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I Cakewalked With a Zombie
Author: Phillip Johnston
Phillip Johnston and the Greasy Chicken Orchestra
Phillip Johnston: soprano sax
Peter Farrar: alto sax
Tim Clarkson: tenor sax
Jim Loughnan: baritone sax
Peter Dasent: piano
Tim Rollinson: banjo
James Greening: sousaphone
Nic Cecire: drums
The Greasy Chicken Orchestra has finely tuned their brand of swinging 20s/30s jazz in a two-year residency at Sydney’s Foundry616, featuring some of Sydney’s finest musicians as they celebrate the music of New Orleans and beyond. With a focus on early Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, tunes include such early jazz classics as South Rampart Street Parade, Muskrat Ramble, and Frog-I-More Moore Rag. The band is led by Phillip Johnston, an American saxophonist/ composer who lives in Sydney while still maintaining a musical life in his hometown of New York City.
In 2023, the GCO released its first recording on Earshift Records, entitled I Cakewalked With A Zombie (Earshift 081). The recording includes both original arrangements of classic tunes of the 20s & 30s, and original tunes by Phillip Johnston that pay homage to that era.
You can listen to/purchase the recording on Bandcamp here.
Streaming services here.
“Johnston has always understood that jazz’s history is a rich resource rather than a liability, and with this band he immerses himself almost completely in this era of energised and good-humoured dance music . . . a nuanced and blended sonority, combined with an emphasis on pinpoint arrangements and concise solos.” – John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald (27 Apr 2016)
Phillip Johnston:
New Music for Silent Films
Phillip Johnston’s first live performance of an original score for historical silent film was commissioned by the American Museum of the Moving Image, and premiered at the Silent Movies: Loud Music festival on 19 Sep 1993. That film, Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney and the then 19-year-old Joan Crawford, with Johnston’s score, began a 30+-year body of work, including multiple feature films, numerous short films, and related multimedia works (such as Wordless! [2013] with Art Spiegelman).
The most important of these works, aside from The Unknown, are The Merry Frolics of Méliès (1899-1907), a collection of eight short films including the iconic “Trip to the Moon”; Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Japanese Expressionist masterpiece Page of Madness (1926); F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), and Lotte Reiniger’s silent silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). In addition to the 12 works that combine comics/comix and music in Wordless!, recent works include comics He Done Her Wrong (Gross, 1930), Big Head Pointy Nose (Pratap, 2022) and Buster Keaton’s short film masterpiece, and Cops (1922).
Over the last three decades, he has performed these works widely in the US, Europe and Australia, at cinematheques, film and music festivals, universities and local movie houses. Australian venues include The Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Vivid, Melbourne Festival of the Arts, MONA FOMA, Woodford Folk Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, National Film and Sound Archive and Melbourne International Jazz Festival. (list of US and international venues upon request).
In 2015, he completed a PhD in Music Composition at the Newcastle Conservatorium, University of Newcastle, with the thesis title: ‘The Polysynchronous Film Score: The Relationship Between Music and Image/Narrative In Contemporary Scores For Silent Film’. He expanded these ideas in his book Silent Films/Loud Music: New Ways of Listening to and Thinking about Silent Film Music (Bloomsbury, 2021; paperback published in 2023).
His work has been commissioned by the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the Sydney Opera House. His career as a composer of music for sound films includes, Philip Haas’ The Music of Chance (1993), Paul Mazursky’s Faithful (1996) and Henry Bean’s Noise (2008). He has taught music composition for film for the last 25 years at NYU, AFTRS, University of Sydney, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and the Australian Institute of Music, among others.
In 2018, he was awarded the Johnny Dennis Award for Film Music Composition ($20,000).
His new current project is Puffs of Smoke: Weird and Wild Artifacts from the Early Era of Australian Silent Film, a study of short works, with original music performed live by the composer on solo saxophone, with electronic and pre-recorded accompaniment.
Phillip Johnston: New Music for Silent Films: list of performances.
