I’m guessing this happened when I was 15 — or 16 at the latest. It had to be one of those years when I was still too young to be allowed (or invited) anyplace on New Year’s Eve, but was nonetheless given permission to stay up as late as I wanted while looking after my younger sibs, both of whom were dead asleep at that wee hour. I don’t suppose Channel 8 in New Haven keeps records for whatever movie they were broadcasting that far back, whatever year it was. But I do know it was New Year’s Eve. I know it was late. And I know it was Citizen Kane.
The reception wasn’t so hot; a little snow on the screen, possibly a lot more outside, the weather being whatever it was in central Connecticut that time of year. I’m bluffing. I don’t remember what it was doing outside because I didn’t care. If someone had broken into the house that night to take everything but the TV, I wouldn’t have noticed. Orson Welles’s greatest magic act had transfixed another unwary spectator. By the time the movie was over, my face was so close to the screen that it was ready and, likely, willing to push through the tube.
As has been the case with just about everyone else’s first encounter with Citizen Kane, I had never before suspected that a movie, any movie, was capable of doing the things with light, shadow and sound that Welles had done. All I asked from movies before that night was a story long enough to keep me occupied for a couple hours. Every once in a while, I’d get more than that. Alfred Hitchcock, that other supreme magician of light and shadow, had mesmerized me plenty of times by my teens. But the tension and menace were always out front in his movies with the big man’s gentle, but firm touch applying gradual pressure upon the viscera to see how much you could stand.
Welles’s movie didn’t press; it seeped, slithered like a dream with sounds that seemed both haphazard and orchestrated. It was as if the movie were another, larger room with the door opened a crack and I couldn’t keep myself from eavesdropping on the chattering ghosts inside. And there were these stark images coming at me at angles and perspectives I’d never seen before.
All of which sorcery was concocted to make me care about a man I wouldn’t have spent more than five minutes with in real life unless forced against my will. What movie could make anyone do that? What kind of movie could make you want to go through such dark mischief again? And again and again and again…?
I plan to put myself through it tonight — or early tomorrow at the latest. It’s an annual ritual that began more than ten years ago when, having become by that time a full-time movie reviewer for Newsday, I would get the inevitable “what’s-your-all-time-favorite-movie” question from civilians and found myself explaining (or trying to) my ongoing fascination with Citizen Kane. More often than not, the answer seemed to disappoint, even among those old enough to remember when Orson Welles was alive. (“’Citizen What?’” “Who’s in that?” “And that’s the story? Hmmm…”) All of which responses were variations on “Why didn’t you pick something I like?” Or, in most cases, have at least heard of.
Just the other day, a cousin living here in DC said, when I told her of my New Year’s plans, “I don’t know that one.” Then, after a pause, asked, “Is it a sad story?” If you’ve seen Citizen Kane at least once, you should have enough sense to immediately say, “Yes.” If you’ve seen it more than once and become enraptured enough with it to read (or watch) accounts of the comparably legendary back story of Citizen Kane’s making, you could even go to the trouble of saying that, it, too, is a sad story; some might say, even sadder than the movie itself.
And yet, even if one knows about Welles’s life story; the meteoric rise that led him to Hollywood, the crash-and-burn that followed Kane, the desultory decades of hit-and-miss movies, work-for-hire, commercials and talk-show appearances that marked his career ever afterwards, it becomes harder think of Kane the same way one thinks of other pictures. Is Charles Foster Kane’s life story a downer? Well, yes. Is the movie a downer? Absolutely not. Huh? What? Why?
OK, here goes: Because watching the movie is like hearing great bebop or rock-and-roll for the first time. Because of the brash exhilaration emitted by the movie itself, its willingness to go-for-broke at practically every bend and turn, to blend sounds and dialogue as no one tried to blend them before, to point the camera upwards where one wouldn’t expect it and aim it deeper than one is prepared for. As I’ve tried to explain to generations of friends and family mystified by my devotion to Kane, it’s not the story that matters as much as its execution, its infectious grasp of unchecked possibility.
