It’s Madison time

When I say hit it, I want you to go two up and two back, with a big strong turn – and back to the Madison.

Hit it!

One of the biggest hits by the suave jazz-blues pianist Ray Bryant has had many revivals. ‘The Madison Time’ – an instructional dance tune – was already two years old when the Ray Bryant Combo recorded it in 1959, but his group’s cool, swinging version of it has proved irresistible.

In 1988 John Waters used it in his original film version of Hairspray, and since then Quentin Tarantino has referenced it in Pulp Fiction, and it is featured in a scene in The Go-Getter, a 2007 vehicle for Zooey Deschanel. Both scenes were tributes to yet another film, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Bande a Part (Band of Outsiders). The famous dancing scene starring Anna Karina is stylish, although her technique is wooden, and the dance is not actually the Madison.

Godard later said of the Pulp Fiction tribute that he would have preferred Tarantino had just given him some money. We can’t blame Tarantino on the Madison’s influence on the robotic dance craze of the early 1990s, line dancing. ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ was as dumb as the movements it accompanied, but it has to be said the Madison was its forebear.

Bryant, who died earlier this month aged 79, had a piano style perfect for the cool jazz era of the late 1950s. As this Independent obituary notes, he wasn’t swayed by the frenetic bebop pianists of the period, instead he kept his roots in gospel and blues; among his mentors was the elegant Teddy Wilson. Here is the Ray Bryant Combo performing an instrumental version of ‘Madison Time’ in 1960. The lyrics – or rather, instructions – are here. Hit it!

Look Who’s Talking

THE CONVERSATIONS: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje (Bloomsbury, 2002).

Film directors are like Napoleon, all-powerful and usually vertically challenged. “But even Napoleon needed his marshals,” says Michael Ondaatje in this book, a series of conversations with leading US film editor Walter Murch. Although just one of hundreds of names seen in the credits when the crowd is filing out of the cinema, the film editor is crucial to turning the director’s vision into a viewable reality. The film editor – and many of the greats have been women, like Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Sight) or Thelma Schoonmaker (longtime Scorsese editor) – is one of the unsung heroes of the form; they can shape the mood, create the pace, make the story work.

It was when Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient was being turned into a film that he befriended Murch, an intellectual as well as a craftsman. Murch’s talent helped Francis Ford Coppola shape some of the most important American movies of the 1970s: the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and 1974’s The Conversation.  The latter gives this book its title, and was recently restored. Its very subject matter concentrates the mind on the aural side of film-making; it’s about a sound engineer (Gene Hackman) and specialist in surveillance work who hears of a murder plot. Filmed on a low budget between the first two Godfathers, it encapsulates the issues Murch faces in his job. A simple matter like the clothing a character wears can make the editor’s job easy or impossible. If the costume department insists on strutting its stuff, dressing the lead in a variety of outfits, that limits what an editor can do if the story has to be reconstructed at the editing desk.

Murch came to editing after being a sound editor, and he expounds on the use of music and sound in movies. His work on American Graffiti revolutionised the use of pop in movies. Most films now have a relentless soundtrack, either telegraphing narrative punches, crassly manipulating the emotions, or inappropriately creating a merchandising tie-in. “Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids,” says Murch. “It gives you an edge, it gives you speed, but it’s unhealthy for the organism in the long run.”

There’s nothing subtle about mainstream movie making now, and The Conversations returns the audience to the basic craft, inviting them in so their experience is enhanced. It’s the best book about filmmaking since Francois Truffaut's similarly illuminating Hitchcock.

Carry On Scoring

I just heard a brilliant doco on composing for British film and TV comedies. Hear the unheralded geniuses who made music behind the Carry On films, Tony Hancock, Harry Worth et al reveal their secrets. It's called Waa! Waa! Waa! Waaaah!.

Among those interviewed is the recently deceased Angela Morley, the "Wendy Carlos" of film composing. Among her credits: Dynasty and Dallas. Her obit is fascinating.

Found the doco on the excellent radio documentary site Speechification.com, an anthology of the world's best public radio docos tailor made for podcasting. I'm looking forward to the one on the history of the mini-skirt. It's called The Shock of the Knee.