The Unknown (Browning, 1927)
19 Sep 1993 The American Museum of the Moving Image, NYC (premiere)
1 Oct 1993 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
9 May 1994 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, Philadelphia, PA
30 Oct 1994 Teatro Verdi, Rome, ITALY
23 Feb 1996 Demarest School, Hoboken, NJ
21 Jun 1996 Mellon Jazz Festival, Philadelphia, PA
6 Aug 1998 Celebrate Brooklyn Festival, Brooklyn, NY
26 Jan 1999 World Financial Center, NYC
28 Aug 1999 Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA
22 Oct 2000 American Museum of the Moving Image, Lon Chaney Festival, NYC
11 Jan 2001 Avoca Beach Picture Theatre, Avoca Beach, NSW, AUSTRALIA
14 Jan 2001 Fox Studios, Fringe Festival, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
21 Jan 2001 Uniting Church, Fringe Festival, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
26 Jan 2001 Big Day Out, Homebush Bay, NSW, AUSTRALIA
27 Oct 2001 Virginia Film Festival, Charlottesville, VA
The Georges Méliès Project (8 films, Méliès,1899-1907)
15 Nov 1997 Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC (premiere)
20,21 Feb 1998 Demarest School, Hoboken, NJ
28 Mar 1998 Teatro Verdi, Florence, ITALY
10 Oct 1998 Time & Space Limited, Hudson, NY
19 May 1999 Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH
20 May 1999 Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
6 Oct 2000 Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA
7 Oct 2000 EdgeFest, Kerrytown Concert House, Ann Arbor, MI
8 Oct 2000 Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
8 Mar 2006 EtnaFest, Catania, ITALY
22 Aug 2010 Screen Live, Sydney Opera House, Sydney AUSTRALIA
15 April 2012 Parramatta Riverside, Sydney AUSTRALIA
12 May 2012 Randwick Town Hall, Sydney AUSTRALIA
08 July 2012 Revelation Perth Film Festival AUSTRALIA
07 Sept 2012 Avoca Beach Picture Theatre AUSTRALIA
12 June 2016 Penn Museum, USA (Relache)
30 Dec 2016 Woodford Folk Festival, QLD AUSTRALIA
13 July 2019 La Perouse Museum, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
21 Oct 2022 Melbourne International Jazz Festival
(Darebin Arts Centre) AUSTRALIA
Page of Madness (Kinugasa, 1926)
9, 10 July 1998 Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC (premiere) USA
5 Mar 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA USA
23 Jan 1999 Duke University, NC USA
26 Aug 2000 Time & Space Limited, Hudson, NY USA
22 June 2008 State Theatre, Sydney Film Festival, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Faust (Murnau, 1926)
05 Oct 2002 New York Film Festival, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC, USA (premiere)
26 Jan 2003 Teatro Manzoni, Apertivo in Concerti, Milan, ITALY
06 Feb 2003 Mass MoCA, Massachusetts, USA
07 Mar 2004 The University of the South, Sewanee, TN, USA
11 Jun 2004 Slovenska kinoteka, Ljubljana, SLOVENIA
12 Jun 2004 UBI Jazz Festival, Venice ITALY
13 Jun 2004 La Palma, Rome ITALY
16 Jun 2004 Brugge, BELGIUM
17 Jun 2004 Antwerp, BELGIUM
11 Dec 2004 Merkin Hall, New York USA
20 Jun 2005 Garda Jazz Festival, Lake Garda Jazz, ITALY
21 Jun 2005 Roma Jazz & Image Festival, Rome ITALY
22 Jun 2005 Cinemazero, Pordenone ITALY
23 Jun 2005 Rote Fabrik, Zurich SWITZERLAND
10 Sep 2007 German Film Festival, Seymour Centre, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
10 Oct 2008 ACMI, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA [Melbourne Int’l Festival of the Arts]
11 Oct 2008 ACMI, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA [Melbourne Int’l Festival of the Arts]
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Reiniger, 1926)