I don’t think I’m saying anything new here. It’s just that for at least as long as I’ve been writing professionally about movies, people want – and expect – less from them than they once did. They still want magic. But do they want Orson Welles’s impudent genius? I suspect it would scare them or put them off as much as it did in 1941. I’m also not sure people are in the mood these days to be reminded, as they watch a movie, that they’re watching a movie, much less watch a movie reinvent itself from within as audaciously as Citizen Kane.
And yet, if last year’s dismal domestic box-office returns are any indication, people aren’t that inclined to go out and see what passes for theatrical film these days. Maybe they don’t know – or haven’t been shown emphatically enough – what movies are capable of. Certainly, no one will ever be allowed to show them the way Welles did, almost by accident, seventy years ago. Still, the movie exists to prove that miracles are indeed possible, if not probable. Which is why I’ll be setting aside some time over the next forty-eight hours to feel — or, at least, simulate – that long-ago rush. Again.
It’s been a while since anyone asked me for a Ten-Best movie list and if I were still regularly paid for going to movies, I would have one piping hot. It’s been a peripatetic year, however, and I’ve been a peripatetic sorta person lately. So I haven’t been as up-to-date on new stuff as I used to be.
Do I wish I still were? Another question for another time. I’m dying to definitively answer that one to myself. Definitively, that is.
Nevertheless, people still ask me what I’ve seen & whether I liked it or not. Clock’s ticking on the end of 2011 & as I note below, I still haven’t seen everything I’ve needed/wanted to see. So I shall reply in the following manner. (This is as of Dec. 27, 2011, by the by):
MOVIES I WOULD PAIR IN A HYPOTHETICAL DOUBLE-FEATURE IN A HYPTOTHETICAL REPERTORY THEATER SHOWING HOW THINGS GOT SO MESSED UP & HOW WE FEEL ABOUT IT NOW:
“Margin Call” & “Take Shelter”
MOVIES THAT WERE BETTER THAN I EXPECTED:
“Melancholia,” “Submarine,” “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Beginners,” “The Adventures of Tintin”
MOVIES THAT WEREN’T QUITE AS GOOD AS ADVERTISED (OR REVIEWED):
“Bridesmaids,” “Tabloid,” “The Ides of March,” “Drive” (but Albert Brooks made up for a lot), “J. Edgar” (Did NOT know until now that Hoover had a Massachusetts accent…Whoda thunk?)
MOVIES THAT FULFILLED ADVANCE HOPES; SOME MORE SO THAN OTHERS:
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,” “Moneyball”, “The Trip”, “The Descendants,” “Super 8”
ODDLY UNDERRATED BLOCKBUSTERS:
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” “Captain America: The First Avenger,” “Thor,” “Midnight in Paris” (longtime – as in jaded – Woody watchers think he got lucky, at best.)
ODDBALL WONDERS PEOPLE AREN’T TALKING ENOUGH ABOUT:
“Cold Weather,” “Poetry,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Arbors”
MY FAVORITE SUBGENRE OF THE YEAR: THE RETRO DOC:
“George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” “The Black Power Mixtape,” “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest”
HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT…(?!):
“Uncle Boomie Who Can Recall His Past Lives”
NOT AS BAD AS I ANTICIPATED, BUT STILL PROBLEMATIC:
“The Help”
I’M STILL NOT SURE ABOUT (BUT CAN’T BRING MYSELF TO DISMISS):
“The Tree of Life,” “Nostalgia for the Light”
AND I STILL HAVEN’T SEEN (BUT WILL SOON, I PROMISE):
“Hugo,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” “Margaret,” “Pina,” “Le Havre,”
Before we get to this year’s Top Ten, some random thoughts: 2011 has been such a mean, tumultuous, uprooting year for me that it was a challenge to keep track of the latest recordings. With the year almost over, I’m factory-sealed certain that I’ve left several worthy candidates behind. See them? They’re glaring at me from behind, standing with hands on hips or waving at my dust trail as if to say, “What?”
Then again, I find myself wondering what the hell they’re doing there. Seems to me I heard at some point this fall that Termination Day for CDs is approaching even faster than one had been led to believe. If we want the latest Keith Jarrett or Aaron Neville, we need only reach into a cloud — a.k.a. THE Cloud — and snatch whatever track we want. I still can’t believe that’s all we’ll eventually be left with. But it’s what all the salespeople insist is happening and they’ve never lied to us before. Ever.
