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Dave Douglas – Spark of Being making of video
Check out the “making of” feature for Dave Douglas‘ Spark of Being…
And, if you’re lucky, they have a handful of dates…
October 7th, 2010
Spark Of Being in MN: preview in CityPages
Event screens at 8:00 @ Walker Art Center [tickets] [map]
October 8th, 2010
Spark Of Being in KC: preview in Kansas City Star
Event begins at 8:30PM @the Blue Room [tickets] [map]
October 24th, 2010
Spark Of Being in NYC
Event screens at 8:00 PM @ the Highline Ballroom [tickets] [map]
Dave Douglas on vinyl
So, Expand from Dave Douglas & Keystone – the second in the Spark of Being trilogy – is now up for pre-order. Spark of Being is Dave’s recent collaboration with experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison (read more here). As a cool option, it’s going to be made available on vinyl – a first for Greenleaf Music.
I’ve got mine on pre-order… boxset and now vinyl. Oh, and once pre-ordered… you get to download it, even though its release date is August 24th.
Dave Douglas & Keystone’s Spark of Being
The latest music from Dave Douglas & Keystone is a three-part release.
Part 1: SOUNDTRACK (out June 22nd)
Part 2: EXPAND (out August 24th)
Part 3: BURST (out September 21st)
All three releases were inspired by Douglas’ recent collaboration with experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison on the new multi-media project Spark of Being, and were written by Douglas for his electric sextet Keystone. The first release, to the aforementioned film, will be available exclusively through Greenleaf Music on June 22. Two additional releases, Expand and Burst, will follow later this year and feature Douglas and Keystone exploring and interpreting the themes of the film.
Spark of Being, which premiered on April 24 at Stanford University’s Lively Arts, combines a re-interpretation of the Frankenstein story featuring new, archival and distressed footage on film by experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison with an original score by Douglas. Spark of Being was commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts as the centerpiece of a campus-wide “Art + Invention” project throughout the 2009–10 season, and was also the culmination of a multi-stage residency at Stanford by Douglas and Morrison.
Expand is a fully realized new jazz album by Douglas and Keystone. It will be released by Greenleaf Music and distributed through traditional music channels on August 24. Greenleaf will follow with the release of Burst on September 21, which, like Expand, further develops the musical ideas of Spark of Being, without the parameters of a soundtrack composition. All three albums will also be available in a full box set on September 21.
“Spark of Being began its life as a meditation on humanity and technology,” said Douglas. “Through the lens of contemporary music and film, Bill Morrison and I were both interested in a collaboration that showed the various uses for invention, from the quirky to the profound, from the benign to the murderous.”
Greenleaf Music rolled this out as part of their newly expanded subscription series. The new subscription service offers expansions to their levels… newly included are subscriber-only podcasts, full streaming of the ENTIRE Greenleaf catalog, complimentary tickets to a Greenleaf artist’s show, meet & greet opportunities, et cetera. My subscription was expiring anyway; so it was a great time to re-up. :)
Dave Douglas & Keystone – Spark of Being
From the Greenleaf Music blog…
Dave Douglas: “Keystone and I have finished our new recording and it will be released very soon. Here is the cover of the first album in the trilogy of CDs and we’re all really excited about the collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison on Spark of Being. ‘Soundtrack’ is the first release of three — it’s the music from the actual film. We’ve documented much more than that, with two CDs of Keystone recordings from the sessions in Stanford.
We’ll be making a big push for this first release as well as for the three CD set and new subscription podcasts and conversations.
I think you’ll enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.”
Sweeeet… more news will be posted when I hear the word…
Thom Yorke // Dave Douglas
Two news items… both film & music related…
As posted on atease… Radiohead’s Thom Yorke wrote three songs for the Tibetian documentary When The Dragon Swallowed The Sun. It is the documentary on the inside perspective on the Tibetan movement to free Tibet from Chinese occupation, its internal conflicts and contradictions. In an interview with 24-bit, director Dirk Simin revealed that Thom Yorke wrote three new songs for a particular chapter of the film.
Songwriter Damien Rice has also written a song for the documentary, and composer Philip Glass has penned the main theme for the film, including a piece for a key “grand finale” sequence. The premiere is expected early in 2010.
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One of my favorite jazzmen, Dave Douglas, is bringing his Keystone group to Stanford to collaborate with filmmaker Bill Morrison on Spark of Being, a ‘monumental work’ combining the screening of film with live musical performance. Dave Douglas is an artist in residency for most of the Spring 2010 at Stanford University.
If you are lucky enough to live near (or are vacationing near) Stanford, you can try your hand at going to the world premiere performance of Spark of Being on April 24, 2010.