this week in music

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

Fiftieth anniversary restoration of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT is playing July 4-17 at Film Forum

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (Richard Lester, 1964)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens July 4, 12:45, 3:00, 5:10, 7:30, 9:45
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.thebeatles.com

The Beatles are invading America again with the fiftieth anniversary restoration of their debut film, the deliriously funny anarchic comedy A Hard Day’s Night. Initially released on July 6, 1964, in the UK, AHDN turned out to be much more than just a promotional piece advertising the Fab Four and their music. Instead, it quickly became a huge critical and popular success, a highly influential work that presaged Monty Python and MTV while also honoring the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and the French New Wave. Directed by Richard Lester, who had previously made the eleven-minute The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film with Peter Sellers and would go on to make A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Petulia, and The Three Musketeers, the madcap romp opens with the first chord of the title track as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are running down a narrow street, being chased by rabid fans, but they’re coming toward the camera, welcoming viewers into their crazy world. (George’s fall was unscripted but left in the scene.) As the song blasts over the soundtrack, Lester introduces the major characters: the four moptops, who are clearly having a ball, led by John’s infectious smile, in addition to Paul’s “very clean” grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell, who played a dirty old man in the British series Steptoe and Son, the inspiration for Sanford and Son) and the band’s much-put-upon manager, Norm (Norman Rossington). Lester and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Repulsion, Star Wars) also establish the pace and look of the film, a frantic black-and-white frolic shot in a cinema-vérité style that is like a mockumentary taking off from where François Truffaut’s 400 Blows ends.

The boys eventually make it onto a train, which is taking them back to their hometown of Liverpool, where they are scheduled to appear on a television show helmed by a hapless director (Victor Spinetti, who would star in Help as well) who essentially represents all those people who are dubious about the Beatles and the sea change going on in the music industry. Norm and road manager Shake (John Junkin) have the virtually impossible task of ensuring that John, Paul, George, and Ringo make it to the show on time, but there is no containing the energetic enthusiasm and contagious curiosity the quartet has for experiencing everything their success has to offer — while also sticking their tongues out at class structure, societal trends, and the culture of celebrity itself. Lester and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Alun Owen develop each individual Beatle’s unique character through press interviews, solo sojourns (the underappreciated Ringo goes off on a kind of vision quest; George is mistaken by a fashion fop for a model), and an endless stream of spoken and visual one-liners. (John sniffs a Coke bottle; a reporter asks George, “What do you call your hairstyle?” to which the Quiet One replies, “Arthur.”) Oh, the music is rather good too, featuring such songs as “I Should Have Known Better,” “All My Loving,” “If I Fell,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “This Boy,” and “She Loves You.” The working name for the film was Beatlemania, but it was eventually changed to A Hard Day’s Night, based on a Ringo malapropism, forcing John and Paul to quickly write the title track. No mere exploitation flick, A Hard Day’s Night is one of the funniest, most influential films ever made, capturing a critical moment in pop-culture history and unleashing four extraordinary gentlemen on an unsuspecting world. The fiftieth-anniversary restoration, courtesy of Janus Films, is screening July 4-17 at Film Forum; don’t you dare miss this glorious eighty-five-minute explosion of sheer, unadulterated joy.

FIRST SATURDAYS: BROOKLYN SUMMER

David Hammons, “The Door (Admissions Office),” wood, acrylic sheet, and pigment construction, 1969 (California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Collection of Friends, the Foundation of the California African American Museum / © David Hammons)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, July 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00 ($10 discounted admission to “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum is throwing a summer party for its July free First Saturdays program, centered by a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy classic, Do the Right Thing. In addition, there will be music from Matuto, Blitz the Ambassador, DJ Uhuru, and Nina Sky, a female comedy showcase hosted by Erica Watson, a talk and fashion show led by Afros: A Celebration of Natural Hair author Michael July, a sidewalk chalk drawing project organized by the City Kids, a hula hoop demonstration with Hula Nation, an art workshop in which participants will learn figure drawing with a live model, and an interactive talk with “Brooklyn in 3000 Stills” creators Paul Trillo and Landon Van Soest. In addition, you can check out the current quartet of exhibitions, all of which deal with activism through art: “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” “Swoon: Submerged Motherlands,” “Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Works, 1963–74,” and “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties.”

