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RAN BLAKE & FRIENDS
Noir effects

It’s difficult to think of any jazz musician who does shows like the one pianist and composer Ran Blake gave with a few of his friends at the Regattabar a week ago last Wednesday. For one thing, there was sheer breadth: 19 numbers including a smattering by Blake and his crew — with pieces by Ellington, Mal Waldron, Ornette Coleman, Gunther Schuller, Ary Barroso ("Brazil"), and Charles Mingus. And they did it all in just under 90 minutes, including intermission.

But the unifying thread was film noir, an abiding passion of Blake’s, and film composers like Alex North and Bernard Hermann. Blake has long played variations on noir themes when he wasn’t writing his own, and at the Regattabar the band alternated the "straight" numbers with accompaniment to short film scenes that were played silently on a small movie screen. Blake, guitarists David Fabris and Jonah Kraut, and trombonist Joel Yennior played in the dark to Preminger’s Whirlpool and Bunny Lake Is Missing (three scenes from the latter, each with Carol Lynley scurrying around in the shadows), John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (two scenes), Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase, and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. (A printed program, complete with film credits, was distributed at the door.)

Maybe Blake would score an entire film if he could — but that wasn’t the point here. There were probably very few people in the audience who were familiar with all the films. Instead, the band played off the intensity of the silent narrative fragments — a particularly horrible scene from Leave Her to Heaven, where Gene Tierney watches impassively as a boy drowns in a lake; an extended scene from Dr. Mabuse, for which Blake and the band played off Konrad Elfer’s expressionistic score; and, most familiar, Bernard Hermann’s cycling, obsessive figures from Vertigo as James Stewart spies on Kim Novak.

Blake’s conception easily fits common notions of "movie music." He likes disembodied effects, sudden dynamic shifts, astringent and percussive dissonances, and lush, ambiguous chords that seem to come straight out of Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen. He’ll contrast these harmonies with a flowing legato melody; an entire musical narrative can shift on a sharply struck repeated single note. And few jazz pianists use the pedals like Blake, either damping a chord or letting a sustain bleed from one passage to the next.

His cohort were of like mind: Fabris with a touch of fuzz or watery Hawaiian slack key; Kraut singing two pop-rock ballads, one written by himself and one by Belmont composer Emeen Zarookian; Yennior playing long high moans and plunger effects; Blake ruminating on Hermann, Alex North, Ellington, and Carol Lynley. The show was a release party for Blake and Fabris’s duo CD, Indian Winter (Soul Note). It’s 23 tracks are as action-packed as the Regattabar show.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
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