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

Ornette Coleman / Roland Kirk

DVD compatible with all DVD players, all zones.

- 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"

Total Time: 58 mins