| This wasn't a concert film. |
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 | | Sly Stone in "Summer of Soul," nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. | | (Searchlight Pictures) | | |
| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
It's Been a Change
I love this story QUESTLOVE tells about SUMMER OF SOUL, the best music movie of 2021, which was nominated Monday for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. When he was absorbing the 40 hours of footage of the 1969 HARLEM CULTURAL FESTIVAL on which his film is based and came across an astonishing MAHALIA JACKSON and MAVIS STAPLES performance of "PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND," he immediately understood, "This is my ending." It's a feverish gospel duet that builds and builds and climbs higher and higher until you feel the Lord may in fact swoop down and take your hand while you listen. It answered the director's question, "What do you want the audience walking away with, like in their stomachs? What's going to floor them in the last 15 minutes?" And it *was* the ending of "Summer of Soul" until Questlove started sharing his first, three-and-a-half-hour draft of the film. Everyone liked it. No one loved it. No one was left with that feeling in their stomach. His girlfriend was the one who explained it for him.
"The Hollywood ending, you know, the kind of 'Kumbaya' safe plan landing ending would have been Mahalia [and Mavis Staples]," Questlove tells the LA Times' "The Envelope" podcast. "But what's happening right now in the world is more like NINA SIMONE. [My girlfriend] said, 'I guarantee you, your film's going to feel way different if you make that switch.'"
And then, boom. It's the Real World you now feel taking your hand.
"Summer of Soul," which opens on a STEVIE WONDER drum solo, features Mahalia and Mavis about halfway through and leaves you with Nina Simone, is the kind of documentary that doesn't need current musicians and celebrities butting in every few minutes to put the onscreen events into context and make you comfortable and tell you why you should care. The very existence of the world circa 2020-21 is all the context the film needs and making you feel comfortable isn't necessarily the goal (although Questlove allows that there's an element of escape). It's a film about the present day, set in 1969. Civil rights. Protests. Anger. Nina Simone. GEORGE FLOYD was murdered eight months before the movie premiered at SUNDANCE. "Once George Floyd comes to the conversation," Questlove tells the Times, "I'll just say that you really, truly couldn't tell what was real on television and what was our film footage. It was interchangeable."
"Summer of Soul" is, in essence, a document of a major Black music festival held in Harlem the same summer as Woodstock and the moon landing which had been all but forgotten to history by the time Questlove signed on to jog the universe's collective memory. It isn't a concert film, according to him. Stevie and Mahalia and Mavis and Nina are there. And SLY & THE FAMILY STONE and GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS and MAX ROACH and ABBEY LINCOLN and and and (the performances are truly incredible). And a world going through a cultural upheaval that casts both a shadow and a light on every performance. It's a movie about reality and reckoning and joy and possibility. It's a movie about George Floyd, who's exactly what B.B. KING and DAVID RUFFIN and the 5TH DIMENSION were singing for, and about, a little over 50 years ago.
Also nominated for Oscars: BEYONCÉ and DIXSON; BILLIE EILISH and FINNEAS O'CONNELL; LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA; VAN MORRISON, and Oscar's favorite bridesmaid, DIANE WARREN (13 nominations, no wins), for Best Original Song... NICHOLAS BRITTELL, GERMAINE FRANCO, JONNY GREENWOOD, ALBERTO IGLESIAS and HANS ZIMMER for Best Original Score... And WEST SIDE STORY provides a musical lift to the Best Picture field; its seven nominations also include a Supporting Actress nod for musical actress ARIANA DEBOSE.
(And shoutout my friend JOSEPH PATEL, nominated for "Summer of Soul.")
Plus Also Too
"I really love being a woman. I really love being a female artist," said ADELE, the big winner at Tuesday's BRIT AWARDS, the first ceremony since the Brits dropped gendered categories. In a night dominated by women, she walked home with the awards for Artist, Album and Song of the Year. LITTLE SIMZ was named Best New Artist half a year after releasing her fourth album, SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT, which is one of the ways the show earns its reputation as the British Grammys. The ceremony wrapped in a cool two and a half hours, which is one of the ways it does not. That still allowed enough time for two, count 'em, two, ED SHEERAN performances... "Herb, do me a favor. Go across the street to the hardware store. I need to have a doorbell button." The first episode of MOOG MUSIC's mini-documentary series GIANTS focuses on composer HERB DEUTSCH, co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer and the man who got that doorbell button for BOB MOOG, who needed it to create his first envelope generator, which he needed to create because Deutsch told him music is meaningless without articulation. A cool window into the life and work of an electronic music innovator and educator who turns 90 today... The first proper SXSW since 2019 is still on for next month but, not surprisingly, the day party lineup is looking a little thin. The city of Austin has received about half the number of applications for special event permits it usually gets for March. "The most glaring absence," the American-Statesman reports, is the FADER FORT.
Rest in Peace
CHII WVTTZ, an 18-year-old Bronx rapper who was short shortly after leaving a Brooklyn recording studio early Sunday morning. He's at least the fourth rapper murdered in the US in 2022. It's the second week of February... Metal guitarist BRUCE GREIG, who played in Misery Index and Dying Fetus.
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
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| | Can this pressing plant revolutionise the vinyl market? | | By Declan McGlynn | | Taiwanese press plant Mobineko has unveiled a new pressing machine specifically for short runs, aiming to reduce the global bottleneck for vinyl production. Declan McGlynn speaks to Josh Doherty about the problems facing vinyl today, how the new machine works and what impact it could have on the future of vinyl. | | |
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 | | Dada Drummer Almanach |
| | In Sounds Begin Responsibilities | | By Damon Krukowski | | Sound alters our environment. Ambient music might be an extreme example, designed to be heard as a part of everything else we hear or do. But all audio information is, in part, ambient. It colors our perceptions of the space we occupy. | | |
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 | | Variety |
| | Oscar Music Snubs and Surprises | | By Jazz Tangcay, Jon Burlingame and Chris Willman | | Jay-Z is out, Beyonce is in and Diane Warren runs up her historic tally. | | |
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 | | Money 4 Nothing |
| | Web 3.Bro with David Turner | | By Saxon Baird, Sam Backer and David Turner | | While the boom and bust have come and gone, NFTs haven't disappeared. A set of crypto based technologies and speculatively disruptive companies are still out there, working to create a new, on-chain future. We have thoughts. | | |
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 | | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| | History made as Indigenous conductor takes the stage | | By Nick Miller | | When Aaron Wyatt picks up the conductor's baton for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday night, he will take a deep breath and set the beat for a moment in history: what is believed to be the first time an Aboriginal man conducts an Australian state orchestra in a public performance. | | |
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| what we're into |
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| Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
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