Sunday Sojourn

Wake up you sleepy heads… for adventure, even on a lazy Sunday afternoon. “No Matter the Battle” pits Allison Crowe and Band, film-scorer Kayla Schmah, and cinema magician Georges Méliès against the moon’s inhabitants – and we’re all aboard:

"Hold Back" + "Effortless" Ciné

“Cinema changed him and he changed cinema,” Agnès Varda, the great Ixelles (Brussels)-born French photographer and film director, says of cultural confrère, French-Swiss director/screenwriter/critic, Jean-Luc Godard. 

JLG’s short “Une femme coquette” is filmed in Geneva with credits to Hans Lucas (a nom de guerre the ground-breaking iconoclast used also for writings in ‘Cahier du Cinéma’). It’s rarely exhibited and seen until its recent sharing online with the world by Australian cinéaste and critic Dave Hesler. (Gracias, Nina, for flagging the original now available in full via YouTube @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzpFi0uBmzs and elsewhere.) 

This early (1955) creation of Godard, as excerpted here, finds its images meeting new sound – from Canadian musician Allison Crowe. “Hold Back” is recorded by Crowe herself at home in Corner Brook, NL. The ciné song’s lyricism reveals “an heart of mystery and some fears faced”.

“Effortless” is recorded by Ryan Adams in a log-home of Crowe’s friends on Salt Spring Island, BC. “Trying not to try so hard” is the puzzle.

Year of the Fire Rooster

Celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year with Allison Crowe on a musical and cinematic voyage that’s of, and out of, this world:

Going Home Tonight - Allison Crowe and Band - Heirs + Grievances from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

You All Haunt Me

Allison Crowe is writing this season. Poems, prose, thought pieces, stream of consciousness... words that may become songs, companions thereto, or something totally different.

Over 2017 she’s bringing together a bigger bi-coastal band, adding new members soon. While all this creativity unfurls we’ll share discoveries of recordings past.

Her music catalogue is already free of over-production – art without artifice. Still, even more unvarnished is this version of “You All Haunt Me” – a song most recently heard on Allison Crowe and Band’s debut, “Introducing / Heirs+Grievances” (http://music.allisoncrowe.com/track/you-all-haunt-me-3). This is the song first recorded simply to preserve the tune. As with the band version, the video features scenes from cinema classic “Ménilmontant”.

Journalist Erin Fletcher, describing Allison Crowe in concert, found words that fit this, and any, track of hers just as well: "The music is the woman. She communicates about love, death and life through her songs. Her voice is unmistakable, and in the same song she can be powerfully raw, yet hit a high note so delicately it slips through her lips and kisses your ear.”

You All Haunt Me from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Going Home Tonight - Allison Crowe and Band - Heirs + Grievances

Home. Whatever it is, wherever it is, it’s usually profoundly meaningful to us.

Ticket for a musical journey on life’s gossamer wings is Allison Crowe and Band – here with song number nine from the group’s debut album, “Heirs + Grievances”.

Well before PanAm Jet Clippers were on the air, the magic of French film-maker Georges Méliès carried people up, up and away to fresh perspectives. Imagination finds home in this travelogue from 1902, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (A Trip to the Moon).


Going Home Tonight - Allison Crowe and Band - Heirs + Grievances from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Now

"Now"

Allison Crowe from "Sylvan Hour" + the closing scene from "A Farewell to Arms" (1932).


Now from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Dedicated to the brave, amazing, inspiring Sara...h McDonald – with love, in peace.


Dedicated to the brave, amazing, inspiring Sara...h McDonald – with love, in peace.

Silence

“Silence”- Allison Crowe from the sylvan castle on Salt Spring Island, Canada:
http://music.allisoncrowe.com/track/silence-sh

Crowe’s musical performance is paired with an excerpt from “Ménilmontant”, the 1925 silent film from auteur, director, Dimitri Kirsanoff and starring his collaborator Nadia Sibirskaia and Yolande Beaulieu as sisters.

Silence from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

A treasure of cinema’s avant-garde, you can find the full (38 minute) movie in the Internet Archive @ https://archive.org/details/menilmontant1924-25 with commentary by David Badagnani, who notes:

“Its story is told entirely in images, without the use of explanatory intertitles; Kirsanoff was among the very rare filmmakers of the silent era to attempt this. The film makes use of techniques such as montage, hand-held camera, ultra-rapid montage, and superposition to achieve the elusive, transcendent quality of ‘photogenie’ so sought after by the French impressionist film directors of the era. Ménilmontant, thus, comes closer to poetry than to narrative prose.”

