Greville Tombs' lore: Silence with added jazz

Tuesday 19 August 2014

Silence with added jazz

Question: How can you tell the difference between good jazz and bad jazz?
Answer: You can't.

Just a little joke there to kick off the blog. After all, this is being written during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Putting re-worked, re-recorded and even contemporary music to silent films is nothing new. Indeed, a personal favourite of mine (rightly or wrongly because it was my first introduction to the film) is the 1984 Giorgio Mororder restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, onto which he paired it with a pop soundtrack.

I watched the film weekly on my TV recorded VHS tape, bought the soundtrack on cassette and generally fell in love with Metropolis, if not quite the band Cycle V, over a summer.

This week I went to see a showing of The Cabinet of Caligari set to a live performance of a brand new jazz score by Graeme Stephen.

The venue was the Jazz Bar in Edinburgh. An underground room with splashes of soft spot lights on red and black décor and primary paintings of jazz bands. The film was projected onto the screen on the stage where the jazz trio (guitarist - Stephen-, drummer and multi-wind instrumentalist) performed.

The audience majority was probably more into the jazz than the old film filling the screen in flickers, going by the head-bobs and toe-taps and I might have been more interested in the film, going by my motionless intense staring at the film, but few could not be impressed at how well the two mixed.

The film, coming from an expressionist background, is the genre birthing horror movie. It contains classic horror elements - or elemenemenements - Monsters, Murders, Madness. The film rewards the viewer with a powerful and disconcerting story done with a joyous panache.

In much the same way, the jazz was at times monstrous, murder and mad and all the riveting for it. Although I am pretty sure the music score simply had "Do Jazz", "Do more Jazz" "Jazz" written in the bars instead of dotted notes, it was powerful and disconcerting and done with a joyous panache.

I guess what I'm trying to say is the cosmic sounding jazz fitted perfectly not only with the strange, slightly alien world shown on the screen but even (from the version screened) the rather beatnik styled font of the intertitle cards!

Early German expressionist horror jazz? I'm a fan.