E-Mail This Article to a Friend Film school Dave Douglas goes to the movies BY JON GARELICK
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I don’t usually recommend a jazz album by saying, "Get it for the movie," but that wouldn’t be bad advice regarding trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas’s new Keystone (Greenleaf Music, available at greenleafmusic.com). The CD/DVD package includes a disc of music, and one of a film and a video. The 52-minute CD includes 11 Douglas pieces played by his electric band — Jamie Saft on Wurlitzer keyboard, Marcus Strickland on saxophones, Brad Jones on bass, Gene Lake on drums, and DJ Olive on turntables — while the DVD has a 34-minute two-reel silent comedy by the actor and director Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, set to an arrangement of Douglas’s pieces. Douglas and his band will perform to screenings of Arbuckle films at the Regattabar next weekend.

Arbuckle is a name just about lost to time. The film on Keystone, Fatty and Mabel Adrift, was made in 1916, and when Douglas showed the CD to his wife’s elderly but sharp-witted and well-educated uncle, the older man, having read the liner notes, could only look up at the musician and say thoughtfully, "David, I had no idea Fanny Arbuckle was a man."

Arbuckle was a major star in cinema’s early years, but in 1921, following a party he helped throw, a young woman died, and Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter. It took three trials to clear his name. The jury’s statement read, in part, "We feel that a great injustice has been done to him. . . . Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from blame." But the party-going Arbuckle was a convenient scapegoat for the first wave of anti-Hollywood Puritanism, and his career was over. He died in 1933 at 46.

"All these movies were removed from circulation, and he was really erased for a long time," Douglas tells me on the phone from his home in Croton-on-Hudson. But it wasn’t a love of Arbuckle’s films that led Douglas to him. In fact, when he started what turned out to be the Keystone project (named for the Mack Sennett studio where Arbuckle worked), he’d never seen one. The impetus was an offer from the Paramount Center for the Performing Arts in nearby Peekskill to use an NEA grant to set the film of his choice to music, with no restriction to genre or period. "The music I wanted to write for film involved a lot of electronic sounds and modern beats, so my first instinct was to look for very modern films. But in anything I saw, it didn’t seem that either medium was adding to the other. So I went back in time to silent film, and so much of it is slow-moving that I felt that the music was overpowering the image. And I didn’t want to write music that would be an attempt to write in an older style. I wanted it to be very modern music, the most cutting-edge thing I could think of." Douglas looked for films that were "fast-moving enough" for the music he wanted to make and that hadn’t already been done to death.

In Arbuckle, he found not only the right comic rhythm but also "a sense of technical adventure. It was a new medium, and you can tell sometimes that he’s playing with the very idea of capturing something on camera."

Fatty and Mabel Adrift was one of many that starred Arbuckle with Mabel Normand. He’s a hand on her parents’ farm. They fall in love and marry with the parents’ blessings — they buy the couple a beach-house love-nest — and to the chagrin of the jilted suitor (the rubber-faced Al St. John). There are various plottings, a storm, the house set adrift on the ocean, a rescue. What’s most striking besides the grace of the physical comedy is the sweetness of the relationship between the two lovers — Mabel is clearly enchanted by Fatty’s goofy charm.

"There are two main misconceptions about Arbuckle," Douglas tells me. "One is that he did these horrible things, which we know he didn’t. And the other comes from that picture of him with a bowler, and you tend to think of that really nasty slapstick, with punching and noses getting twisted. And that’s not what his movies were like. They were sweet — not sentimental, but with a sly, subtle humor, and very kind of romantic and lovely. Now that I’ve done this, I really feel that he should be up there with Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton as one of the great early directors and actors."

Douglas’s music, meanwhile, is atypical of what one associates with modern scores for silents. This isn’t a "period’ recreation of ancient Ellington or ragtime, the cartoon compositions of Raymond Scott, or even Brill Frisell’s characteristically pastoral settings for Buster Keaton (Douglas admires Frisell, which is one reason he wanted to stay away from Keaton). Instead, he sets his expansive harmonic palette and the often volatile counterpoint of trumpet and sax against hard funk rhythms and floating turntable samples, often with pop-song hookiness. Sometimes the music itself acts in counterpoint with what’s on the screen. But Douglas’s ballad-tempo love theme "Sapphire Sky Blue" (written for his wife) also happens to be the perfect accompaniment to Fatty and Mabel’s seaside idyll.

"I wanted it to be surprising, but I also wanted it to work with the film. I knew I didn’t want to do a one-for-one illustration of the action — someone getting bonked on the head and there being a big drum hit."

Not that Douglas deliberately avoids synchronicity. For the five-minute video edited from Fatty’s Tin-Type Tangle, Douglas sets one of his deepest grooves, "Just Another Murder," with a halting stop-time. In one scene, repeated in the video, Fatty is flipping pancakes in the kitchen, the stop-time coming in when he drops a cake onto his foot and flips it back into the pan.

"Yeah," Douglas agrees, "but in writing a theme like that — that has all those stop-times in it — my thinking is just that this is going to hook up in one way or another, the feeling of this stumbling guy. So when we do it live, it hooks up just right with the pancake drop one night, then the next night it hooks up slightly differently. And my hope is that the themes I wrote are strong enough that they’ll hook up no matter what the specific moment-to-moment relationship is."

Douglas is often inspired — or provoked — by non-musical topics. Witness (RCA, 2000) was unabashedly political, and Sanctuary (Avant, 1997) was inspired, in part, by Filippo Brunelleschi’s design for the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence. Reading Douglas’s liner notes for Keystone, you can sense his identification with Arbuckle’s plight, the independent artist who was sold out by his corporate benefactors, the scapegoated Hollywood libertine.

"I feel more and more that in jazz and improvised music — in what I like to think of as American music, which means so many things — what’s valuable is the voice of the individual. In the music of my heroes, — Gil Evans, Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis, Bill Frisell, Thelonious Monk, Henry Threadgill — each member of the ensemble is getting heard as an individual, and that’s what the freedom is about." As for Witness, "I started to feel that maybe I didn’t even need to write liner notes — the idea that we were making this music, and that we were in it together, and that yes there’s a composer but the composer is inviting each person to say these things."

As for how the performances of Keystone have gone so far, "In one show we did I decided to play one song without any film, and it was really interesting because a lot of people came up afterwards and said, ‘Wow, after I just watched you guys play, I interacted with the movie and the score in a completely different way.’ It’s not like we’re just down in the pit and they’re watching the movie. So there’s a nice interaction that goes both ways."

DAVE DOUGLAS | Regattabar | Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett St, Harvard Sq | Oct 21 + 22 | 617.395.7757