Apr 4

Apr 4 The Figures

Evan Louison

Culture

Director Nadia Szold and composer Daniel Wright bring their jazz-inflected portrait of poet and artist Geoffrey Young to life

Coming to Ojai Playhouse April 13

Filmmaker Nadia Szold’s The Figures, a portrait of renowned artist, curator, and poet Geoffrey Young, follows her 2022 documentary Larry Flynt for President. But while Flynt was at times a raucous experience as it dove into the heyday and antics of its notorious subject, The Figures represents a quieter, more reflective approach, taking a joyful, irreverent, and at times somber stroll through the life of an independent artist.

The film, featuring luminaries of music, fine arts, and poetry — including Clark Coolidge, James Siena, and Carroll Dunham, to name but a few — is scored by composer Daniel Wright of Radio Skies. It plays at the Ojai Playhouse on April 13th, with the director, composer, and subject all in attendance for a special Q&A.

VORTEX caught up with Szold and Wright in advance of their upcoming screening to discuss the work, the process, and the strident wail of the artist’s cry.

VORTEX: It was so exciting to watch something where you feel like you’ve been truly immersed in a world. It was like visiting all these artists’ studios, Geoff’s inner sanctum.

Nadia Szold: Was this the first time you’ve seen the film?

I’d seen it once before, but it was really great to revisit it with the music in the foreground of the experience.

Daniel Wright: We had a music and art-based friendship previously. I’ve been in Ojai ten years, and we have kids the same age. Nadia told me about the project, showed it to me with some temp stuff in place, and I loved the whole project. It was just kind of an obvious yes. Nadia has a real sense of how she wants things to feel, and the nice thing about this was even though there were a number of different genres happening, it all still had a specific, cohesive feel that glued it together. Some of it was touching on this Brubeck, 50s / 60s West Coast jazz thing.

Do you have a set unit of personnel that you work with when it comes to scoring?

DW: I work with Karl Hunter a lot, who spans a lot of genres too. It’s funny, almost everyone who’s in every band I’m in is somewhere on the score for this movie. Karl also has a jazz combo that he plays with in Ventura. Tyler Hammond is a younger drummer who does a lot of skateboarding and jazz festivals in LA. There’s this whole scene around that that’s really cool.

What was your process like?

DW: Basically, it’s a mix of things. We use covers, soundalikes — meaning stuff that could fill the space of something that we already like, that feels good where it is in the film — and then original compositions that can weave between those genres I was looking at. Once it was all written, I looked at personnel, figured out which parts my normal guys could cover; which parts it was important to have more jazz-oriented players who can express something of their own through the music. And then we had hybrid pieces where we wanted the touch of the jazz guys, but then I overdubbed a bunch of the band guys.

And how do you figure out where you fit in the scheme of things? I noticed you’re jumping around a bit in terms of what part you’re playing. Is that just a piece-by-piece consideration, like whatever voice you’re drawn to in the mix?

DW: Well, everything got demoed out just by me, on my own. So I work up the tempos, the rhythms, the guitar stuff. Then I’m adding MIDI instruments, too, filling it all out. Once it’s time to record, I’m good with playing as little as possible, just so I can have ears on everything. I’m finding that more and more as I go on, you know, I love to play, but I’m never going to know for sure if I got something if I’m the one playing it.

Are you charting all these pieces out for the ensemble?

DW: For something like Aubrey, we had a really classic chart for it. It looked like a Real Book chart. But that’s the most classic ballad-type thing we have [in the score]. The intro would be written out, and then there’d be improvising over the chords. Other stuff with the band guys could have been charted out, but the way we are used to playing together, we almost never use charts. So, in that case, it’s just me teaching the parts to them, and then we jump in, jam it out.

There’s a Stan Getz thing going on in the last piece, Going Home. Were there other touchstones you kept going back to?

