AFI’s 22nd annual European Union Film Showcase opens tonight with Mammoth, Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s first English-language feature starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams.

The festival runs through Nov. 24 with centerpiece screenings including The Young Victoria, a period romance from Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes with Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a Terry Gilliam film already well-known for being Heath Ledger’s final project.

For tickets and more information, visit AFI Silver’s Web site.

A semi-regular look at music festival news, rumors, and gossip

2009 Umbrella Music Festival: Our pals over at the Chicago Reader noted in their ’09 Fall Arts Guide that the Umbrella Music Festival “is eclipsed only by the Chicago Jazz Festival as the most impressive and adventurous jazz event of the year.” Since those guys seem to know what they’re doing, we’ll take their word for it. This year’s event—which, for the fourth turn of the calendar, “celebrates jazz and improvised music from Chicago and beyond”—extends over four days and includes performances from Matthew Shipp and a quartet that includes Tortoise’s John Herndon. But the clear highlight is a closing-night performance of compositions by Joe McPhee arranged by Ken Vandermark for a nonet which features both players. Tickets for events vary in price, but most (if not all) still seem to be available. The first night’s slate of events is entirely free.

Read More “Festival Watch: Umbrella, Troika, All Tomorrow’s Parties” »

Salome, one of the few metal bands that performed at this year’s CMJ.

For D.C. bands, the takeaway from CMJ seems to have been this: It will not pluck you from obscurity, but it can’t hurt. Also: Don’t believe the hype.

“The myth that you can land the perfect agent or manager at a place like that—I don’t think it pays attention to the reality that you’ve been talking to that person for seven months already,” said Jesse Elliott, whose polymathic alt-country band These United States played a handful of shows during this year’s College Music Journal Music Marathon. The annual industry gathering featured over 1,000 artists, close to 100 venues, and around a dozen acts from the D.C. area.

Elliott’s got a point: Most of the young bands I heard chatter about during the festival—like Florida’s Surfer Blood, New York’s Freelance Whales, and London’s Golden Silvers and Mumford and Sons—had recording contracts, significant blog buzz, or both going in, not to mention full management teams in place. These are not bands whose success lives or dies according to an industry festival.

“Most of the bands at these festivals are already signed,” wrote Todd Hyman, who runs the District-based labels Carpark and Paw Tracks and hosted CMJ showcases for both, in an e-mail. “Though this year there seemed to be a preponderance of unsigned blog bands. Seems folks were complaining about that.”

Read More “At CMJ, No Fast Track to Fame, but Plenty of IRLing” »

Louisiana Creole and Cajun music has long had a home in the D.C. area.  From the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Twist and Shout club and Wolf Trap’s “Swamp Romp” to Texas Fred Carter’s WPFW Saturday afternoon radio show and dances at Glen Echo Park,  distinctive fiddle and accordion-led bayou sounds have always been on the area’s musical menu.

On October 17 and 18, dance instructors and promoters Michael Hart and Sharon Schiliro presented the 1st annual “Dancing by the Bayou” festival at Glen Echo.  The event hosted a number of Louisiana and D.C. zydeco and Cajun bands for people to dance to throughout that weekend.  The roster included Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-chas, Jesse Lege & Bayou Brew, and Leroy Thomas and the Zydeco Roadrunners among many others.

Hart and Schiliro, who will be presenting a dance at Glen Echo on Sunday, November 8 with the Acadien Cajun Band, talked to me recently via e-mail about their festival and the state of zydeco and Cajun music in the Capital region.  They combined most of their responses.

City Paper: Do you think the recent festival will translate into increased enthusiasm for upcoming events, and/or will it be like that Buffalo Gap event—an annual thing that folks look forward to once a year?

Hart and Schiliro: I do think we may get a lift in attendance at the upcoming November/December dances, but weather, football games, etc. can always cut into the attendance; we shall see!  We do have an outstanding Zydeco band for our Mardi Gras dance in February to be announced shortly!  The Mardi Gras dance, in the last two years, has had great attendance for a week night!

Read More “Q & A with Dancing by the Bayou’s Michael Hart and Sharon Schiliro” »

Tabi Bonney performs at Fat Baby last night in New York City.

The thing about CMJ is, not all of it’s CMJ. There are the unoffocial day parties—free, sometimes invite-only events sponsored by record labels, PR firms, and media. There are the more exclusive parties at night. And there are the shows that, although not nominally part of the five-day conference and music festival, go on anyway, right in the middle of it all.

Take Casper Bangs‘ show last night at Pianos, which was sponsored by the weekly concert series Cross-Polination and was not part of the official CMJ roster. Nevertheless, the band—the project of Rob Pierangeli, who used to play in the Hard Tomorrows—played to a nearly full room.

Pierangeli paid $45 when he applied to play at this year’s CMJ, but his band was turned down. “Sorry to be frank, but I don’t see if the music has that much to do with who gets in,” he told me today. “So if you want to play, you have to know someone. Everyone knows that though. That’s not new information.”

