September 21, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
The Jazz Passengers perform with The Creature from the Black Lagoon in Shocking 3-D for a Halloween treat at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- The Jazz Passengers
- The Creature from the Black Lagoon in Shocking 3-D
- The hip and hot Jazz Passengers play new music and perform new dialogue
- The Creature from the Black Lagoon is the horror camp classic from 1954
- Friday, October 29
- 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $25 / UCSB students $15
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival present a terrific Halloween treat, The Jazz Passengers with The Creature from the Black Lagoon in Shocking 3-D on Friday, October 29 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. The Jazz Passengers—an all-star collective of downtown New York City talent acclaimed for their playful improvisatory ways—do a hilarious radio play-style take on the 1954 camp horror classic, turning off the film’s sound and performing witty new dialogue and terrific music. 3-D glasses will be distributed to the audience. Rolling Stone has called the program, “An absurdist mix of jazz and musical comedy.”
In 1997 the Jazz Passengers joined the trend of creating new scores for old movies. They chose to do 20 minutes of director Jack Arnold’s cult favorite The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Replacing both the music and dialogue, they performed this snippet during a concert at Town Hall in New York City and then forgot about the project. Thanks to a commission from “Celebrate Brooklyn” several years later they revisited the film and redid the entire soundtrack—dialogue, sound effects and music—from beginning to end. Along with some suitable hats and a lot of improvised dialogue, the new original score uses signature l950’s musical gestures to create an entirely new language.
Conducted by Norman Yamada, the regular band (vibraphonist Bill Ware, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxophonist Roy Nathanson, bassist Brad Jones, drummer E.J. Rodriguez and violinist Sam Bardfeld) is joined by the guitar and comic antics of Ilene Weiss. With far more acting experience to their credit than perhaps any jazz band before them (for example, Roy Nathanson has appeared in films by Chantal Akerman, Jim Jarmusch and Elaine May), members of the Jazz Passengers go at their voiceover tasks with aplomb, making awful jokes and useless references that blaze a trail from unzipped zippers to good old George W. Bush.
The film itself stands at the pinnacle of Jack Arnold’s extravagant career as a director. With other 1950s B movie classics like It Came from Outer Space (l953) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (l957) to his credit, as well as episodes of everything from Gilligan’s Island to The Brady Bunch to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Arnold had his hands in a shocking percentage of the camp canon of the last fifty years. But Creature has penetrated our popular culture consciousness, if there is such a thing, more deeply than the rest.
The plot of the film involves a scientific expedition up a remote part of the Amazon River. Led by Richard Carlson (as Dr. David Reed), with the voluptuous Julie Adams (as Kay Lawrence) by his side, the group runs afoul of a prehistoric monster—a hideous, semi-amphibious gill-man from a lost age. They ensnare the beast, but it escapes and then blocks their passage, marooning them in the forbidding jungle waterways. The marauding creature then returns to haunt its former tormentors, claiming lives and a captive. As the posters declared back in the day, “Not since the beginning of time has the world beheld terror like this!” On a local note, the film was partially shot at nearby Zaca Lake in the San Rafael Mountains.
The Jazz Passengers with The Creature from the Black Lagoon is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and sponsored by the Daily Nexus and the Santa Barbara Inn.
Tickets for the event are $25 for the general public and $15 for UCSB students. They are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.