The legacy of Charlie “Bird” Parker will be celebrated at annual free SummerStage festival
SummerStage
The New School, Marcus Garvey Park, Tompkins Square Park
August 24-28, free
www.cityparksfoundation.org
“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” saxophone great Charlie Parker once said. “They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” The Kansas City native, known as Bird and Yardbird, blew away all boundaries on his sax during a career that was cut short by his death in 1955 at the age of thirty-four. His legacy will once again be celebrated at the annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival as part of the City Parks Foundation free SummerStage programming. This year’s tribute begins indoors on August 24 at 7:30 (free with advance RSVP here) with a screening of N. C. Heikin’s documentary Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story at the New School, followed by a Q&A with alto sax player and Morgan protégée Grace Kelly and Morgan manager Reggie Marshall. On August 25 at 7:30 (RSVP here), the New School will host a screening of Bruce Spiegel’s Bill Evans: Time Remembered, followed by a discussion with Spiegel. The live music gets cooking August 26 at 6:00 in Marcus Garvey Park with performances by Jason Lindner: Breeding Ground, Antoinette Montague, and DJ Greg Caz, followed the next day in the Harlem park by a 2:00 master class with Samuel Coleman and a 3:00 concert with the Randy Weston African Rhythms Sextet, Cory Henry & the Funk Apostles, the Artistry of Jazzmeia Horn, and Charles Turner III. The festival concludes on August 28 at 3:00 in Tompkins Square Park with the great lineup of DeJohnette – Holland – Moran, Allan Harris, the Donny McCaslin Group, and Kelly.
New York City has seen a dramatic rise in the closing of long-beloved institutions in the twenty-first century as gentrification and rent hikes soar. When filmmaker Kurt Vincent heard rumors that the Chinatown Fair arcade game haven was on the way out, he brought his camera to the Mott St. spot to document what it meant to him and the community that has been built around it since it opened back in 1944. “After all these years, the path to the arcade was ingrained, even in dreams,” he narrates at the beginning of The Lost Arcade, describing a dream he had. “As I stood in front of the doors, I could smell the arcade. The smell was a primordial memory hidden deep in my mind, somewhere beyond time and space, and somehow, in my dream, I connected with this distant and abstract memory.” Director-producer-editor Vincent and producer-writer Irene Chin, who previously collaborated on the experimental short The Bachelorette Party, have created a love letter to Chinatown Fair, affectionately known as CF, which has seen its ups and downs over the years, including a boom during the golden age of arcades in the 1980s and a problematic drop in the 2000s as kids stayed home to play video games on their computers and televisions. Vincent speaks with Anthony Cali Jr., who practically grew up in CF; former CF employees Henry Cen, Norman Burgess, Derek Rudder, and Akuma Hokura and their boss, Sam Palmer, who bought the place after visualizing it in a dream; and Lonnie Sobel, who attempted to resurrect it after its initial closure.
French director Alice Winocour follows up her 2012 Cannes hit, Augustine, with the pulse-pounding, heart-racing paranoid thriller Disorder. Matthias Schoenaerts is sensational as Vincent, a role Winocour wrote specifically for him. A veteran of special forces in Afghanistan, Vincent has been sidelined back in France, diagnosed with PTSD and awaiting medical clearance for a return to the field. He is distraught and frustrated, as his identity as a soldier is his life. While waiting to hear from the doctors, he is hired by his team leader, Denis (Paul Hamy), to join a security force for a party at a French Riviera estate, known as Maryland, owned by powerful Lebanese businessman Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp). During the party, Vincent witnesses an altercation involving Whalid, cabinet minister Pierre Duroy (Philippe Haddad), and some mysterious figures. Later, when Whalid suddenly has to leave on a business trip, Vincent comes back to the estate as a one-person security force protecting Whalid’s trophy wife, Jessie (Diane Kruger), and her young son, Ali (Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant). Vincent is instantly suspicious of everything and everyone, constantly looking over his shoulder and scanning for threats ahead, which disturbs Jessie — until it appears that Vincent just may be right.
