Thelonious Monk once said, “Talking about jazz is like dancing about architecture.” Having dated a jazz trombonist, I know this to be true, but I hadn’t considered until recently that making a movie about jazz might be an equally quixotic process. Free-form if not formless and often wordless, the musical genre asks us to abandon our need for structure and surrender to a purer state. Such trust in audiences is not exactly bottom-line Hollywood’s forte, yet “Miles Ahead,” the new film about Miles Davis, has the remarkable audacity to take all its cues directly from jazz. Continue Reading →
Archive | Music Matters
A One-Note Shame: ‘I Saw the Light’
“I Saw the Light,” the new biopic about Hank Williams, begins with three disjointed moments. A snippet of a faux-archival interview with the country western singer’s publisher, Fred Rose (Bradley Whitford), shifts to Williams (Tom Hiddleston), bathed in dusty light and singing a cappella on an empty stage, and then lurches to his quickie wedding to freshly divorced single mother Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen) at an Alabama gas station.
It’s an opening sequence that doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts, which, alas, can be said across the board of this much-anticipated adaptation of Hank Williams: The Biography by Colin Escott with George Merritt and William MacEwen. Focusing on the singer’s struggles with alcoholism and promiscuity (whiskey and women, who are we kidding?), it takes up his story when he’s a local radio station singer whose bride is chomping at the bit to join him at the microphone. Since her voice is not exactly of June Carter Cash caliber, this causes as much tension in their young marriage as his heavy boozing does. Continue Reading →
I can’t shake the feeling that these last lunar eclipses took no prisoners. I could not reel myself in and no one around me seemed able to curtail their worst impulses, either. Not to mention all the losses over the last few