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Over lockdown, I got tired of the usual Netflix fare and embarked on watching a wider variety of movies including, horror of horrors, movies with subtitles. And I found a bunch of great stuff. Here’s a round-up of films about music and musicians I enjoyed (order from weirdest to least weird) that you might not have seen. If you have seen them all, congratulations on being cool.
And if you want a list of all the musical movies I’ve watched recently, you can find it here.
Ashik Kerib (Sergei Parajanov)
Sergei Parajanov is one of the wildest and most original filmmakers of all time. He’s best known for the masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates. Ashik Kerib is in a similar style and follows the story of a musician as he tries to raise enough money to impress the father of his bride-to-be. If you can ignore that the actor has clearly never seen a musical instrument before let played one, it’s a fun ride.
You can find it on YouTube in okay quality. But I’d recommend finding a higher quality version if you can.
The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
Iranian cinema was on one hell of a tear in the 90s. Kiarostami gets all the plaudits in the west. But Mohsen Makhmalbaf is my favourite. He packs his movies with visually arresting scenes and they are so heartfelt they even touch a cynic like me.
The movie is about a blind kid, Khorshid, with outstanding hearing. He’s employed to tune instruments before they leave the factory and needs to convince his boss to give him an advance so his mum doesn’t get evicted. Unfortunately, Khorshid keeps being distracted by music (he’s particularly obsessed with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) and is constantly wandering off track despite the best efforts of his buddy Nadereh.
Two warnings. Firstly, the plot doesn’t make a lick of sense (instruments don’t get tuned at the factory by a kid with perfect pitch for starters). Secondly, thanks to the Iranian penchant for casting non-actors, the performances from the adults are so wooden you could carve a tanbur out of them. Luckily, the two kids in the lead roles are great.
There’s a watchable version on YouTube but you can pick up a much better version on Amazon. And it’s well worth it just for the colours. I also highly recommend A Moment of Innocence and Gabbeh.
Youth (Paolo Sorrentino)
This is the only film on the list with proper Hollywood actors in. It’s set in an impossibly grand resort in the Swiss Alps and stars Michael Caine as a retired composer rebuffing attempts from the Queen to perform for her and Harvey Keitel as an aging director trying to come up with an end for his movie.
Félicité follows a singer in Kinshasa, DRC trying to raise money to pay for treatment for her son after a traffic accident. The film deals with contrasts. It explicitly talks about the contrast between night and day. The movie itself is split in two with a realist first half and a dream-like second half.
But the most exciting contrast comes in the music. Félicité sings in a sweaty bar back by the Congolese rumba of the Kasai Allstars. While l’Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste play the music of Estonian contemporary composer Arvo Pärt while bathed in blue light. As the band’s music becomes increasingly driving, thudding and distorted, the orchestra’s music becomes more ethereal.
And if you want more Arvo Part, the man himself shows up in the documentary Sounds and Silence.
Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda)
Cleo from 5 to 7 is a gem of French New Wave cinema by the loveable genius Agnes Varda. It follows the pop star Cleo in real time as she hangs around her kitten filled apartment, rehearses new music and tootles around Paris while waiting for the results of her cancer test.
As I Open My Eyes (Leyla Bouzid)
I was promoted to check out this movie when I found out the soundtrack was by the outstanding oud virtuoso Khyam Allami. As I expected, the music is excellent and combines traditional Tunisian sounds with copious amounts of rocking out.
The movie centres on a young woman who fronts a politically outspoken band in the run up to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution which kicked off the Arab Spring.
They Will Have to Kill Us First (Johanna Schwartz)
They Will Have to Kill Us First is a documentary following musicians who fled the north of Mali after the takeover by hardcore religious nutjobs Ansar Dine who banned music. Most notably, Songhoy Blues who go from exiled local band to playing the Royal Albert Hall over the course of the film.
For another perspective, check out Timbuktu. A fictional account of a musician who choses to stay in the extremist held region while doing his best to stay out of their way.
The song is built around a sample of Ike’s Rap by Isaac Hayes (the same sample used in Tricky’s Hell is Round the Corner). So the whole song is on an Em chord (Ebm in the original) with descending bass notes on the C-string of E, D, C#, C.
By far the hardest part of the arrangement is the artificial harmonics in bars 21-22 (“A thousand flowers could bloom”) played at the same time as the bass notes. If, like me, you struggle with that bit, you can ignore the harmonics all together and just play it as written.
The solo starts off like the original but I go off on my own from there. I suggest you do the same. I’m using notes from the melody plus a Bb (A-string, 1st fret) that lends some gritty dissonance to the solo.
This arrangement is heavily based on The Beatles’ version but is closer to the tempo of the original. I’ve taken a few liberties including adding my own intro and solo. Feel free to do the same for your version.
I recommend one finger per string picking for everything but the solo. I just used whatever falls under my fingers in that section.
There are a few fancy chords in the arrangement. Including my favourite chord: C7(#5). C7 is already an unsettled chord and adding that #5 creates even more tension that is released when you move back to the F chord.
The song gets much of its power from being blunt and straightforward. So I’ve kept the arrangement stark and tried to play it directly without too much emotion.
The picking is mostly thumb on the g- and C-strings and the index and middle on E and A respectively. The big exception is the rapid notes on the C-string at the end of each stanza e.g. bars 9 and 17. For those, I recommend using alternate picking as it’s too quick to comfortably play with your thumb.
The other big exception is the trumpet solo, where I switch to strumming to give things a lift.
While not quite in the league of November Rain, Guns N’ Roses’ acoustic lighter-swayer Patience is still a bit of an epic. So for this arrangement I’ve trimmed down the intro and outro and skipped the repeat of the verse and chorus.
The intro follows Axl’s whistling for the first four bars before playing the first solo section. Just a bit of bending to deal with here.
The main solo section starts in bar 28 with some sliding around. My favourite part is the lick in bar 32-33. I wasn’t sure if this bit was going to work on uke, but it ends up fitting neatly.
Things switch up in bar 39 for the outro with some loose strumming and a fun sliding solo section.
I found the melody in the outro (from bar 47 on) tricky to arrange. Usually, you’d have a G note over the G chord somewhere. But the melody sticks with the F# (E-string second fret) and A notes from the D chord. That makes it hard to pull out the chord changes in this section clearly. But if you keep the chord changes clear in your head you should navigate it okay.
Links
Buy the original
My tabs of Sweet Child O Mine and November Rain are both on the Uke Hunt Patreon for concert level backers and up.
The fantastic Paula Fuga has a new album out including features from Jack Johnson and Ben Harper: Rain on Sunday. I backed this on Kickstarter way back in 2014 and it’s been well worth the wait.
It’s always fascinating to see how bands deal with the death of musical fads and Travis are a prime example of it. Their debut album Good Feeling was full of Oasis-y rockers about good times and picking up girls. Which would have flown off the shelves if it had been released in the Britpop era rather than in 1997, the year Radiohead killed off the genre with OK Computer. After the lukewarm success of the album, they shamelessly reworked themselves into a Radiofriendlyhead sounding band on The Man Who (even slagging off Wonderwall on the first verse of the album) and had a breakthrough Why Does It Always Rain On Me?. Setting the scene for Coldplay who released their debut a year later.
The chords for this one are very easy. The only challenge is some rapid picking (which you’ll need to do some alternate picking) and pull-offs.
From Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery, Don’t Play that Ukelele. (Via @ukeist)
