Dr. Lonnie Smith is one of the headliners at this years Charlie Parker Jazz Festival
Marcus Garvey Park and Tompkins Square Park
August 21-23, free
www.cityparksfoundation.org
The annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival is always a bittersweet affair. The sweet part is three days of free music this year, up from the usual two. The bitter part is that it always comes near the end of the summer season, with Labor Day and school right around the corner. But let’s not worry about that now and instead concentrate on the free concerts at the twenty-second edition, which is part of the CityParks Foundation SummerStage program and begins August 21 at 6:00 in Marcus Garvey Park with Oliver Lake Big Band performing a special commission, the King Solomon Hicks Trio, and Michela Taps: Bird Lives! (“[Parker] was such an innovator and a driving force in this music, as well as an important influence on tap,” tap-dance star Michela Marino Lerman said in a statement. “We hope to contribute, in some way, to his tremendous legacy.”) On Saturday starting at 3:00, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Andy Bey, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Camille Thurman, and Norma Miller will be in Marcus Garvey Park (preceded at 2:00 by a master class taught by Samuel Coleman). And on Sunday at 3:00, Charlie Parker’s lasting influence will be honored in Tompkins Square Park with Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls, Joe Lovano, Myra Melford: Snowy Egret, and Michael Mwenso.
Czech master Jan Švankmajer’s debut feature-length film is a unique and unusual trip inside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But this being Švankmajer, who began making creepy and fun stop-motion animated shorts in 1964, this is not a traditional telling. “Alice thought to herself, Now you will see a film made for children — perhaps,” Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) says at the beginning. “But — I nearly forgot — you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.” Sitting on the bank of a river, Alice tries to look at the book being read by her older sister (the figure is possibly a doll; the audience never sees the head), but Alice gets slapped, so she soon creates her own story in her head, as a taxidermied white rabbit comes alive and she follows it into a desk drawer and enters a weird, fantastical land where she alternates between being a regular-sized girl, a giantess, and a small doll. She encounters Carroll’s Mad Hatter, the beheading-crazed queen, a live piglet, and his other oddball creatures as she keeps finding keys that lead her into stranger and stranger places. She never smiles as her curiosity grows, very much a child with natural fears about what awaits her in the future. Alice gives different voices to all the characters as she narrates the tale, with all the lines identifying the speaker (“said the white rabbit,” “cried out the Mad Hatter and the March Hare”) accompanied by an extreme and disconcerting close-up of Alice’s mouth saying the words. Alice has constructed a dark world in her imagination, one that is not nearly as playful as the one created by Carroll. Švankmajer’s (Faust, Little Otik) use of dolls, puppets, and bizarre sets is impressively peculiar as the story takes grotesque twists and turns that are certainly not for younger children. Alice is screening August 19 as part of the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by a live performance by Brooklyn electronics duo Xeno and Oaklander, and Eastern European food will be available from Bear; the summer festival concludes August 26 with Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. And be sure to get there early to check out the 