And yet, you’re all here, aren’t you? Even though I haven’t yet learned how to download album covers or to make the necessary links to specific tracks. Someday, maybe even next year, that’ll be in place. For now, some tough choices from a tough year…
1.) Sonny Rollins, “Road Shows Vol. 2” (Doxy) – The Greatest Live Act in Jazz, headlined by the Greatest Living Improviser, keeps rolling along, its every flourish and delicacy captured for what promises to be an epochal series of recordings from past and (one hopes) future concerts. This second installment’s tracks are just a year old, but you understand why they needed to be out there in a hurry. They celebrate the start of the Colossus’ ninth decade as observed in Japan and, most notably, at last September’s “Sonny Rollins @80” concert @ New York’s Beacon Theater. On that evening, the celebrant, leonine and fit, sounded frisky and responsive to the electricity of the moment, his furry tone combed to a bristly sheen. He brought out guitarist Jim Hall, his comparably indefatigable 1960s playmate (to dive into “In a Sentimental Mood,” of course) as well as trumpeter Roy Hargrove who, as with the leader, always brings his A-game in front of onlookers. This disc is the next best thing to having been there. Yet it still makes you wish you’d been able to share the audience’s excitement at seeing Ornette Coleman wander on-stage for a characteristically insurgent solo on “Sonnymoon for Two” wherein he lures the Colossus “outside” the regular changes for some buoyant give-and-take. If Rollins is now the de-facto king of whatever it is we mean when we talk about jazz, then this edition of “Road Shows” shows him to be a wise, benevolent ruler whose domain, however small it may seem to outsiders, feels accessible enough to meet your most urgent needs and expansive enough to contain multitudes.
2.) Ambrose Akinmusir, “When the Heart Emerges Glistening” (Blue Note) – Only four years removed from winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, this 29-year-old trumpeter has delivered on his grand promise with an album of startling depth and range. Once you get past the challenges of pronouncing his intimidating surname (ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee) and of getting past the album’s knotty title, you’re free to acclimate with his big, brilliant sound or unravel the intricacies of his soloing – which, while layered with the trills, glissandos and arpeggios emblematic of the jazz trumpet’s heritage, share the probing detail and varied attack of sax icon Joe Henderson and of pianist (and album co-producer) Jason Moran. For all his agility and command, Akinmusire leans heavily on his band-mates (tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown); all of whom are worthy collaborators, collectively and individually. Word is out that these guys are all part of a big band that Akinmusire is leading. Can’t wait to hear what that’s like.
3.) Noah Preminger, “Before the Rain” (Palmetto) – At age 24, Preminger, a front-rank tenor saxophonist on just his second album as a leader, plays ballads as if he were a seventy-something road-warrior. He already knows, on instinct, how to approach a melody from behind; where to hang the drapery on a chord change and when to gently pull it away. And he doesn’t seem in a hurry to disclose everything he knows, not even on his original compositions (the title track, “Abreaction,” “Jamie”) or on Ornette Coleman’s “Toy Dance.” As with Akinmusire, Preminger is blessed with a eerily compatible rhythm section of bassist John Herbert, drummer Matt Wilson and pianist Frank Kimbrough, who contributes a couple of his prodigious compositions (“Quickening,” “November”) to the cause. By the time this group gets to massage a sturdy war horse such as “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” you’re utterly convinced that Preminger is the real thing – and that he’s coming along quite nicely.