“Sylvan Hour is truly a masterpiece” says pioneering culture blog Muruch. (http://www.muruch.com/2015/05/allisoncrowe-sylvanhour.html)

These Words

Sometime the 'invisible monster' is within ourselves, sometimes it's outside, trying to break in... and there are times when it's both internal and external. "These Words" from Allison Crowe's "Sylvan Hour" explores such chambers. Visually carrying us into the psychic underworld is cinema's original "Phantom of the Opera" - Lon Chaney so darkly brilliant in the 1925 film version of Gaston Leroux’s gothic novel.


These Words from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

“Sylvan Hour is truly a masterpiece” says pioneering culture blog Muruch. (http://www.muruch.com/2015/05/allisoncrowe-sylvanhour.html)

Skeletons and Spirits

Clock strikes 12 for the second time in a “Sylvan Hour” selection – awakening Allison Crowe’s “Skeletons and Spirits” in this recording from Salt Spring Island’s sylvan castle:

          

In 1933 Ladislas Starewitch and his daughter, Irene, produced and directed "Fetiche Mascotte" – in English “The Mascot” – and it’s an excerpt from this classic film seen here with Allison’s musical performance.

Skeletons and Spirits - Sylvan Hour from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Stop-motion animation pioneer and imaginative genius Władysław Starewicz was born in 1882 in Moscow, Russia to Polish parents. Following the October Revolution of 1917, he resettled in France –adopting the name Ladislas Starewitch (or Starevitch). Creator of the first puppet-animated film, he’s legendary for his use of insects and other animals as film protagonists and for his fantastic, inventive, techniques.

Starewitch died in 1965 while working on “Comme chien et chat” (“Like Dog and Cat”). Since 1991, his granddaughter, Léona Béatrice, together with her husband, François Martin, has been restoring and bringing to the world his wonderfully artful films: http://starewitch.pagesperso-orange.fr

Phoenix

“Phoenix” rises next from Allison Crowe’s “Sylvan Hour”. Snow fell on Newfoundland, Canada this week – and, even in the cold and dark, we’re witness to irrepressible spirit and positive strength. Inspiration!


Phoenix from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

It’s said that “Meet John Doe” represents an attempt by Frank Capra, the great Italian-born American film director, (known for more care-free populist classics - “It Happened One Night”, “It’s a Wonderful Life” and others), to “work out his own fears and questions” about the future of the people. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story, this 1941 movie stars Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Edward Arnold and, as “The Colonel”, Walter Brennan (who rails against “the heelots” – the “greedy-guts’’ in our society, as Buffy Sainte-Marie calls them.)

http://music.allisoncrowe.com/track/phoenix-sh 

There Is

There Is from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

“There Is” – time for the next revolution of Allison Crowe’s “Sylvan Hour”. For visuals we cut once more to “The Chase”. Michèle Morgan and Robert Cummings seek a way out in this 1940s film noir.

A Case of You

A Case of You from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Allison Crowe uncorks vintage “A Case of You” – off her “Sylvan Hour” album – with passion and artistry recognizing two great Canadian musical inspirations intertwined in the song – its writer, Joni Mitchell, and muse, Leonard Cohen. Cinematically, Frank Borzage directs the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” –scenes hear featuring the film’s leading stars Helen Hayes, Gary Cooper and Adolphe Menjou.

Effortless

“Effortless” sailing from Allison Crowe's "Sylvan Hour" into scenes from “The Chase”, a 1946 film noir – screenplay by Philip Yordan based on Cornell Woolrich's novel, “The Black Path of Fear”. Directed by Arthur D. Ripley, produced by Seymour Nebenzal, the movie’s stars appearing here are French actress Michèle Morgan and American Robert Cummings.

Sea of a Million Faces

“Sea of a Million Faces” – the version from Allison Crowe’s “secrets” album - is accompanied here by scenes from “Of Human Bondage” - the 1934 film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel starring actors Leslie Howard and, in her break-out role, Bette Davis. (Them there eyes are focus of another song.)

16 Songs

“16 Songs” now showing in your home theatre – on any size screen. Allison Crowe’s century-spanning mashup of great music and movies is a global cultural festival that can be enjoyed in “Couch Mode” – which, its host site, Vimeo, explains is: “The chillest way to watch all your favorite Vimeo videos from the comfort of your couch, Lay-Z-Boy® or any other plush sitting apparatus.”

