BeatRoute Magazine AB Edition - November 2019
BeatRoute Magazine is a music monthly and website that also covers: fashion, film, travel, liquor and cannabis all through the lens of a music fan. Distributed in British Columbia and Alberta, and Ontario edition. BeatRoute’s Alberta edition is distributed in Calgary, Edmonton, Banff and Canmore. The BC edition is distributed in Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo. BeatRoute (AB) Mission PO 23045 Calgary, AB T2S 3A8 E. editor@beatroute.ca BeatRoute (BC) #202 – 2405 E Hastings Vancouver, BC V5K 1Y8 P. 778-888-1120
BeatRoute Magazine is a music monthly and website that also covers: fashion, film, travel, liquor and cannabis all through the lens of a music fan. Distributed in British Columbia and Alberta, and Ontario edition. BeatRoute’s Alberta edition is distributed in Calgary, Edmonton, Banff and Canmore. The BC edition is distributed in Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo. BeatRoute (AB) Mission PO 23045 Calgary, AB T2S 3A8 E. editor@beatroute.ca BeatRoute (BC) #202 – 2405 E Hastings Vancouver, BC V5K 1Y8 P. 778-888-1120
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SCREEN<br />
TIME<br />
JAZZING<br />
IT UP: THE<br />
MUSIC OF<br />
MOTHERLESS<br />
BROOKLYN<br />
In conversation with Edward<br />
Norton about how jazz is<br />
the backbone of his new film<br />
Motherless Brooklyn<br />
By PAT MULLEN<br />
E<br />
dward<br />
Norton juggles riffs and<br />
rhythms as actor, writer, and director<br />
of Motherless Brooklyn. The film, a<br />
passion project 20 years in the making,<br />
stars Norton as Lionel Essrog, a<br />
detective with Tourette syndrome navigating<br />
the criminal underworld of 1950s Brooklyn.<br />
Motherless Brooklyn adapts Jonathan Lethem’s<br />
novel of the same name as Lionel uncovers<br />
a case of racial discrimination in the city’s<br />
housing market, touring through jazz clubs<br />
and political rallies while investigating the<br />
death of his mentor and falling in love with<br />
an activist named Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).<br />
Fuelled by the jazzy rhythms of the city, the<br />
film is a symphony of racial tensions and altered<br />
scales.<br />
Norton, speaking with <strong>BeatRoute</strong> at Toronto<br />
International Film Festival, says he adapted<br />
Lethem’s 1990s-set novel for the 50s to<br />
increase the audience’s empathy for Lionel.<br />
“The novel is really about the experience of<br />
being inside this character’s brain, knowing<br />
him, and feeling empathy as you watch him<br />
navigate this painful and funny affliction,”<br />
says Norton.<br />
The beat and syntax of Jazz help put the<br />
audience inside Lionel’s head. “One of the arguments<br />
for acting and directing was knowing<br />
I could experiment with the condition,<br />
but also sculpt the balance of the performance<br />
in the editing room,” explains Norton.<br />
The rhythms of jazz lend Lionel’s spastic tics<br />
a certain musicality as Norton’s performance<br />
evokes a musician riffing on the scales and<br />
echoes the drum beats and trumpet toots of<br />
Daniel Pemberton’s score.<br />
The film makes the connection<br />
between jazz and Tourette’s explicit<br />
when Lionel encounters a<br />
trumpet player at a club. “I feel<br />
about Lionel the way the trumpet<br />
player communicates<br />
to him saying, ‘I know that<br />
headspace.’ It’s a gift, but<br />
it’s a brain affliction just the<br />
same,” explains Norton.<br />
“Lionel says back<br />
to the trumpet<br />
player, ‘But you<br />
have a way to<br />
push it out<br />
and make it<br />
sound pretty.’<br />
If I laugh lots of times, I feel lucky to have<br />
a vehicle for it. If the dial got turned up a little<br />
bit, it could be a paralyzing mental state.”<br />
Norton’s empathetic performance draws<br />
upon Lionel’s unavoidable awkwardness<br />
without making light of it.<br />
Motherless Brooklyn further evokes Lionel’s<br />
struggle through an original song, “Daily Battles”<br />
by Thom Yorke. “Thom expresses this<br />
duality of longing in the heart, but also psychic<br />
terror, fracture, and dissonance,” says<br />
Norton. “Musically, he expresses Lionel’s<br />
headspace perfectly for me.”<br />
“Daily Battles” echoes throughout the<br />
soundtrack with classic and contemporary<br />
variations, including one by<br />
Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter<br />
Wynton Marsalis, who<br />
“You have to pick yourself<br />
up and out of your personal<br />
struggles and engage<br />
with the bigger fights.”<br />
curated the jazz selections in the club scenes.<br />
“When Laura reaches out and is so empathetic<br />
to Lionel, senses his distress, and helps<br />
calm him down, I was nervous about using<br />
a known jazz ballad,” explains Norton. “The<br />
last thing you want to do is take people out<br />
of that moment if they recognize the song or<br />
get distracted. Wynton did this beautiful arrangement<br />
of Thom’s song and played it like<br />
a Miles Davis ballad from the Birth of the Cool<br />
era.”<br />
Norton says that Yorke’s ballad captured<br />
the essence of the story so strongly that it inspired<br />
a revision to the script. “I put it in the<br />
scene when Lionel complains about his condition<br />
and Laura says, ‘We all have our daily<br />
battles.’<br />
“Laura is a Black woman who’s a lawyer in<br />
the 50s and everyone only sees her as a secretary,”<br />
explains Norton. “You have to pick<br />
yourself up and out of your personal struggles<br />
and engage with the bigger fights.” ,<br />
30 BEATROUTE NOVEMBER <strong>2019</strong>