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	DAVE DOUGLAS’S KEYSTONE Movie music

Will movie screens soon be a regular part of musicians’ gear at the Regattabar? A few weeks ago, Ran Blake screened film noir segments to run with his musical accompaniment. And in his late set last Saturday night, trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas and his Keystone band played along with two 1915 movies by silent-film comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle that were separated by a suite of music alone.

In the CD/DVD release Keystone (Greenleaf Music), it’s easy to accept Douglas’s modern jazz funk as a running counterpoint to Arbuckle’s acrobatic physical comedy. At the Regattabar — with its non-stage and the movie screen off to one side, like another musician — film and music competed for attention, at least in "Fatty’s Tintype Tangle." Douglas doesn’t like to cue his music as a "one-to-one" relationship to events on the screen. He and his excellent band played continuously over the half-hour as unrelated mayhem — broken plumbing, a chase scene, harmless gunplay — transpired on the screen. At best, you could say, his rhythm (variations on funk and Latin grooves) and Fatty’s matched in their helter-skelter gracefulness; they actually synchronized only when Gene Lake’s drum solo accompanied gunshots.

In "Mabel’s Wilful Way," oom-pah-pah rhythms were a familiar theatrical accompaniment as Mabel Normand and her parents visit the zoo, where they meet Fatty and a friend. Here, slow tempos and several free-tempo passages left room for the action on the screen — whether it was a brief languid tenor passage from saxophonist Marcus Strickland, with responsive barks and oscillations from Rhodes keyboardist Adam Benjamin, or even some comic "screams" from DJ Olive’s turntables. Image and sound achieved parity, and aside from Douglas’s a cappella encore of Thelonious Monk’s "Well You Needn’t" (dedicated to Steve Lacy), it was the most evocative music of the night. Maybe the next time Keystone come to town, they can play in a pit beneath an elevated screen.