Steep the tea, brew the coffee, mull the wine, pour anything that you wish to enjoy this golden hour+ http://vimeo.com/couchmode/album/3076464/sort:preset/106154608

And, if your player doesn't show this player - you can find  "16 Songs” directly @ http://vimeo.com/album/3076464

       

Throw Your Arms Around Me

Love is the answer.

Inviting “Throw Your Arms Around Me”, Allison Crowe’s 16 Songs wraps around this tune from songwriter Mark Seymour and mates in Hunters and Collectors (1981–1998, 2013–2014) an Australian band noted for its “blend of pub rock and art-funk”.

Throw Your Arms Around Me from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Pairing is with visuals from “L’Atalante”, the poetic, beautiful, loving and loveable 1934 film from French director Jean Vigo (1905 – 1934).

Musical hugs are supplied here by Canada's Allison Crowe (voice, piano, engineer), Billie Woods (acoustic guitar, bgs), Dave Baird (bass, bgs), Laurent Boucher (percussion), Larry Anschell (engineer), & Kayla Schmah (producer).

#16 of 16 Songs

Alive and Breathing

Rounding into home with this series, some familiar characters and universal themes help spin Allison Crowe’s “16 Songs” Video Album full-circle.

Reimagining more than a century of cinema, decades of songwriting, and a dozen albums of genre-spanning musicality, Allison’s fusion of music + movie invention carries us up, up, and away.

She dreams in Technicolor for this capping episode of an animated mission accomplished by the Fleischer Studios team in 1941 - “Superman: The Mechanical Monsters”.

Alive and Breathing from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Emblematic of the intertwined DNA of inspiration - Superman’s creators, child-hood pals Joe Shuster (1914 – 1992), illustrator born in Toronto, Canada, and Jerry Siegel (1914 – 1996), Cleveland, Ohio, USA-born writer, were big film buffs, too.

Metropolis, the city of Clark Kent, Lois Lane and The Daily Planet, gets its name from the 1927 German expressionist science-fiction epic – a movie masterwork of Fritz Lang (1890 – 1976). Superman’s alter-ego is a nomenclatural mashup of American film actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor.

In art, as in all areas of life, self-determination and expression – freedom - is elemental.

“Alive and Breathing” - Allison Crowe (vocals, guitar, piano, engineer and producer) is joined here by Dave Baird (bass) and Laurent Boucher (percussion).

#15 of 16 Songs

 

Double-Edged Swords

All aboard for another journey in the luminous company of Louise Brooks (1906 – 1985). The iconic American actress and dancer stars here in a scene from "Prix de beauté” (“Beauty Prize” aka “Miss Europe”), a 1930 feature film directed by Augusto Genina and written by René Clair & Georg W. Pabst.

Double-Edged Swords from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

On track with Allison Crowe (vocals, piano, engineer) for this recording of “Double-Edged Swords” is: Billie Woods (guitar); Dave Baird (bass); Laurent Boucher (percussion); Larry Anschell (engineer); and Kayla Schmah (producer).

#13 of 16 Songs

Josephine

Marie-Josèphe Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie (1763 - 1814) aka Joséphine de Beauharnais was known as Rose before she met Napoléon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821) – to whom she was married from 1796 – 1810. The iconic French leader favoured calling her Joséphine.

By any name, she was passionate about her namesake plant – authors Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello, in a recent book on its lore and deep-rooted history, label Joséphine the "Godmother of modern rosomaniacs". (Hybridization of roses through artificial, controlled, pollination began with her horticulturalist Andre Dupont.)

Josephine from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Tori Amos’ allusions to the mythology of this historic couple bloom in the song covered here by Allison Crowe – “Josephine”.

The music grafts with stems from “Maniac Chase” - a 1904 film short created by pioneering American director/producer team of film-maker Edwin S. Porter (1870 - 1941) and inventor Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931).

#12 of 16 Songs

Effortless

“Day Dreams”, a film short from the 1920s, the most prolific and transcendent decade in the creative output of actor-director+ Buster Keaton, is here revisited for the eleventh music video in Allison Crowe's "16 Songs".

Effortless from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Unafraid in ideas and body, Keaton’s genius flowered in the freedom of his own film unit working outside the studio system. A century on, musician Crowe engages a parallel track in her own art, rewarding audiences with a peerless body of recordings and live performances produced free of industry forces.

“Effortless” is first released on “This Little Bird” album (Allison Crowe – vocals, piano, engineer, producer; Dave Baird – bass; Laurent Boucher – percussion).

#11 of 16 Songs