Volume 21 Issue 8 - May 2016

school vibe is unmistakable in this one-of-a-kind cultural sideshow
that marries flag twirling, and the tossing and catching of facsimiles
of rifles, with music that romanticizes American adolescence. The
experience creates real bonds among the participants, a crosssection
of societal groups. The musical highlight was former Philip
Glass assistant Nico Muhly’s sophisticated, What Are You Thinking?,
which took its post-rock stance seriously, balancing a grounded
chamber music centre against a hypnotic percussion groove. A perfect
component for what is essentially a high concept reality show.
The Wonderful Kingdom of Papa Alaev: According to Hot Docs
programmer Myrocia Watamaniuk, Allo “Papa” Alaev, nearly 80, rules
his celebrated folk music clan with an iron tambourine. Beginning
with his unilateral decision to emigrate to Israel from Tajikistan, the
gifted musician micro-manages nearly every aspect of his family’s
lives, both on stage and off. Every child and grandchild lives in their
single-family house in Tel Aviv, except his only daughter who chose
her own way in life, a sin her father will not forgive. Set to a blazing
tribal soundtrack, drama and drumbeats sing out from every entertaining
exchange in this grand family affair.
Hip-Hop Evolution: The Banger Films team behind Metal: A
Headbanger’s Journey and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage traces the
evolution of hip-hop using Canadian rapper/q host Shad as a guide
and placing the genre’s huge cultural influence in historical context.
Director Darby Wheeler told The Fader that Hip-Hop Evolution won’t
be a rehash of the genre’s most well-documented moments. “The
process [of making the film] revealed some stories that have never
received major attention, and we’re hoping that even the most knowledgeable
hip-hop heads will be entertained, informed and surprised
by what Hip-Hop Evolution has to offer.”
Gary Numan: Android in La La Land shows the electro pop, 80s
rocker as family man, dealing with Asperger’s and wondering how
he will ever make meaningful music again. With the support of his
wife and three daughters, his painstaking studio work on a new
album gives him the confidence to go public once again. As Variety
pointed out, despite the film’s occasional feel as a glorified promo for
the new recording, Numan himself is “winningly candid and guilelessly
charming.”
Raving Iran follows two young Iranian men at the centre of Iran’s
techno scene as they dodge the authorities and prepare for one
giant rave in the desert. As an Italian critic wrote: “The beats of electronic
music become synonymous with freedom and healthy rebellion.
[Director] Susanne Regina Meures conveys this world suspended
between illusion and reality through hypnotic images of bodies letting
themselves go to music completely, like in a liberating exorcism.”
Spirit Unforgettable: John Mann, frontman for Canadian Celtic rock
band Spirit of the West, faces the reality of early onset Alzheimer’s at
52. With the support of his wife, he and his lifelong bandmates give
their fans one goodbye performance at Massey Hall.
De Palma, the indispensable documentary about Brian De Palma,
directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is a candid look at
one of Hollywood’s longest directorial careers from the mouth of
the man himself. In compulsively watchable detail, De Palma – who
considers himself “the one practitioner who took up Hitchcock’s
form” – talks about each of his 29 features, dropping one factual
nugget after another, from camerawork and direct influences to
gossip about famous actors not learning lines, while Baumbach and
Paltrow seamlessly intercut scenes from 45 years of filmmaking. De
Palma has worked with the cream of film composers, from Bernard
Herrmann (“who sees the movie and goes off and writes the score”),
John Williams, Danny Elfman, Mark Isham and Ryuichi Sakamoto to
Paul Williams (who was able to write parodies of all sorts of pop music
forms in Phantom of the Paradise) and eight with Pino Donaggio
(Carrie, Dressed to Kill, etc.) and offers several insights into Ennio
Morricone’s work on The Untouchables. It all began when De Palma
saw Vertigo at Radio City Music Hall as a teenager in 1958.
Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.
CONVERSATIONS AT THE WHOLENOTE
Alison Mackay’s
Coffee House
Creation
DAVID PERLMAN
We are approaching the half-hour point in my taped conversation
with Alison Mackay, Tafelmusik’s longtime violone/
contrabass player and concert curator extraordinaire,
and are finally getting round to the ostensible reason for
having this conversation at this time – Tafelmusik’s upcoming presentation
titled “Tales of Two Cities: The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House.”
As always with Mackay’s projects, it’s an immensely engaging premise
– taking two cities, thousands of miles and worlds apart – and viewing
them through the musical lens of the same moment of historical and
cultural time.
“Let me tell you a fun thing before we get into it,” I say. “On
May 21st, which is the middle of your run at Koerner Hall,
Zimmermann’s Coffee House in Leipzig will be featured on stage in
your show, and the same evening in the Peter Hall of the Moravian
College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, “Zimmerman’s Coffee House”
will be the title of the last evening concert of their 109th festival.
And if you trace that college back to its schoolhouse origins, it goes
back to 1745, which is only 20 years after Bach arrived in Leipzig!”
“Oh that’s wonderful,” she says, delightedly. “We should get in
touch with them and see what we could do together.”
It’s a typical response from Mackay, whose relish for the juxtapositions,
coincidences and synchronicities that offer opportunities to
see old things anew, has become her curatorial trademark.
Memory Lane: We have just finished a rambled down memory
lane, starting with the first of her Tafelmusik projects I can
remember, “The Four Seasons: Cycle of the Sun,” back in 2004.
That project took 1725, the year Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni was
published, and made that year the departure point for an investigation
of other musics being made in the world in the same year – an
exploration that encompassed Chinese pipa, Indian veena and Inuit
throat singing.
One can see the same bird’s eye imagination at work in her
“Galileo Project.” “It was in 2009, she says, “part of the International
Year of Astronomy, because 1609 was the year Galileo first turned
his telescope on the night sky. There were to be international celebrations
of that event and we were actually approached by the
Canadian committee that was planning events surrounding the year,
to curate an event that would link astronomy and art.”
“Cutting across strata of geography and time is something you are
good at,” I say.
“For me the seed of these projects is always in the music,” she
says. “These events and performances are always concerts and
there’s always a concert’s worth of music in them. And it’s very
much about celebrating having a chance to perform the very best
music in our repertoire. I hate having to include anything that’s only
there because it matches the subject. I love to include profound,
wonderful music – the best of our repertoire but giving the chance,
just once in a while, to see it in a wider historical and cultural
context. It shines a new light on the music. So it’s not that I think
that audiences now have shorter attention spans or anything like
that, or that they need visuals or bells and whistles. I still very much
believe in purely musical concerts.”
These amplified concert forms are just as much for the musicians
benefit as for the audience’s, she points out, using Vivaldi as
an example. “Something like The Four Seasons is something our
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