The live audience with T-Bone Burnett Sunday evening at the Kabuki was not, for all its warmth and breadth of illustration (in the form of big-screen clips from his movie credits) overly revealing of this legendary musician/music producer's intellectual or emotional process: interviewer Elvis Mitchell was relaxed and witty, but T-Bone seemed a bit nervous, not so surprising given the size of the audience hanging on his every word. We did hear a little about his formative influences; Hoagie Carmichael and his band in the 1946 Gilda (which he described as ground zero for what music in a film should be), the new authenticity in Elvis Presley's 1957 Loving You, and American Graffiti, as well as some exceedingly brief mentions of musicians Ralph Stanley, Jimmy Reed, and John Goodwin, of his parents' Ella and Louis records and their Cole Porter songbooks, but the conversation was vague and rambly; it felt like the rubber never really hit the road. Maybe there is no road exactly. When questioned about his methods, T-Bone explained that his process is not very conscious ... I do it by feel. He was more expansive in the anecdotal department, with generous comments about the many friends - musicians, directors, and actors alike - who have worked with him along the way, including Anthony Minghella, the Coen brothers, Johnny Cash, Callie Khouri and Jeff Bridges; we heard about Reece Witherspoon's finally being ready to sing 'Wildwood Flower' in Walk the Line after bending over double and screaming at the top of her voice in the studio yard, and of Johnny Cash's barely contained violence, his southern gothic darkness, albeit the only victim in this story was a guitar Cash scored with a nail. Clips from his many brilliant musical-production credits included scenes from O Brother, Where Art Thou (when he, as he put it, pulled the sword out of the stone), The Big Lebowski, Cold Mountain, Walk the Line, Across the Universe, and Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, to name a few; the music in these segments more than made up for whatever wasn't said, and maybe that is the point, after all, that music is its own best interlocutor.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
SFIFF53: T-Bone Burnett
The live audience with T-Bone Burnett Sunday evening at the Kabuki was not, for all its warmth and breadth of illustration (in the form of big-screen clips from his movie credits) overly revealing of this legendary musician/music producer's intellectual or emotional process: interviewer Elvis Mitchell was relaxed and witty, but T-Bone seemed a bit nervous, not so surprising given the size of the audience hanging on his every word. We did hear a little about his formative influences; Hoagie Carmichael and his band in the 1946 Gilda (which he described as ground zero for what music in a film should be), the new authenticity in Elvis Presley's 1957 Loving You, and American Graffiti, as well as some exceedingly brief mentions of musicians Ralph Stanley, Jimmy Reed, and John Goodwin, of his parents' Ella and Louis records and their Cole Porter songbooks, but the conversation was vague and rambly; it felt like the rubber never really hit the road. Maybe there is no road exactly. When questioned about his methods, T-Bone explained that his process is not very conscious ... I do it by feel. He was more expansive in the anecdotal department, with generous comments about the many friends - musicians, directors, and actors alike - who have worked with him along the way, including Anthony Minghella, the Coen brothers, Johnny Cash, Callie Khouri and Jeff Bridges; we heard about Reece Witherspoon's finally being ready to sing 'Wildwood Flower' in Walk the Line after bending over double and screaming at the top of her voice in the studio yard, and of Johnny Cash's barely contained violence, his southern gothic darkness, albeit the only victim in this story was a guitar Cash scored with a nail. Clips from his many brilliant musical-production credits included scenes from O Brother, Where Art Thou (when he, as he put it, pulled the sword out of the stone), The Big Lebowski, Cold Mountain, Walk the Line, Across the Universe, and Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, to name a few; the music in these segments more than made up for whatever wasn't said, and maybe that is the point, after all, that music is its own best interlocutor.
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