DW: One piece was recorded previously, a piece that was really inspired by those 70s Ethiopiques records, which grew out of a session I had with Bernie Larsen and Oliver Newell, just an experiment, really, and Karl Hunter and Syd were all on that too. Nadia found a place for it, and we liked what it did. There was definitely some temp stuff like there was one Tindersticks track [we listened to]. If I’m writing something to a temp, I try to do this thing where I’ll listen to [the temp] really obsessively for about a month, and then not listen to it at all for about a month, just to see if I can create something that feels the same naturally. Stuff like that, I would classify that as a soundalike… Just stuff where I really wanted to go after what it was they [the original composer] were doing. I’ll even title things in a way that makes it so anyone digging deep enough can easily pinpoint what tune I was inspired by. Because it’s written off memory, it’s nice because it can be your own. But you have to let it mold into your memory before you try something.

NS: Wasn’t there a Pavement song we used at some point?

DW: Right, we thought it was them doing a cover of Take Five [Dave Brubeck].

NS: It was, wasn’t it?

DW: It’s funny, they never actually play the theme. I think it’s just them playing in five, and we started calling it Take Five. But it’s not called that. Anyway, Nadia’s a great music fan with an eclectic taste and a lot of the stuff she likes fits, even though you wouldn’t think it would. Like, there’s no reason Yo La Tengo should fit with Brubeck, but there it is. And it works in the film because you’re watching artists at home and at work, and it seems like stuff they could be listening to in their own space.

That is what it felt like watching it. The music really gets under the skin of the subjects to the point where it imbues even their most casual, at-home moments with this kind of somber, quiet human drama. Nadia, how does the process start out for you?

NS: Well, I’m never married to the temp. It’s something that helps with editing, but I like to be able to sit back and say Okay, let’s forget about it and try something new.

What was the biggest puzzle for you?

NS: Figuring out the romance section, the part where Geoff meets Laura [Chester, novelist, ex-wife]. For that, I remember we were talking about whether we were going to do something completely original —

DW: Was that the saxophone and piano piece?

NS: It’s the Schubert. I was interested in either doing something original or finding something in the public domain and making something new out of that, giving it a kind of Santo & Johnny, 1960s surf vibe. At first, I was really set on a folk song, and we even considered Girl from the North Country —

DW: Oh, right, I demoed that as well. We searched for all kinds of stuff.

NS: Yeah, and it sounded really good, but it turns out that Dylan wrote Girl from the North Country, even though it sounds timeless, so we couldn’t use that. I was sure it was this old folk song. So then I was thinking of the seduction scene in Barry Lyndon, and even though the vibe of Geoff and Laura is totally different than the Schubert piece that Kubrick used, it just occurred to me, what about this melody?

It definitely swoons.

NS: Yeah, and I think doing it with the slide guitar [in The Figures score] helped a lot. But I still didn’t know if it was really going to work. So then, [to DANIEL] I think you sent it to me?

DW: Right, as a demo.

NS: And I listened to it ten times or so and thought, This is really going to work. And it was just something that had been nagging at me since the beginning. The idea of it was so far out I wasn’t even sure we should touch it. We tried a few things before.

DW: There was a context for it then. That’s a good example [of our process]: Nadia had a concept to chase, and it wasn’t like I had to write something, it was more like I had to build something, and I really like approaching music that way. We had this old recording that’s the vibiest thing ever, this Santo & Johnny surf recording, and then we mixed that with the Schubert melody. But there were three others we tried. We kept demoing stuff in that style, and we would mock it up really quickly, try it out. And I’ve been doing that a lot more since this film, where I’ll give three versions of something to someone, say See if any of these directions work for you. More like a designer than a traditional composer who says This is how the music has to be. And I find myself more and more in that world. I like the quality control part of it; I like the puzzle and putting it together, but I’m not genre-oriented at all. Nadia would bring a genre to me and I was always like Hell yeah, this is so interesting.

Tell me about the Laura suite. The playlist I listened to had a whole series of takes, all of them incredibly varied, some in a broad way, others more subtly.

