The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, September 4, 1996 - 19

Acclaimed 'House' comes to 'U'

"Kansas City"'s Robert Altman.

Director Robert Altman
makes music out of movies
Latest film, 'Kansas City,' explores 1930s, jazz

NEW YORK (AP) - Robert Altman
was an 11-year-old in Depression-era
j(ansas City when the family maid sat
him down in front of the radio one day
and said, "Now listen to this. This is the
best music there is."
Even today, the 71-year-old director
says the tune he heard, Duke Ellington's
ballad "Solitude" remains his favorite
piece of music.
And fittingly it's "Solitude" that
serves as a final coda to the violent
denouement of his new film, "Kansas
City" which the director describes as a
romanticized "jazz memory" of the
wide-open city of his youth.
Altman takes full credit for the
haunting arrangement of "Solitude,"
which features a cross-generational
bass duet between 59-year-old Ron
Carter, a veteran of Miles Davis' great
1960s quintet, and 24-year-old
Christian McBride, the most in-demand
bassist of the post-Wynton Marsalis
,generation.
The two bassists are part of a Dream
Team of 21 contemporary jazz musi-
cians whom Altman and music produc-
er Hal Willner brought together for
three weeks last summer to evoke the
spirit of Kansas City's swinging 1930s
jazz scene when Count Basie, Coleman
Hawkins and other jazz immortals held
court from dusk to dawn.
"Mr. Altman made it very clear that
,although he wanted us to keep in mind
he musicians we were modeling our-
"selves after ... we were not supposed to
sound like replicas of our role models,"

said 27-year-old Joshua Redman, cast
as Lester "Pres" Young, the cool tenor
saxophonist of the Basie band.
"We were only supposed to keep in
mind their overall musical personality
and hopefully be able to synthesize that
with our own sound."
As a teen-ager, Altman frequented
the jazz clubs of his hometown. In the
1930s, Kansas City was run by corrupt
politicians and gangsters who made it
possible for rowdy nightclubs, gam-
bling dens and brothels to flourish.
Ironically, this "sin city" created a
ripe atmosphere for a jazz renaissance.
Musicians could always find work
there even at the height of the
Depression. The city's central location
as a transportation hub made it the
starting and finishing point for bands
touring the "territories" out west to
California.
The blues-imbued and loosely swing-
ing ensemble passages, along with the
classic instrumental solo battles form
the roots of modern mainstream jazz. It
was in this fertile atmosphere that be-
bop pioneer Charlie "Bird" Parker grew
up - depicted in the film as a 14-year-
old carrying around a busted old saxo-
phone in a sack who hangs out in the
balcony of a club to catch the continu-
ous jam session.
Altman likens the structure of his
new film to a jazz piece. The story line
is quite terse, like the theme of a tune:
On the eve of a violence-marred 1934
municipal election, a scrappy telegraph
operator (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kidnaps

the drug-addicted wife of a politician
(Miranda Richardson). She hopes to
swap her captive for her small-time
thief husband (Dermot Mulroney), who
has been captured by a gangster (Harry
Belafonte) after a bungled stick-up of a
gambling customer. The husband is
being held in the basement of the Hey
Hey Club, while a round-the-clock jam
session is going on upstairs.
"There is the story of the kidnapping
and the resolution of it, and then every-
body just riffed on it,"said Altman, who
often lets his actors improvise their
lines. "The two girls were like tenor
saxophones, sometimes challenging
one another. Belafonte comes in as the
brass, the trumpet. They're all doing
variations on and around this theme the
way jazz is done."
It is the jazz performances them-
selves that Altman admits may outlast
the movie. The soundtrack to "Kansas
City" (Verve) - with 12 tracks featur-
ing nearly 65 minutes of music - came
out in May, in advance of the film's
Aug. 16 release date, and has already
hit the Top 20 on Billboard's jazz chart.
Altman also edited a separate hour-long
music video with a dozen numbers,
including footage not used in the film,
that is to be broadcast on PBS and sold
in stores.
And for those interested in compar-
ing the new versions with the original
masterpieces, Columbia/Legacy recent-
ly has released a 25-track CD, "The
Real Kansas City," with recordings
from 1925-1941.

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