17 May 2013 Randwick Town Hall, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
15 Sep 2013 Parramatta Riverside, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
07 Jun 2014 Sydney Vivid Festival Sydney, Australia
17 Jan 2015 MONA FOMA, Hobart, Tasmania, AUSTRALIA
07 Jun 2015 The Capital Jazz Project, Canberra, AUSTRALIA
25 June 2016 Springwood, New South Wales AUSTRALIA
28, 29 Dec 2016 Woodford Folk Festival, QLD AUSTRALIA
26 Sep 2020 Chauvel Cinema/Goethe Institut. AUSTRALIA
27 Sep 2020 Chauvel Cinema/Goethe Institut. AUSTRALIA
02 Oct 2020 NFSA (National Film & Sound Archive), Canberra. AUSTRALIA.
20 Jan 2021 Bangalow Film Festival, Bangalow, NSW AUSTRALIA
26 Feb 2021 Fed Square/ACMI, Melbourne, VIC, AUSTRALIA
Wordless! (with Art Spiegelman, 2013)*
05 Oct 2013 Graphic Festival, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
18 Jan 2014 Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, USA
22 Jan 2014 Colorado College, Colorado Springs, USA
24 Jan 2014 University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
08 Oct 2014 Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, USA
10 Oct 2014 UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
12 Oct 2014 Seattle, WA, USA
14 Oct 2014 USC, Los Angeles, CA, USA
15 Oct 2014 UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
17 Oct 2014 USCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
19 Oct 2014 Kaufman Center, Kansas City, MO, USA
21 Oct 2014 Lisner Auditorium, George Washington University, Washington DC, USA
26 Oct 2014 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA
13 Mar 2015 Miller Theatre, Columbia University, NYC, USA
10 Mar 2015 Williams College, Williams MA, USA
20 Sep 2015 Comicópolis, Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
11 Nov 2016 London Jazz Festival, Barbican Centre, London UK
17 June 2018 Philharmonie de Paris, Paris FRANCE
Silent Shorts (3 films)
He Done her Wrong (Gross, 1930)*,
Cops (Keaton/Cline, 1922),
Trip to the Moon (Méliès, 1902)
02 Dec 2022 Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)/Federation Square, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
*Wordless! and He Done Her Wrong are not silent films per se. Wordless! is a live performance involving projection of images from graphic novels and comics, projected as enhanced slide shows, combined with a lecture by Art Spiegelman, and accompanied by a live band. He Done Her Wrong is an extended version (20 minutes) of one of these, encompassing the entire graphic novel.
Playing With Monk is jazz duo of piano and saxophone, focused around the music and influence of jazz iconoclast Thelonious Monk.
This project for the two veteran composer/instrumentalists consists of a unique repertoire drawn from the iconic compositions of Thelonious Monk, both the well-known and the obscure, as well as original tunes both new and old from the two composers’ catalogues that are inspired/influenced by Monk’s work.
The music is swinging, bluesy and spiky, as Monk would have liked it.
News Flash! : Click this link for more information about their latest project:
Jazz Goes To The Movies.
They are co-leaders of the early jazz repertory band The Greasy Chicken Orchestra, who are in their 7th year of regular performances at Sydney’s Foundry 616. Johnston’s New York band The Microscopic Septet’s 2010 recording Friday The 13th: The Micros Play Monk (Cuneiform) was given 4 stars, made an Editor’s Pick and called ‘a love letter to Monk’ by Downbeat Magazine.
This new duo is the latest in a long history of collaboration between Dasent and Johnston on new and inventive projects that combine originality and a deep love of the breadth of jazz history.
Video clip: Playing With Monk plays Monk’s Locomotive
Jazz Goes To The Movies is a special project of Playing With Monk.
Dasent and Johnston perform jazz interpretations of beloved themes from classic Hollywood films.
Categories
Saxophone Special
Phillip Johnston: alto saxophone
Peter Farrar: alto saxophone
Tim Clarkson: tenor saxophone
James Loughnan: baritone saxophone
Saxophone Special is a contemporary saxophone quartet playing a diverse repertoire, ranging from jazz and contemporary classical to tangos and waltzes, with a special focus on quartet arrangements of the music of Steve Lacy.
The photo is from a recent site-specific performance at the Power UP! Festival at the Inner West’s White Bay Power Station.
Categories
The Microscopic Septet
Jazz Goes To The Movies is a special project of Playing With Monk.
Dasent and Johnston perform jazz interpretations of beloved themes from classic Hollywood films.
From romantic standards that originated as film themes (The Shadow of Your Smile, As Time Goes By), to varied styles ranging from James Bond, Judy Garland, Walt Disney and Federico Fellini, Jazz Goes to the Movies will be a joy for the lover of film music.
Co-leaders Peter Dasent and Phillip Johnston both have careers as jazz musicians and composers of film music.
Dasent is known for Peter Jackson’s early films Heavenly Creatures, Meet The Feebles and Dead Alive.He has arranged six suites of music from Fellini’s films including the Academy Award-winning La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963). The music has been released on the CD Bravo Nino Rota, performed by his group The Umbrellas with guest mezzo-soprano Michelle Agius-Hall.
Johnston has scored Hollywood films starring Cher and Ryan O’Neal (Faithful), James Spader and Mandy Patinkin (The Music of Chance) and Tim Robbins and William Hurt (Noise), as well as independent films, documentaries and shorts. Johnston is also a lecturer on film music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where he teaches composition for film, and the University of Sydney, where he teaches the history of film music. His book Silent Films/Loud Music (Bloomsbury) was released in paperback last year. His early film music has been released on the CD Music for Films on Tzadik Music.
