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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
November 25, 2017
Disclosure: I found this a hard review to write. When we attend concerts, our attention is on the action on the stage, and that attention becomes the focus of the review (with perhaps some commentary on the ancillary elements, such as the programmatic choices or the acoustics of the hall). When it's a purely musical event, we watch and listen intently to what the musicians are doing. If it is, say, an opera or musical theatre production, audience attention falls on the singing and acting happening on the stage; the performance of the musicians in the pit is secondary.
The performance by the UVic Jazz Ensemble was a particular challenge, in the that action was the 1926 film The General, one of the greatest silent movies ever made, and the performance under scrutiny was a live soundtrack to the film performed by the UVic Jazz Ensemble.
A big budget film that infamously involved driving a steam locomotive off a bridge (in the days before Industrial Light and Magic models and CGI effects), The General left early audiences puzzled; recognition that it is a great film had to wait until three decades after it was made. But Keaton's genius had — and continues to have — a significant influence on film makers. You can see his impact in the cinematography of Wes Anderson, the physical humour of Jackie Chan, and the sight gags of Chuck Jones and other animators.
The task of the UVic Jazz Ensemble was to provide a soundtrack to the film. The music played was an assembly of music from a variety of sources, none of it familiar to my ears, and plenty of space was given to the players space to freely improvise.
Did it work? I think so. The film's four major elements — train chase, a battle scene (it's set in the U.S. Civil War), romance, and this being Buster Keaton, comedy — give ample opportunity for a variety of musical moods.
What was noticeable was that the music avoided all of the well-established cliches and tropes. For example, the train scenes, while propelled by a steady rhythmic pulse, avoided an easy chugga-chugga. And in the comedic scenes, the band could have veered into territory normally occupied by Carl Stalling's arrangements for Looney Tunes cartoons, but stayed away from ear-gags.
Quibbles, all technical and associated with the film: The projection of the film onto the bare cement worked, but only passably. It would have been nice to see the film on a screen made for the purpose, larger and with greater contrast. There were interruptions with assorted alerts from the source computer, perhaps the consequence of streaming from an internet source.
But these were minor, and did not detract from the overall experience. With any luck accompanying a silent film will become a recurring event for the UVic Jazz Ensemble. At the evening's end I came away thinking that the ensemble could, with a few more films under their belt, find a voice or language that would be uniquely their own. Encore!
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