DW: Luckily we had this session with these great jazz musicians, where we were capturing this live stuff that was important for us to get just the most emotional recording possible, and that’s kind of like, Let’s leave it to them and just see what happens, and then with this piece, we used their rhythm section, laid it all out very much like when you hire jazz musicians for a film score, you know, follow a chart exactly, no improvising, every time they did a take we said Go simpler, do less... And then I overdubbed the guitar [melody] later, and Karl’s saxophone got added in again later even though he was in the studio playing live with the other band members. So that’s another example of what we did with this score: It was a constructed piece using [the musicians’], which is true, and it’s actually really impressive, just because it’s so hard to get away from sometimes. Once you hear something and see it together [with the footage], it’s really hard to get away from. Sometimes, the demo process can be a problem that way, but I feel like at this point I just trust that if we didn’t beat the demo, we didn’t beat it. If you let it marinate you’ll know which one is really calling you.

**West Coast Premiere!**

**Q&A with Geoffrey Young, Daniel Wright, and Nadia Szold**

TICKETS

NS: Another example of finding something in the public domain and then changing its genre, in this case from classical to jazz, came as a complete surprise, and that’s Going Home.

DW: That’s my favorite.

NS: It was a surprise. I was convinced that Going Home was a spiritual. So many people had covered it, so many amazing versions, from Albert Ayler to Alice Coltrane, that it’s just a part of our canon. It’s in our blood, this song. So simple, and with the strident wail of the saxophone. Then, when I researched it, I realized that the melody is the same as the Dvorak New World Symphony, which is in the public domain. We had room to make it our own, and I felt the musicians had leeway to express themselves within that theme. It’s interesting. Dvorak is such a quintessentially Eastern European composer, and yet the piece has this distinctly American feeling to it. Later on, I read something about how Dvorak’s assistant might actually have written the bulk of it.

DW: We got lucky on that [session]. We had another pianist I had met once [on the track originally], who I think might have been a little intimidated by some of the charts, that one in particular, I think. He bailed out, and I heard about this guy visiting from New Mexico named Bevan Manson — older guy, in his fifties. Very much an awkward music genius character, very contained, didn’t talk much. And he was such an absolutely extraordinary musician. The track became more about engineering then, actually, because we just wanted to capture those two instruments [Karl Hunter, saxophone, and Bevan Manson, piano] in the room together. That was definitely a moment where everyone in the studio just stopped and listened. It was so incredible to watch.

It’s interesting, watching the movie again with an focus toward how the score elevates the picture, it felt like I was hearing a musical expression of the Geoff Young artistic method, this curatorial mix of jazz, poetry, and painting that the film captures.

NS: Sitting next to Geoff at the premiere, he turned to me and whispered Wow, the music! And for me, that strident sax wail from Going Home is the artist going for it again, hitting the ball again, despite whatever lack of recognition, lack of success in a traditional sense, that artistic impulse, the need to say, Here I am, for me, hearing that sound and showing who Geoff is, an artist operating on an underground, DIY level, continuing to publish, to write, to curate, I couldn’t help but feel inspired. When I think about all the movies that get made and what gets seen, all the music that gets made, what gets heard, I have to ask the question: Who are we making this for? Geoff puts out chapbooks with a limited edition of 150 copies. There’s a ripple effect, an impact, where people still connect to the work. I made a small film about an artist I admire. The message is that it does matter, but you have to leave the traditional meters of success behind and abandon what you might have initially thought success would be like.

There is a somber, bittersweet quality to the film’s tone.

NS: Death and impermanence are these themes that come up in Jeff’s poetry. The fact that he’s 80 years old and still doing it... The film’s not just about an artist who’s still making art. It’s about our own mortality.

What’s next for you?

DW: I’m producing a track for the Moon Valley Choir, who I really love. And we’re in the middle of releasing a Scott Hirsch record that I worked on for the last few years.

NS: I’ve written a script adapted from John Updike’s novel Marry Me, and I’ve been editing that for about a year, and it’s finally in a place that I feel good about. Now, I’m sitting back and trying to see where we are as an industry and when the best time will be to bring it to market. Honestly, I’m just so excited to be showing The Figures in town and bringing it all back home here.