combination of visuals and music’s certainly is not a new idea, but this particular combination, silent film and live music, is something that has just come roaring back in the last decade or so.”
King, for instance, chose Keaton’s 1920 two-reeler The Scarecrow from the stack in part because she wasn’t already familiar with it.
“I couldn't have taken one off the top of my head,” said King. “It opens with this really beautiful launch scene between Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely. It’s all physical comedy. But what this in particular had is a lot of objects they're swinging back-and-forth. When I first saw that I thought, ‘Okay, I really have an idea.’ It’s very much in sync with the movie, which is hard to do but is really fun. It is an undertaking.”
That adventurous spirit is right in line with the festival’s mission, said Spelman.
“I think the joy of working in New York is that artists sometimes, they don’t want to fall from the second floor, they want to fall from the top of the building. They want to take a risk and do it in a very public place. I think it’s exciting when you’re inviting artists, whether they’re well known or emerging or mid-career, to do something that is from an uncomfortable place, that challenges them. Most artists are looking for new artistic adventures. So if these things come along, they will often say yes.”
One guitarist who said yes that Spelman is particularly excited about is Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, who plays next Tuesday, Jan. 17, accompanying the 22-minute The Baloonatic (1923).
“She is so astonishing and creative,” he enthused. “A lot of people will routinely compare her to Björk or Joanna Newsom, but it's impossible to categorize. Even when you see her videos, you'll notice that she is very theatrical in her performance. [Her music] is beautiful without any visuals. But in her performance and her videos, she works with very innovative theater and film directors, [has] a strong interest in costumes and interesting locations and a strong interest in puppetry as well. The last three times I've seen My Brightest Diamond, Björk has been in the audience.”
Spelman, like the attendees, will be experiencing all of the pieces for the first time at the Festival.
“I don't know what to expect. Certain artists often keep low profiles when they're in a commission process, and usually they reach out when there's a problem or they're freaked about having some issues. But usually I consider no news is good news. Truly, one of the joys of being a presenter is kind of shepherding into being new works. That really is an enormous privilege, to get to help foster the creation of new work.”
The New York Guitar Festival continues with events through January 29 at the Kaufman Center and Merkin Concert Hall. See Charles Petersen’s story for Capital New York on last weekend’s kickoff to the festival, a celebration of Brian Eno’s ‘Apollo’ album, here.
Fue una experiencia inolvidable donde el amor y la pasión al arte, a la música y a la creatividad une las emociones, los sueños y las diferentes culturas en un espacio donde el tiempo se desvanece hasta el punto que deja de existir.
Felicitaciones!