Dick Fontaine's Jazz Movies: Ornette Coleman Trio / Sound?? - Double Feature (2005)

In this indispensable DVD, two of the most interesting films ever made modern experimental jazz are included. The first one, " Ornette Coleman Trio", presents Ornette Coleman's famous trio during their visit to Paris in 1966 in order to record the soundtrack of a very nutty-looking Belgium film called "Who's Crazy?".
The film was made in three days and offers a portrait of the trio that becomes an "ironic essay in dignity in the face of insanity". Ornette, who in this era was one of the leaders of the Jazz Avant-garde movement, faced the challenge with his two fellow musicians by responding with passionate improvisations to the stimuli that reached him from the screen where the images are projected. A priceless testimony to the innovations which revolutionized the world of jazz in the sixties.
The second film, also directed by Fontaine, is a curious and original musical and cinematographic experiment. Its strange title, "Sound??", clearly indicates the objective of the work, which is merely to take advantage of the ideas of an innovative jazzman (Roland Kirk) in order to permit an Avant-garde contemporary (John Cage) to speculate with silence and with sound as two facets of the same reality.
Kirk appears in the film demonstrating his ability to play three saxophones simultaneously, incorporating at the same time recordings of birdsongs or his giving out whistles to the audience in order that they accompany him "in the key of w, if you please". Parallel to this, Cage talks about his concepts and prepares a piece "musical bicycle" with two of his collaborators at the Seville Theatre of London, introducing Kirk's music in an echo chamber in its search for the sound of silence. Two extraordinary examples of immortal Avant-gardism.

Chapters:
- Ornette Coleman Trio
A film by Dick Fontaine, 1966
Featuring Ornette Coleman (tp,as,v), David Izenzon (b), Charles Moffett (d).
Director Dick Fontaine set out to catch the music, the thoughts and the personalities of Ornette Coleman's mid-1960s trio during two days in Paris while they worked on scoring a film. He did that job exceptionally well. There is a memorable performance of Ornette's 'Sadness' (complete and uninterrupted from David Izenzon's bowed introduction to the end!) during which Fontaine quickly cuts away from images of the musicians responding to the movie screen to concentrate his cameras directly on the players' serious, passionate involvement with their improvisations. It is one of the best filmed jazz performances ever captured on video.

- Sound??
A film by Dick Fontaine, 1967
Featuring Roland Kirk, John Cage.
Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage's enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk's more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music. Kirk plays three saxes at once, switches to flute, incorporates tapes of birds played backwards, and finally hands out whistles to his audience and encourages them to accompany him, "in the key of W, if you please." Cage, on the other hand, is preparing a work for musical bicycle with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham at the Seville Theatre in London. Cage meets Rahsaan's music in an echo chamber, and he ends his search for the sound of silence in his favorite spot – the anechoic chamber – where it turns out to be the uproar of "your nervous system in operation." Rahsaan is in top form playing everything from “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” to his suite “Rip, Rig and Panic.”
1. Roland Kirk in Concert
2. Collective improvisation
3. Playing at the Zoo
4. Blues
5. A "Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square"


Features:
- Interactive Menu
- Direct Scene Access