4.) Allen Lowe, “Blues and the Empirical Truth” (Music & Arts) – Is it music or is it scholarship? Or musical scholarship? Is it criticism of the blues or just critical of them (or at least of what people say about them)? These and dozens of other questions aroused by “Blues and the Empirical Truth” are far more significant than any answers I or anyone else pretending to know more about music than Allen Lowe can cobble together. Lowe is a gnomic, compulsively idiosyncratic polymath who lives in Maine, plays a red-hot saxophone and has for years put together epic inquiries into the history and nature of American music and how it shapes – or doesn’t – the national character. On this three-disc set, recorded over a two-year period, Lowe arranges, composes and plays “inside” and “outside” jazz as well as such makeshift forms as neo-gutbucket-progressive-punk (at least that’s what I’m calling it for the moment.) He is backed by a typically eclectic guest list that includes guitarist Marc Ribot, pianist Matthew Shipp, trombonist Roswell Rudd and Lowe’s fellow musicologist Lewis Porter, contributing here and there on keyboards. Along the way, tribute is made to civil rights activists Pauli Murray and Ella Mae Wiggins, forgotten or obscure musicians such as saxophonist Dave Schildkraft and pianist Blind Tom Bethune and…Doris Day, who should have been invited to Portland to jam with this crowd; except you have to wonder what she would have made of a song list with such titles as “Speckled Shaw Crippled Pete Boogie,” “Blues in Transfiguration,” “Elvis Died With His Sins Intact,” “In a Harlem Ashram” and “(Bull Connor Sees) Darkies on the Delta.” Guess it doesn’t matter as long as no animals were harmed in the process.
5.) Muhal Richard Abrams, “SoundDance” (Pi) – Just so you know, Sonny Rollins isn’t the only octogenarian legend who’s still getting the job done. Abrams, the peerless pianist-composer who co-founded the legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) nearly 50 years ago, marked his own ninth decade by engaging in colloquies of such breadth and magnitude that they each needed their own disc. One of these is a dialogue with tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson that took place in October, 2009, a year before the latter’s death, though it’s a strain to detect signs of sagging energy in his playing. Both Abrams and Anderson seem energized by the task of extending or enhancing each other’s thoughts and even listeners resistant to free-form improvisation won’t miss a beat (so to speak). A year later, Abrams engaged in a sonic pas de deux with fellow innovator, author and AACM veteran George Lewis, who brought both his trombone and his laptop to the party. These two masters of orchestration create intricate, spiraling patterns that are at once imposing and puckish. You can wander in and out of their gallery of sound and find something strange, shiny and, in a peculiar way, companionable.
6.) Craig Taborn, “Avenging Angel” (EMI) – A title of one track could easily apply to most of the others: “A Difficult Thing Said Simply.” Taborn, who owns one of the most eclectic curriculum vitae in contemporary music (Tim Berne AND James Carter?), approaches the art of solo jazz piano as if he were translating complex code from a distant star. Often, he binds the information in tightly-wound chords struck down as if on anvils to forge unusual shapes. At other times (the aptly-named “Glossolalia”), he lets things twirl in the air like dazed, tiny phantasms squeezed out of an overcrowded basement. As with the early work of Keith Jarrett, Taborn is prone to lean to too hard on a riff, but (again, as with Jarrett) the digging can occasionally lead to an illuminated strike. In what’s been a vintage year for solo jazz piano discs (see the honorable-mention list below), this stood out for one simple reason: It sounded the most different from what its genre had yielded before.
7.) Youn Sun Nah, “Same Girl” (ACT) – Didn’t know a thing about her when this disc slipped into in my mailbox earlier in the year. After one track, I found myself asking, “Where has she been all my life?” (In Europe, apparently, where this album was first released last winter.) She is steeped in the French chanson tradition, but as with the most interesting singers beyond the boomer generation – Is she really 42? – she’s willing to try anything from Broadway (“My Favorite Things”) to Brazil (“Song of No Regrets”), from the folk music of her native Korea (“Kangwondo Aririang”) to the mellow sounds of Metallica (“Enter Sandman”). And she can scat real good, too, as proven on the quiet-fire “Breakfast in Baghdad.” The minimalist backing she gets from guitarist Ulf Wakenius, bassist-cellist Lars Danielson and percussionist Xavier Desandre lets her rangy, limber voice roam, run and leap about at will, even when the material is dipped in deep blue. Nothing seems to scare or stop her. Good as this disc is, it makes you wish she’d dare even more.
