[Dixielandjazz] Howard Alden & Bucky Pizzarelli

[Stephen G Barbone]

If you are in the NYC area and like Django , Woody Allen,  Howard  
Alden, Bucky Pizzarelli and Sean Penn, you might want to go to the  
Picture House in Pelham NY on January 19. The ticket price is a BARGAIN.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Two Guitarists, as Heard in a Woody Allen Film

By Phillip Lutz - NY Times - January 13, 2012

EARLY in 1998, the guitarist Howard Alden got a call from the pianist  
Dick Hyman, a longtime collaborator of Woody Allen’s, asking whether  
he would like to work on Mr. Allen’s latest movie, “Sweet and  
Lowdown.” All he would need to do, Mr. Hyman said, was lay down tracks  
in the style of the gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt — a style with  
which Mr. Alden was deeply familiar.

But as it turned out, Mr. Allen was also hoping that Mr. Alden would  
show the actor Sean Penn, who had no experience playing guitar, how to  
play well enough to lend plausibility to his character, an American  
guitarist obsessed with Reinhardt. Mr. Penn, who insisted on learning  
tunes note for note, “far exceeded what Woody wanted him to do,” Mr.  
Alden said.

“What I thought would be just a couple of days working on the  
soundtrack,” he said, “turned into six months of working with Sean.”

The experience will be revisited on Jan. 19, when Mr. Alden, along  
with the guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who played rhythm guitar to his  
lead on the film’s soundtrack, appear together at the Picture House in  
Pelham. The two will play tunes related to the film and take part in a  
moderated question-and-answer session after the movie is shown.

Jennifer S. Christman, the executive director of the Picture House,  
said the event would represent the first major concert for the 91-year- 
old theater, a single-screen movie house that underwent a six-month  
renovation starting in September 2010 and a separate period of  
construction last summer. During the later construction, a 40-by-12- 
foot stage was created near the spot where the organ pit sat during  
the silent-picture era.

For the kickoff concert, the Picture House could hardly have recruited  
a pair of performers more comfortable with each other, or the  
material. Both describe a 20-year working relationship virtually  
devoid of conflict; both have extensive experience playing the  
repertoire favored by Mr. Penn’s character, mostly prewar standards  
and compositions by Reinhardt. And Mr. Pizzarelli, 86, worked for  
extended periods with the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli, an  
intimate of Reinhardt’s.

During their two days in the recording studio in July 1998, the  
musicians observed Mr. Allen’s working methods first-hand. Though he  
was a constant presence, Mr. Alden said, Mr. Allen largely made his  
wishes known by conferring with Mr. Hyman, the music director, who  
often ordered quick reworkings of arrangements to meet the script’s  
needs. At times, this worked to the music’s benefit; in one instance,  
Mr. Alden found out months after the fact that a solo arrangement of  
“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” that he had created on the spot was  
actually serving as a love theme, and formed the musical core of some  
character-defining moments in the film. It was probably wise for the  
director to have withheld that fact, Mr. Alden said, “because he  
didn’t make you all self-conscious.”

Other compositions — 10 or so — were recorded but did not make it to  
the screen. The Reinhardt original “Nuages” was one of them. “  
‘Nuages,’ ” Mr. Pizzarelli said, “was the greatest tune that came out  
of the Django school.” He played it with string-busting intensity on  
the bandstand with Grappelli, and said it would probably be played at  
the Picture House show.

While Mr. Alden and Mr. Pizzarelli both insisted that the roles of  
leader and accompanist flow back and forth in their duo engagements,  
Mr. Pizzarelli also said Mr. Alden would be calling the tunes on the  
stand. Beyond “Nuages,” Reinhardt tunes likely to make their way into  
the Picture House set are, Mr. Alden said, “Douce Ambiance,” a gypsy  
anthem first recorded during the war, and “Tears,” a ballad.

If all goes as hoped, the Picture House performance will be the first  
of three or four shows that combine film and live music this year, Ms.  
Christman said. No musicians have been signed and no formats ruled  
out, including the one employed at the Jacob Burns Film Center in  
Pleasantville, which in the past has invited members of the  
Westchester Jazz Orchestra to play selections from music documentaries  
chronicling events of the 1950s, and has also devoted an evening to  
Mr. Pizzarelli.

For the moment, discussions at the Picture House appear to be moving  
in another direction. In a nod to the theater’s earliest days, Ilya  
Tovbis, the director of film programming, said he and Ms. Christman  
had been looking at silent films and contemporary composers who have  
written scores for them, like the clarinetist Beth Custer, for “My  
Grandmother,” a satire from Soviet Georgia; the indie-folk guitarist  
Damien Jurado, for Dimitri Kirsanoff’s experimental films; and the  
ambient-electric band Air, for “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” by Georges  
Méliès, the science fiction pioneer recently portrayed in Martin  
Scorcese’s “Hugo.”

“We do start with film,” Ms. Christman said.

Howard Alden and Bucky Pizzarelli in concert and discussion after a  
screening of “Sweet and Lowdown” at 6:30 p.m., Jan. 19, at the Picture  
House, 175 Wolfs Lane, Pelham. Tickets: $25 and $35. Information:  
picturehouse.org or (914) 738-7337.