Bla-Bla Land | Colta.ru

Colta.ru continues to introduce you to the events of the SXSW festival (South by Southwest), which takes place these days in Austin. In the second part of the “Bourbon Diary”, Yegor Antoshchenko talks with the composer La La Lada Justin Gurvits, listens to the rising star of the feministic priest Madame Gandhi and admires the jazz pianist Robert Glesper.

Americans love Celebrity , they love success stories - and, as my experience shows at the festival, they love queues very, very much. To get to a meeting with Justin Gurwitz, a composer who received an Oscar this year for the music for La La Lona, I have to defend for about 30 minutes. The Gurvitsa is thirty -two, and he has not yet got used to the whole film that had fallen on him and the whole film. He sits at the piano, smiles embarrassedly (he is clearly not used to a large audience, although he soon has to speak in several large halls) and talks about thousands of hours spent after the piano for grinding melodies. It turns out that it is quite difficult to write music for films. In order to get the desired result, Gurvitz made as many as 1900 demoscles. “We were inspired by classic American and French musicals-but we did not have a goal to write something that would sound“ like in those days, ”says Gurvitz. “We used the musical language of the past, but we wanted to ensure that the music from“ La La Lada ”was not like anything.” The melody of the famous City of Stars was written on the tenth attempt - all previous ones did not satisfy the director of the film. The correct melody was not invented at the Riff, from which the first scene of the musical begins. “I never start with riffs, the most important things for me are melody, harmony. So I had to seriously work, ”says Gurvitz, sorting out the notes.

This meeting would be especially interesting to the musicians: Gurvitz goes from draft sketches to the final result, explaining that he added dissonances here to obtain the necessary melancholic plaque, and here he used the dominant chord instead of major soberness to slightly reduce the optimism of the main topic. With director Damien Shazell, whose career started from a thriller about the jazz drummer "Obsession", they met while studying at Harvard-both played in the Chester French indie group, Shazell sat behind the drums. “A year and a half we treated the group very seriously,” Gurvitz recalls, “and then parted in their business. Damien wanted to make a movie, I became interested in the music for films. The remaining participants continued to engage in a group-and after some time serious people began to hunt for them: they offered a Kanye West contract, they signed up on Interscope . They flew every week for concerts in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other cool places. And Damien and I were just senior students and bit their elbows with annoyance. We missed our chance. "

But now in the bright future of the creators of La La Land there is no doubt: in order to get to the free branded cocktail “Dreamers” with the Beitter, I have to make my way through a huge queue of fans with disks, posters and simple wipes for autographs.

Madame Gandhi - "Her"

The next day, I am entered in a small Cheer Up, Charlie bar, where Madame Gandhi is a former Mia drummer, who began a solo musical career. Like Mia , Gandhi loves the clothes of bright colors and raises the sharp topics of today, regarding the equality of the sexes. For the first time they learned about her in 2015, when she decided to take part in the London marathon during menstruation, deciding to do without gaskets or tampons. “They would have fettered me, would bring inconvenience. I just wanted to run - and be free, ”she told the press then. The problems of menstruation occupy her seriously: in You T Ube there is a video where the singer, moving vigorously on the stage, reports an alarming statistics at the UN meeting about the number of girls expelled from college during critical days in African countries. Her performance on the SXSW precedes the recording of Moujin’s singing, which is why what is happening begins to take some kind of psychedelic character. On the stage of Madame Gandhi , it costs on its own: it launches samples, plays along with itself on drums, throws slogans into the hall about the “female future”, which will definitely come - the girls at the stage are warmly supported, the men do not mind. This format of concert-title for me is new, some Madame Gandhi things sound curious and promising-but in general, all this, unfortunately, looks quite damp.

Robert Glasper - "Experiment in Leverkusen"

“Are you Russian? What do you think about Donald Trump? " - Without unnecessary preface, the Latin American girl at the entrance to the next institution asks. I try to laugh it off, but she is persistent: leave me your mail, I want to talk to you about it. To be honest, I'm already tired of thinking about Trump and talking about him - and I am a little surprised how local journalists and just random people met on this trip are not tired of this. It seems that the whole country seemed to cover a large orange shadow - and so it will be four more years (if not eight years).

When I get to the party of jazz pianist Robert Glesper and his friends, you can’t approach the scene anymore. Glesper is a representative of the very new jazz against whom the Seb was protested, the protagonist of La La Lada. Traditional jazz improvisation in it freely coexists with atonal samples, fussy trap percussion, auto on vocals and other attributes of the “black sound” today. Unorthodox jazz generally experiences an obvious rise-take at least the last albums of Kendrick Lamar, David Bowie and Saxophonist-Superzovets Kamashi Washington.

- Are you Russian? What do you think about Donald Trump?

Many of the musicians working with Lamar are now standing on stage with Glesper. For example, the wonderful singer Anna Wise - her solo concert seemed to me one of the best at the festival (read the next part of the diary). The seven-minute solo on the drums of Marcus Gilmore, built around the archetypal hip-hop bita, is simply impossible not to admire: it seems that some new musical language is born before your eyes. Wonderful Bitboxer Taylor McFferrin Chekanit Bit bitter than the Roland TR-808 drama machine. And this is not surprising: after all, his father Bobby McFferrin is a genius of vocals, which can imitate almost any instrument: from bass to a pipe. Robert Glesper himself is a 38-year-old musician, on the account of Grammy for the Album “Black Radio” , cooperation with Kanye West, Talib Kelib, Jay-Z , except for musical talents, has a rare talent to unite people, and the concert does not look like a creative evening with invited guests, but as a friendly party of musicians who play for many years playing for many years together. We need such jazz.

Ahead - meetings with Chris Novoselich from Nirvana and Niall Rogers from Chic and a huge number of concerts of beginners and consisted musicians. I manage to hold out without whiskey all day, limiting myself to only three cocktails and a liter of beer. I am notable - and the American taxpayer was not in vain spent his money by inviting me here. Let's see what will bring a new day.