8.) Bill Frisell, “Sign of Life” (Savoy) – At its most inquisitive and unfettered, Bill Frisell’s music can be as evocative of the “the old, weird America” as Bob Dylan’s 1967 basement tapes. (Come and get me, Greil Marcus!) He has a boho-folk artist’s affinity for both the pastoral and the abstract. Beneath even his most glowing, spacious-skies landscapes, there are flickering shadows and misshapen objects that don’t distort the view, but are blended to make a slightly cockeyed, but still arresting picture, “Sign of Life,” performed by his 858 Quartet of violinist Jenny Schienman, violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts, is his best-realized sound painting since 2001’s “Blues Dream,” whose noir-ish cloaking devices I still appreciate, even if others didn’t. This is a sunnier compound of motifs and riffs that give off an aura of mystery, even danger – especially when the irrepressible Scheinman starts throwing paraphrases and adornments like left jabs. It’s clearer than ever that with both this disc and the John Lennon tribute released in the same year, Frisell can’t be stopped – or even contained. Only sampled – and what would NPR do for filler between news stories if his music weren’t around?
9.) Miguel Zenon, “Alma Adento: The Puerto Rican Songbook” (Marsalis Music) – Not only was this the year’s best Latin jazz album, it was also among the more inspired examples of that overpopulated subgenre, the tribute album. Zenon’s homage isn’t to a single artist or composer, but to the men and women who wrote the classic pop tunes of his native land. He and arranger Guillermo Klein practically reinvent crooner Bobby Capo’s “Incomprendido” as a slow-drying lament. Conversely, Rafael Hernandez’s “Silencio,” revived by the “Buena Vista Social Club” some years back, is given a near-chimerical, tempo-shifting transformation. The centerpiece, literally and figuratively, comprises two pieces by Sylvia Rexach: the title track and “Olas y Areenas,” both of which are treated by Zenon and Klein with passionate intensity and solicitous intelligence. Zenon may sometimes risk going overboard with his ambition and with his playing, but that’s part of the attraction. And if his alto-sax soars like a rocket plane, he’s becoming more adroit at gliding to pinpoint landings. .
10.) Evan Christopher, “Remembering Song” (Arbors) – If you paid close attention to “Treme” this year…no, wait. I have to digress just a little here. I’ve been hearing fans of “The Wire” complain that they find “Treme” too slow, too dense and not as – what? – urgently engrossing as its predecessor. I am compelled to remind these folks that it took at least three seasons for “The Wire” to find a following. And that only when it was nearly over did people begin thinking of it as a “classic.” So though it’s no longer fashionable in pop-culture circles to counsel patience, call me unfashionable. Watch and wait…Anyway, if you did pay close attention to “Treme,” you probably saw Christopher jamming with Tom McDermott and the luminous Lucia Micarelli on Scott Joplin’s “Heliotrope Bouquet.” He has been one of Crescent City’s most lyrical and stalwart clarinetists and this love letter to his adopted hometown is both a wistful lament for the unshakable legacy of Katrina and a bittersweet celebration of the spirit that refuses to wither or retreat from that legacy. His original compositions – e.g., “The River by the Road”, “You Gotta Treat It Gentle” – show that he’s not trying to reinvent tradition, but fulfill its demands. Sometimes, you don’t need to listen to something that changes the world. Easing its pain is enough. And for me, this year especially, it was more than enough.
HONORABLE MENTION:
1.) Gonzalo Rubalcaba, “Fe Faith” (5Passion)
2.) Matthew Shipp Trip, “The Art of the Improviser” (Thirsty Ear)
3.) Larry Goldings, “In My Room” (BFM)
4.) Charles Lloyd & Maria Farantouri, “Athens Concert” (EMI)
5.) Terrell Stafford, “This Side of Strayhorn (MaxJazz)
BEST NEW ARTIST
Chris Dingman, “Waking Dreams” (Between Worlds Music)
BEST VOCAL
Youn Sun Nah, “Same Girl” (see above)
BEST LATIN ALBUIM
Zenon, “Alma Adento: The Puerto Rican Songbook” (see above)
BEST REISSUE
Julius Hemphill, “Dogon A.D.” (Arista/Freedom) HONORABLE MENTION: Bill Dixon Orchestra, “Intents and Purposes” (RCA/Dynagroove)