Here are a few samples of great film themes as performed by Playing with Monk:
Main Theme from Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) by Peter Dasent
Main Theme from Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 by Nino Rota
“The Godfather Waltz” by Nino Rota from The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
“If I Only Had A Brain” (Arlen/Harburg) from The Wizard of Oz (1939)
“Addio A Cheyenne” from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in The West (1968) by Sergio Leone
Return to Playing With Monk
Phillip Johnston phillip@phillipjohnston.com 0424 655 317
Peter Dasent peterdasent@mac.com
The Microscopic Septet are widely considered one of the most important and unique bands to come out of the New York Downtown scene of the 1980s. Never sufficiently contained by a single category, the Micros—co-led by by soprano saxophonist Phillip Johnston and pianist Joel Forrester—formed during a remarkable period of musical experimentation and quickly distinguished themselves as a raucously fun, musically adept, and wickedly clever jazz band.
“The past is a big place filled with music. Some players cling to it like a security blanket; others fool themselves that they can invent new sounds out of thin air. The smart ones use the past as a resource: an infinite library from which to steal any number of hooks and probably make a clean getaway. But borrowing from the past is different from wallowing in it, and hip modernity springs from the subtlest tweak of something old. That’s the game the Microscopic Septet plays. Although you might variously hear echoes of Duke Ellington, Sun Ra or Louis Jordan, the compositions by pianist Joel Forrester and soprano saxophonist Phillip Johnston suddenly dart up unforeseen alleys, like the past is chasing with sirens screaming. Even more than the compositional quirks, what ensures their escape is the players’ characters oozing from the music – and it’s a fun ooze. Now, 34 years on, the Microscopics have their own past to cannibalise; their own bones to spit out. The result? One of the most distinctive sounds in contemporary jazz.”
– John Shand / The Sydney Morning Herald
“seminal, brilliant post-modern jazz”
– Downbeat Magazine
“one of the most distinctive sounds in modern jazz.”
– John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald
Musicians
Phillip Johnston: soprano sax
Don Davis: alto sax
Mike Hashim: tenor sax
Dave Sewelson: baritone sax
Joel Forrester: piano
Dave Hofstra: bass
Richard Dworkin: drums
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The Microscoptic Septet: Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me: The Micros Play The Blues Released on…
The Microscopic Septet: Manhattan Moonrise Released released May 27, 2014 via Cuneiform Records Manhattan Moonrise is the 3rd release by…
The Microscopic Septet: Friday The 13th: The Micros Play Monk Released October 5, 2010 via Cuneiform Records Composer and pianist…
The Microscopic Septet: Lobster Leaps In Released September 17, 2008 via Cuneiform Records “…sounds like someone mistakenly booked the Art…
The Microscopic Septet: Surrealistic Swing: History of the Micros, Volume 2 Released October 10, 2006 via Cuneiform Records The Micros…
The Microscopic Septet: Seven Men in Neckties: History of the Micros vol. 1 Released October 10, 2006 via Cuneiform Records…
Phillip Johnston’s Page of Madness: Suite for Improvisers had its Australian premiere at SIMA’s Summer Series at The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre in February 2016. This large ensemble piece had its US premiere as the finale of Johnston’s one-week residency at John Zorn’s venue The Stone in New York in March of 2015.
The music is based on Johnston’s original score for Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 Japanese silent film, Kurutta Ippēji (A Page of Madness) which was premiered at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 1998 and later had its Australian premiere at The Sydney Film Festival in 2008. The Suite for Improvisers was created from themes used in the film score and some of the structures which applied improvised music to silent film scoring, combining them into a long form music composition. The music functions without the film, as a vehicle for a group of stellar Sydney improvisers, in the spirit of large ensemble music such as Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill for the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, or the music of The New York Composers Orchestra, of which Johnston was an originating member in the late 1980s. This film-score-without-a-film is both haunting and exhilarating.
John Shand wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald: ★★★★½
“If a sense of surprise courses from the heart of much good music, then Phillip Johnston sliced open an artery to flood this work with the stuff. Composition and improvisation have shared a bed since music was born, but often the former has constrained the latter or the latter has rendered the former redundant.
The Holy Grail has been to find a way to create contexts and structures within which improvisers may be given their heads, so the piece is completely different with each iteration, yet remains recognisable.
Johnston plays composer in the conventional sense of strewing enchanting themes through the work, and in the less conventional sense of calling for free improvisations of specified durations and instrument combinations. While playing soprano saxophone he also conducted, controlling dynamics, density, intensity and entry and exit points for individuals.
It was a rendition that bounced between highlights as happily as a child in a toyshop. Among them were Farrar’s alto saxophone exploding with look-mum-no-hands daring and thrilling improbability, Robson tearing the music’s surface apart with his baritone, McMahon summoning up a churning ocean of sound, and a Swanton solo of understated sorrow that was as good as anything I’ve heard the bassist do in 37 years of hearing him.”
Photo credit: Angeline Marmion