[Dixielandjazz] Blues For Fatty Arbuckle

[Steve barbone]

Below article is a little off-beat, but Dixieland and Fatty Arbuckle were
getting popular at around the same time. So how come an adventurous
Dixieland Band didn't do the sound here?

Cheers,
Steve 

Blues for Fatty: A Silent Comic Gets a Jazzy Soundtrack

By THOMAS STAUDTER August 28, 2005 NY Times

The silent-film comedian Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle may seem like an unlikely
inspiration for a jazz composer. But the trumpeter Dave Douglas's newest
album serves as accompaniment, homage and apology to Arbuckle, whose career
was destroyed when he was charged with rape and murder in 1921. "Keystone,"
set for release Sept. 20 on Mr. Douglas's own Greenleaf Music label
(www.greenleafmusic.com), uses DualDisc technology in a multimedia package
devoted to Arbuckle. The CD side of the disc includes 11 original songs; on
the DVD side, five of those songs, in edited form, make up a new soundtrack
for "Fatty and Mabel Adrift," a 1916 two-reeler that Arbuckle made, as
director and star, for Mack Sennett at Keystone Film Studios. The DVD side
also has a music video called "Just Another Murder," created from vignettes
from another Arbuckle film, "Fatty's Tintype Tangle."

The project began when Jon Yanofsky, executive director of the Paramount
Center for the Arts in Peekskill, N.Y., asked Mr. Douglas if he would like
to write and perform some film scores in conjunction with a grant the center
had received. Not wanting his music "to overpower the images," Mr. Douglas
said, he chose to work with the Arbuckle films because their fast pace
seemed to match well with the heavily grooved, electronica-steeped jazz
riffs he was creating in his home studio. Mr. Douglas said he was also drawn
by the present obscurity of the films; Arbuckle was one of the biggest stars
of the silent era when the scandal struck, but he never regained his
popularity even though he was eventually acquitted. Mr. Douglas and his band
will perform live to screenings of "Fatty and Mabel Adrift," "Fatty's
Tintype Tangle" and two other Arbuckle films on Oct. 1 at the Paramount
Center (http://tickets.paramountcenter.org); a New York City performance is
scheduled for Feb. 18.

Sharing a birthday (March 24) with Arbuckle "certainly piqued my interest,"
Mr. Douglas said. "But what really got me into the guy was realizing why his
name was tarnished. It hit on my sense of social consciousness and made me
want to be part of setting something right for Roscoe Arbuckle."