Moneta Sleet Jr., “Selma Marchers on road to Montgomery,” gelatin silver photograph, 1965 (courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

The powerful, wide-ranging “Witness,” which has just been extended through July 13 (the other three exhibits continue into August or September), is a traveling show being held in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. More than one hundred paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations are on view, divided into eight thematic categories: “Integrate Educate,” “American Nightmare,” “Presenting Evidence,” “Politicizing Pop,” “Black Is Beautiful,” “Sisterhood,” “Global Liberation,” and “Beloved Community.” In Bruce Davidson’s “USA. Montgomery, Alabama. 1961,” a black Freedom Rider sits by a window on a bus being escorted by the National Guard. David Hammons’s “The Door (Admissions Office)” is not exactly a welcoming sight. Norman Rockwell’s “New Kids in the Neighborhood (Negro in the Suburbs)” depicts three white children and two black children stopped on a sidewalk, curiously looking at each other. Melvin Edwards’s “Chaino” evokes slavery and lynchings. A trio of cartoonish KKK members drive into town in Philip Guston’s “City Limits.” There are also works by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Jack Whitten, Faith Ringgold, Ben Shahn, Betye Saar, Gordon Parks, Jim Dine, Yoko Ono, Barkley Hendricks, Robert Indiana, Richard Avedon, and others that examine the civil rights movement from multiple angles, displaying America’s continuing shame.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “JUSTICE AFTER ALL” BY BLACK LIPS

Georgia’s Black Lips are one of the truly great live bands of the twenty-first century, playing their garage-surf punk with an infectious wild abandon. Anything can happen at their shows, and often does. At an outdoor concert a few years back, the manic crowd broke down the front barrier, nearly crushing the photographers in the photo pit; without missing a beat, the band helped people onto the stage, keeping the music going, the party never stopping. Later, bassist Jared Swilley floated atop the audience, lifted toward the heavens. Essentially, the quartet feels the same way about music as they do about pizza; “Pizza is a snack for children at birthday parties and sleepovers. Don’t try and make it fancy,” they recently tweeted. Swilley, guitarists Cole Alexander and Ian Saint Pé, and drummer Joe Bradley are currently touring behind their first studio album in three years, the rockin’ Underneath the Rainbow (Vice, March 2014), which features such awesome tunage as “Drive-by Buddy,” “Funny,” “Do the Vibrate,” and “Nightmare Field.” (You can stream the album here.) The Black Lips will be playing Vans House Parties on July 3 with Nightbirds (admission is free with advance RSVP). If you’re lucky enough to get in, you might notice a special aroma as well; the band worked with olfactory scientists to create such scents as ocean, cedar, moon, denim, squid ink, fire, and semen (“if the man only ate fresh plums for about a week”), which are disseminated throughout the show in recognition of “the powerful effect of scent on emotion and memory,” as if their shows aren’t memorable enough already.

OUTDOOR CINEMA: PUSSY RIOT — A PUNK PRAYER

Feminist art collective Pussy Riot states its case and faces the consequences in documentary about controversial group

PUSSY RIOT — A PUNK PRAYER (Mike Lerner & Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2012)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Rescheduled for Wednesday, August 27, free, 7:00
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org
www.hbo.com

The slogan “Free Pussy Riot!” is being shouted around the world — and was even seen on Madonna’s back — ever since the Russian government arrested three members of punk collective Pussy Riot after they staged an anarchic performance of less than one minute of “Mother Mary, Banish Putin!” at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on February 21, 2012. British documentary producer Mike Lerner and Russian filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin follow the sensationalistic trial of Pussy Riot leaders Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, Nadezhda “Nadia” Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina “Katia” Samutsevich as they each face years in prison for social misconduct and antireligious behavior for what some consider a sacrilegious crime and others view as freedom of speech. The three women do a lot of eye rolling and smiling in court as they are enclosed in a glass booth, proud and unashamed of what they did, continuing to make their points about the separation between church and state, feminism, freedom, and the seemingly unlimited power of Vladimir Putin. Lerner and Pozdorovkin speak with Masha’s mother and Nadia’s and Katia’s fathers, all of whom fully support their daughters’ beliefs and discuss what their children were like growing up. Meanwhile, other members of Pussy Riot and men and women across the globe take to the streets and airwaves to try to help free the incarcerated trio, who are responsible for such songs as “Kill the Sexist,” “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests,” and “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” Pussy Riot — A Punk Prayer is screening August 27 in Long Island City as part of Socrates Sculpture Park’s free summer Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by live music from Tessa Makes Love; Russian food from Pomegranate will be available for purchase as well. The sixteenth annual series continues through August 27 with such other international fare as Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue, Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, and Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (The program was originally scheduled for July 2 but was postponed because of the weather.)

HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME: AN ORIGINAL MUSICAL

New musical uses Tupac Shakur’s lyrics to tell contemporary tale of hard life (photo by Joan Marcus)

Palace Theatre
1654 Broadway at West 47th St.
Thursday – Tuesday through January 4, $67.75 – $184.25
www.hollerifyahearme.com

The new musical Holler If Ya Hear Me might be based on the songs of Tupac Shakur, but it does not tell the life story of the controversial West Coast rapper who was shot and killed in a Las Vegas drive-by in 1996 at the age of twenty-five. Instead, book writer Todd Kreidler — introduced to Shakur’s music by friend and mentor August Wilson — uses Shakur’s lyrics to share a contemporary tale about life in a ghetto in an unnamed Midwestern industrial city. As the play opens, John (Slam star Saul Williams) descends from the heavens in a jail cell, evoking Shakur’s several stints in prison, while delivering the East Harlem native’s “My Block,” soon joined by the company, setting the mood with the posthumously released song about guns, crack, black-on-black crime, unemployment, economic hardship, and racism. After his innocent brother, Benny (Donald Webber Jr.), is shot and killed, Vertus (Christopher Jackson) is determined to get even with the members of the 4-5 gang who took out Benny, angering his mother (Tonya Weston), alienating his girlfriend, Corinne (Saycon Sengbloh), and energizing young Anthony (Dyllon Burnside), who wants revenge as well. Meanwhile, the moody, humorless John is looking to go straight, getting a job working in Griffy’s (Ben Thompson) car-salvage business, where Benny used to work, planning with the white Griffy to get out of the neighborhood together. Through it all, a decrepit old man (John Earl Jelks) calls for peace by writing on walls and preaching through a megaphone.

John (Saul Williams) and Darius (Joshua Boone) get down to serious business as Anthony (Dyllon Burnside) looks on in HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME (photo by Joan Marcus)

The first act of Holler If Ya Hear Me is a mess, with a confusing narrative and point of view, a kind of mishmash of West Side Story and In the Heights, but director Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, Stick Fly) brings things together in act two, focusing more on the individual stories of John, Griffy, and especially Vertus, with stand-out performances by Williams, Thompson, and Jackson. Daryl Waters’s orchestrations too often emphasize Shakur’s background use of R&B elements, Broadway-fying such songs as “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” “Me Against the World,” “Dear Mama,” and “Unconditional Love”; Wayne Cilento’s (Wicked, Jersey Girls) choreography is almost nonexistent; and Edward Pierce’s set design is essentially a bare stage with stoops and a fenced-in salvage show occasionally, sometimes randomly, wheeled in, but Leon and the company still manage to pull it all off in the end while setting a new high for the use of the N-bomb on the Great White Way. The Palace Theatre itself has been transformed for the show, with stadium seating in the front of the tiny orchestra, while the rear has been turned into an interactive exhibition curated by the National Museum of Hip-Hop.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON: ME, MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, AND I

Epic durational performance at the New Museum comes to a close on June 29 (photo by Benoit Pailley/New Museum)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Through Sunday, June 29, $16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

“This is it. Is this it?” a group of musicians sing over and over again on the fourth floor of the New Museum. Today, after more than eight weeks, it will finally be it for the ten guitarists and vocalists who have been performing the song “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage” as part of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s first museum show, “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I.” Since May 7, the ten troubadours — eight of whom have remained with the project for its duration — have been playing the song, composed by former Sigur Rós member Kjartan Sveinsson, while sitting on chairs, a couch, stools, or mattresses or walking around barefoot or in socks, boots, or sneakers as a short clip from the first Icelandic feature film, director Reynir Oddsson’s 1977 Morðsaga (Murder Story), is repeated on the far wall. In the scene, Kjartansson’s mother plays a housewife who fantasizes about having sex in the kitchen with the plumber, played by Kjartansson’s father. Supposedly, Kjartan Ragnarsson and Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir had sex for real the next night, conceiving Ragnar. Sveinsson’s ethereal composition, which hints at such familiar tunes as Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” becomes a kind of meditative mantra that really can be listened to for hours on end, highlighted by the central recognizable phrase “by the dishwasher” (where the on-screen couple make love). Audience members are encouraged to sit in one of the chairs or lie on a mattress that isn’t being used and even chat with the performers, particularly when they go on break; unsurprisingly, the ten men have received many telephone numbers during the length of the show. (However, keep away from the refrigerator; the beer is for the band only.)

