Bill Frisell Trio featuring Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen
Saturday, 8 p.m.
Royce Hall
Though silent films have been traditionally accompanied by organ, the Bill Frisell Trio added a modern take to them by adding a jazzy soundtrack to two Buster Keaton films, a Bill Morrison film and Jim Woodring’s animations on Saturday at 8 p.m in Royce Hall. Bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, who have performed with Frisell before on his Grammy award-winning CDs “Unspeakable” and “East/West,” joined the leading jazz guitarist for a night of shapeshifting images and music.
The show began with Woodring’s morphing Rorschach-like “Faces” accompanied by a waterfall of equally slippery sounds from the band. The shifting progression of the live soundtrack reinforced the flexibility of the projected images, as vague shapes arranged themselves into and out of distinguishably human forms. The animation showed the range of forms within the human face, as well: Noses slipped into smiles, and smiles melted into frowns, provoking a seasickness of emotions.
The next stop-action animations “House of the Dead” and “Sugar of Vengeance” portrayed the life of a wide-eyed, rodent-like cartoon character named Frank. The band continued to follow the flow of the story, building suspense with repeated progressions of notes that culminated in a climax of crashing cymbals. The animation was filled with a dark sense of humor, as Frank carries on eating a piece of cake unaffected by his discovery of a skeleton in the “House of the Dead.”
Woodring continues juxtaposing disparities in “Sugar of Vengeance,” in which a gremlin-like creature interrupts Frank’s picnic, the chaos accompanied by wild percussion and sliding guitar and bass. The jazzy soundtrack was a perfect match for the abstract animations.
Morrison’s re-edited “The Mesmerist” moved into the realm of live action, portraying the story of how the Mesmerist exposes a murderer, but still with splotches from a deteriorated nitrate print of James Young’s “The Bells,” adding an abstract element to it. The music was perfectly timed with the movie, as drum beats accompanied blood dripping, and the band went wild with the murder.
Portraying the lighter side of murder, Keaton provided some comedic relief to the audience in “High Sign,” in which his character ends up being hired as the murderer and protector of a man whom the Blinking Buzzards gang has marked. The audience’s laughter in response to Keaton’s stumbling and stunts such as replacing a cop’s gun with a banana proved that slapstick has maintained its comedic value after all these years, as everyone loves a good fall, especially when it is timed with music.
While Frisell’s score varies significantly from the traditionally expected, the basics such as an accelerating drum roll to portray a train and a descending scale to portray someone falling down a latter remain. In the second Keaton film, “One Week,” Keaton’s character and his newlywed wife must assemble a house from a box, Ikea-style, which naturally ensues in mistakes and comedy.
The lack of words in the animations and films allowed the Bill Frisell Trio and their audience some room for interpretation, as the mood was dictated more generally and suggestively with music where it might have been more concrete and firmer with dialogue.