GARY LUCAS' FLEISCHEREI [FEATURING: SARAH STILES]


Guitarist Gary Lucas, whose dauntingly eclectic career encompasses a formative stint with Captain Beefheart, a collaboration with Jeff Buckley very early in Jeff's career and a recent duo album with underground singer/songwriter legend Peter Hammill was once called "the guitarist of a thousand ideas" by The New York Times. Still, summing up Lucas’s kaleidoscopic career is a daunting task by any measure. He’s got a project for every day of the week, and three on Sunday. He composes soundtracks for television and film, and can often be found performing his scores live, including the classic 1934 Chinese silent feature The Goddess and the Brazilian cult classic This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse. Not surprisingly given his Castle-haunted youth he’s demonstrated a particular affinity for horror films, creating acclaimed scores for Carl Theodor Dreyer's classic 1932 Vampyr, a Spanish-language version of Tod Browning’s immortal version of Dracula, and James Whale’s definitive Frankenstein (both from 1931).

Famously dubbed “the thinking man’s guitar hero” by The New Yorker, Lucas first made his mark in the early 1980s with the last incarnation of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, an association that continued fruitfully after Don Van Vliet’s retirement from music.  He collaborated with the lamented legend Jeff Buckley, contributing incisive guitar work and two songs to the epochal 1994 album Grace (including the title track). More recently, he’s released Otherworld, a duo collaboration with UK vocalist Peter Hammill; and a project with Hungarian jazz-rock ensemble DeBORT

MUSIC FROM
MAX FLEISCHER CARTOONS



RUNE 405

Next to Walt Disney, Max Fleischer is the best-known animator of the 20th century, creating and contributing to American culture the one and only Betty Boop. Fleischer Studios also brought the newspaper character Popeye The Sailor and all the characters of that universe to (animated) life.

Guitarist Gary Lucas, whose dauntingly eclectic career encompasses a formative stint with Captain Beefheart, a collaboration with Jeff Buckley very early in Jeff's career and a recent duo album with underground singer/songwriter legend Peter Hammill was once called "the guitarist of a thousand ideas" by The New York Times. Lucas has long been a fan of Fleischer's work and has wished to develop a band to present the music that was used in these cartoons.

The music and era conjured up by the group is a gleaming confection from a hurly-burly era when the Jazz Age crashed into the Great Depression and Tin Pan Alley borrowed shamelessly from Harlem. To create the small band arrangements, Lucas enlisted virtuoso trombonist and arranger Joe Fiedler to craft zingy, modern-but-historically-grounded arrangements and to bring in a brilliant group of players, each one at home with the traditional as well as the exploratory: saxist Jeff Lederer, double bassist Michael Bates and drummer Rob Garcia.

Casting the cats was the easy part. Finding a singer who could capture the insouciant spirit of these characters while comfortably inhabiting the material proved far more difficult. Lucas turned to his wife, a New York City casting director, who said, "why don’t you let me cast this one?" "That was a good idea", Lucas says. Tony Award-nominated, musical theater vocalist (on and off Broadway) Sarah Stiles, who embodies both the sophisticated and sexy Betty and her gawky, neurotic, loveable counterpart, Olive Oyl, was clearly the right choice. "Sarah is really a bundle of fire who can do it all. It was crucial to find a singer who wouldn’t try to hijack the idea and make it about her." Part of what makes Stiles such a perfect fit for the material is the way she captures the spirit of the characters. It’s immediately obvious when she’s singing a song associated with the effervescent Ms. Boop and when she’s donning the slippery guise of Ms. Oyl.

Hewing closely to the original scores, Lucas and his crew summon a lost world of rent parties and Yiddish music halls, Vaudeville emporiums, Broadway revues, and even klezmer dance parties. With Fleischerei, Lucas, Stiles and group have created a particularly vivid and entrancing realm, a musical world that’s uncannily familiar and tantalizingly foreign like only the past can be.

Music from Max Fleischer's Cartoons press release

Buy this album




MEDIA
For press and media: cover art and high resolution images are available below for download (click thumbnail, right-click image and select "Save As.."). Please credit the photographer (when available) and "Courtesy of Cuneiform Records". For more information, click here.

Music from Max Fleischer's Cartoons

PRESS RELEASES
Music from Max Fleischer's Cartoons press release

facebook twitter
© Cuneiform Records 2014
ARTISTS | TOURS | ABOUT | DISTRIBUTORS | STORE | CONTACT | LICENSING

Subscribe to Cuneiform's newsletter!