Band members have played “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage” for nearly eight weeks straight (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Meanwhile, in a corner of the space, the video Me and My Mother is looped on a small monitor, depicting Kjartansson’s mom spitting in his face every five years; it was hard not to consider whether the band members have ever thought about spitting on Kjartansson as well, but it turns out that “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I” is not torturous at all. What makes it so visceral is how the musicians approach the song; instead of merely going through the motions, they invest themselves in it, keeping it fresh and alive despite the endless repetition, interacting with the crowd and each other. One guitarist suddenly struts to the center, singing loudly. Another starts noodling on the six-string, adding bluesy notes or echoes of Jerry Garcia. Another is rejuvenated by his girlfriend giving him a shoulder rub as he plays. Yet another, seeing one of his compatriots nodding off, goes over and gives him a little kick, and both jump into action. Several react when a woman gets off a mattress and starts dancing and twirling. And then, as if by magic, the ten musicians gather together for a final flourish fifteen minutes before closing time. Last year, Kjartansson presented “A Lot of Sorrow” at MoMA PS1, in which Brooklyn band the National performed its song “Sorrow” for six consecutive hours in the VW Dome. “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I” takes such durational performance to a whole new level, an inspiring and inspirational show that gets into your soul. You might never look at your dishwasher the same way again.

THE PLEASURES OF BEING / OUT OF STEP: NOTES ON THE LIFE OF NAT HENTOFF

Documentary delves into the life and legacy of jazz aficionado and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff

THE PLEASURES OF BEING / OUT OF STEP: NOTES ON THE LIFE OF NAT HENTOFF (David L. Lewis, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Wednesday, June 25
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.pleasuresthemovie.com

The seven-decade legacy of one of America’s most important and influential journalists is celebrated in David L. Lewis’s illuminating documentary, The Pleasures of Being / Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff. The too-short, sometimes scattershot eighty-five-minute film reveals Hentoff to be much more than just a columnist and a critic; Lewis, in his debut feature film, shows Hentoff, who turned eighty-nine earlier this month, to be a fascinating character who speaks his mind, a fierce defender of the First Amendment, a crucial participant in the spread of jazz in the mid-twentieth century (including as a record producer), and an outspoken libertarian who is adamantly antiabortion. “When he came to a room, nobody said, ‘Oh, here’s the critic,’” saxophonist and composer Phil Woods explains. “They said, ‘Here’s a friend of the music.’ It’s a whole different thing. He was part of the family.” Lewis speaks extensively with the Boston-born Hentoff, a bent-over man with thick, silvery-gray hair, beard, and mustache who types with two fingers in his extremely messy and crowded home office, as well as Hentoff’s wife, Margot; cultural critic Stanley Crouch; former Village Voice editor Karen Durbin; First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams; recently deceased poet and activist Amiri Baraka; jazz historians Dan Morgenstern and John Gennari; and even Voice editor Tony Ortega, who fired Hentoff in 2009. Hentoff discusses his childhood, his start in journalism, his personal and professional relationships with such figures as Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, and Malcolm X, and his steadfast defense of civil liberties.

Nat Hentoff sits down with Edmond Hall at Boston’s Savoy Club in 1948 (photo by Bob Parent)

The film is narrated by Andre Braugher, who reads passages from some of Hentoff’s seminal liner notes, and also includes stunning, rarely seen archival footage of Lenny Bruce, Hentoff on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line and with Andrew Young on Look Up and Live, an all-star rendition led by Billie Holiday of “Fine and Mellow” from the television program The Sound of Jazz, and other great clips. “You never know what impact you have, if any,” Hentoff says late in the film. “So I write to write, and hope that some of it has some effect.” Hentoff needn’t worry; he’s had plenty of effect, and continues to do so now, in his weekly column for the independent news site WorldNetDaily. The Pleasures of Being / Out of Step opens June 25 at the IFC Center, with Lewis participating in Q&As following the 8:00 screening on June 25 and the 8:15 show on June 27.