Read More “CMJ Notebook: Casper Bangs, Shots of District Acts, Kiwi Rock” »

Middle Distance Runner performs at the CMJ Music Marathon in 2008.

Every CMJ has its success story—the unknown act who, thanks to buzz and grit and talent and luck , tickles the right trigger of the wayfaring label rep or taste-maker who, for whatever reason, has decided to see it. But most of the thousand-plus little-known bands and artists who descend on New York City each fall for the College Music Journal Music Marathon don’t walk away with freshly inked contracts or top-tier management. Their game is more incremental: A write-up here, a handshake there. So whether they’re dampening expectations or they mean it, it’s probably unsurprising that most of the D.C. bands performing during this year’s CMJ say their primary goal is just to “have fun.”

“These things are kind of a madhouse, and there’s a lot of talk of ‘there’s gonna be a lot of industry people,’” says Matt Dowling, whose band Deleted Scenes has two CMJ gigs and a meeting with a marketing firm. ”I don’t mean to be a cynic, but we’ve been playing for long enough and pined over certain goals to realize that the bottom line is to have fun. If the industry happens to like it, then great.”

John Thornley, of U.S. Royalty, is equally cautious: “I don’t think we’re going to go there and get a record, and I mean, it may happen. The goal is just to go there and play a show and get a lot of people.” But he also sees less tangible benefits. “If you meet a band at a party, and you like their music and they like yours, it’s that much more easy to work with them.”

At least a dozen bands and artists from the District will play gigs during this year’s CMJ, which starts tomorrow night and runs through Saturday, and includes about 75 different venues across New York City (there are also panel discussions and a film festival). Some acts already have recording contracts, others don’t, and all of them—once you get past their shared enthusiasm for merriment—have different goals.

Read More “For District Artists, Mixed and Measured Expectations for CMJ” »

A semi-regular look at music festival news, rumor, and gossip

CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival 2009: As college radio directors prepare to descend on New York City for their annual milking of the music industry-PR teat, we here at Festival Watch are left to wonder if we might have missed out on something by not signing up for airtime. We’re not talking about the opportunity to see more than 1,300 live bands (including   Broadcast, Pissed Jeans, and Rahzel). Nope: We’re bummed that we may have been denied, in the words of one former festival participant, a whole bunch of free NYC dinners. Sigh.

For those of you who can afford the $495 dollar ticket price (only $2.62 a band!), registration has been extended through 6 p.m. today. But we’re guessing that if you pay for the badge yourself, you don’t get the free dinners.

Unsound 2009: If you’re in the market for a festival experience that’ll probably cost you more than $500, we’d suggest you check out The Wire-sponsored Unsound festival. This, according to press materials, is a “[m]usic and art festival…with installations, panel discussions, workshops, film screenings and performances from Biosphere, Kode9 & Spaceape, Stars Of The Lid, Monolake, Omar-S, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Grouper, Ikonika, James Blackshaw, 2562, Untold, Deuce DJ Team (Marcel Dettmann & Shed) and more.” Honestly, it sounds pretty rad—and The Wire is an excellent go-to for culture you might have otherwise missed. Trouble is that Unsound takes place in Krakow. Poland. It’s a beautiful place, and we’d definitely suggest that you make the trip. But you’d need to get there by tonight. And, though the roughly 40 Euro admission price is totally doable, the plane fare it would take to get there will probably put this out of most of your respective price ranges.

Maybe we’ll see you there next year?

Read More “Festival Watch: CMJ, Unsound, Blip, Lollapalooza” »

My father read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales late in my literary development, long after I could sweep through novels with heavier plots on my own. But it gave me comfort to curl up and listen to the implausible tales that sought little more than to entertain and teach the simple lessons of humility and temperance.  The dreams that followed his bedtime stories were often sweet.

Such is the case with Masquerades, the romantic comedy that will close this year’s Arabian Sights Film Festival in screenings this Friday and Saturday evening.  It’s pure fairy tale fun set in a small dusty town in the Algerian Aures, rather than the typical rolling green pastures of England.  Read More “Reviewed: Masquerades” »

Art closely reflects life in one of this year’s Arabian Sights Film Festival openers,  Open Shutters Iraq, a documentary film about Iraqi women learning to tell stories using photography.  In a meta-critical way, director Maysoon Pachachi (an Iraqi herself) documents a story she can relate to even though it differs dramatically from her own.   Pachachi was born in Washington, DC to Iraqi parents and was educated in the US, Iraq and the United Kingdom, where she now resides as a professional director.   The women she documents currently live in Iraq, and are learning the craft of photography through a program run by British photojournalist Eugenie Dolberg.

The film is set in Damascus, Syria, where the women got their first training in photography and where they return after shooting photo-essays in Iraq. In their training, they are encouraged to share their life stories so that they can begin to create art from a deeply personal place.  These stories about Iraqi life have been largely unheard and the photos the women subsequently produce come from a perspective largely unseen.

I had the opportunity to ask Pachachi a few questions of my own. Here’s what she had to say: Read More “Q&A With Maysoon Pachachi, Director of Open Shutters Iraq” »