The poet Philip Larkin was notably reactionary, and a lot worse, on a lot of subjects, and when he wrote jazz criticism in the 1960s, he was particularly disapproving of pretty much any such music recorded after the Okeh label was bought by Columbia in 1926. (Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration.) So it’s a little surprising to peruse Larkin’s collected writing on jazz and see him lavish (sometimes admittedly qualified) praise on the visionary Ornette Coleman, once the record-title-proclaimed Shape of Jazz to Come!, who died this morning at the age of 85. Coleman’s “500 odd bars on R.P.D.D.’,” Larkin wrote of a tune on the 1962 LP Ornette!, “ranging from lusty honking to meditative diminuendo and exhibiting unfailing resourcefulness at all stages, must be the most remarkable solo released this year so far.” Years later, bitching about Coleman’s Chappaqua Suite, Larkin grouses that Coleman has no chords,...
- 6/11/2015
- by Glenn Kenny
- Vulture
Perhaps the most misleading aspect of the new crop of Beat movies that have surfaced during the past few years is that they obscure the fact that there was once an older crop of Beat movies. If your only exposure is Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, Walter Salles’ On the Road, John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings, and Michael Polish’s Big Sur, you might assume that the Beats participated in an artistic movement reserved exclusively for the written word. Yet Allen Ginsberg was front-and-center of experimental film projects like 1959’s Pull My Daisy (narrated by Kerouac) and 1966’s Chappaqua, while William S. Burroughs spent most of his career after the 1970s in independent films (alongside producing spoken word albums). Even Jack Kerouac, the most novelistic of the best-known Beats, showed his media literacy by recording improvisatory experiments in audio technology before he published “On the Road.” The literary Beats not only inspired later independent filmmakers...
- 11/26/2013
- by Landon Palmer
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
In 2006, before I started The Playlist film blog, out of boredom I began what I called the The Playlist Soundtrack Series. A sort of "If I Were _______ (insert filmmaker's name here)" type thing. The concept was naive and simple: choose a handful of music-savvy filmmakers whose work I admired and create imaginary soundtracks for movies they hadn't made, based on their taste and music they might conceivably use one day. It began as nothing more than a fun exercise for me, as I had time on my hands back then.
Eventually, I had amassed a half a dozen of these soundtracks in various states of completion, and to host them somewhere I started The Playlist blog in 2007. It then became a place to discuss music in film, soundtracks, etc., and when that topic was outgrown slightly (after a while you tend to hit all the classic film and soundtrack bases...
Eventually, I had amassed a half a dozen of these soundtracks in various states of completion, and to host them somewhere I started The Playlist blog in 2007. It then became a place to discuss music in film, soundtracks, etc., and when that topic was outgrown slightly (after a while you tend to hit all the classic film and soundtrack bases...
- 5/25/2012
- by The Playlist
- The Playlist
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