by Robert Leeper
Badi Assad (top) and Kaki King
On Thursday night at Merkin Concert Hall, The Goddess, a classic film from the golden age of Chinese cinema, was given a fresh score and performed live by the iconoclastic guitarist/singer Badi Assad, part of the ongoing New York Guitar Festival. Assad's varied background in classical, folk, jazz, and pop music yielded a nostalgic yet uplifting score full of wonder, anger, and rhythmic vitality.
The Goddess tells the story of an unnamed mother (played by the extraordinary Ruan Ling-Yu), who struggles to support herself and her infant son, to whom she is utterly devoted. She eventually becomes involved with a gambler who calls himself "The Boss," who soon strongarms his way into becoming her pimp. The film's underlying message—society's oppression of those already at the bottom—is as relevant today as it was then.
Assad's score was executed almost entirely on guitar and vocals, although with numerous extended techniques. The one exception was a gorgeous whole-tone theme on kalimba, representing not only the purity of the child, but of the mother's dreams and aspirations.
The themes came embedded in a wash of inventive sonorities produced through acoustic special effects, such as crossing the guitar strings or putting a drumstick underneath them. The hypnotic rhythms of Assad's native Brazil created gorgeous moving chordal pads, interspersed with leitmotifs representing the film's characters and emotions. The machine-gun-like rhythms of The Boss had a touch of sternness to them, the pounding chords giving way to the shimmering kalimba. The score smoothly transitioned between themes: from the frenetic, to the pensive, to breathy spoken syllables that represented The Boss at his worst.
The Goddess was preceded by Fatty Arbuckle's 1920 short film, The Garage, a slapstick comedy whose physical humor was punctuated on drum kit and Home Swinger by Kaki King, a veteran of the NYGF. Though some bass-drum/high-hat interludes could have been a bit tighter rhythmically, the almost sloppy sound fit the action onscreen. Especially well scored was the climax in which the titular garage catches on fire—Ms. King slammed her drumsticks onto the strings creating heavy, forceful, thrash metal power chords as the actors tried to quell the raging fire.
The New York Guitar Festival's Silent Film/Live Guitars series continues next Tuesday with Luther Dickinson accompanying the 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and wraps up on Thursday with North Carolina's Toubab Crewe scoring Yasujirô Ozu’s 1932 comedy, I Was Born, but . . . Tickets and additional info available here.
Kind of hard to imagine guitars in a Chinese movie, but, then again, I didn’t get to see or hear it.
I can imagine the crashing sound of the drumsticks though.
Kind of hard to imagine guitars in a Chinese movie, but, then again, I didn’t get to see or hear it.
I can imagine the crashing sound of the drumsticks though.
Kind of hard to imagine guitars in a Chinese movie, but, then again, I didn’t get to see or hear it.
I can imagine the crashing sound of the drumsticks though.
Kind of hard to imagine guitars in a Chinese movie, but, then again, I didn’t get to see or hear it.
I can imagine the crashing sound of the drumsticks though.
Kind of hard to imagine guitars in a Chinese movie, but, then again, I didn’t get to see or hear it.
I can imagine the crashing sound of the drumsticks though.
Kind of hard to imagine guitars in a Chinese movie, but, then again, I didn’t get to see or hear it.
I can imagine the crashing sound of the drumsticks though.