Gary Lucas: Jazz Guitarist Adds Dimension To The Theater Experience

DownBeat Magazine named guitarist Gary Lucas one of their “Hot 66 6-Stringers,” but it has been Lucas’ ability to lead jazz ensembles and collaborate with musicians from different genres and cultures that audiences find most fascinating about him. A strong live performer and a prolific improviser, Gary Lucas has created a reputation for himself as a theater art musician playing improvised scores live during the showing of classic and contemporary films.

Most audiences today may only be aware of such theater art performances from the stories they heard about silent films being shown in local theaters while a handful of musicians played live music to compliment the scenes in the film and translate the emotions of the characters through music. It is an old art form that many educational institutions and cultural societies use today to enhance the audiences viewing experience. Co-founder of Ruby Flower Records, Ana-Isabel Ordonez is an advocate of theater art performances and has worked on several projects commissioned by the Luxembourg European Cultural Organization in coordination with the La Belle Usine Association.

Ordonez explains about these projects, “The improvised music brings another art form and dimension to the experience and adds to it the musical score, which will create the intangible feeling that those film noir represented visually. The history of film and music combined has always existed. The element of original improvised jazz adds the sense of hearing to the visual to which the audience members can respond as a collective or individually. The audience can interpret this experience individually or as a collective feel. There is no right or wrong in the interpretations. Every interpretation and experience will be sole and subjective to the participants, performers and observers alike.”

One of Gary Lucas’ first projects using the live theater art format was in 1989 when he debuted his score for “The Golem,” a 1920 film made by Paul Wegener and directed by Carl Boese. Lucas and his original collaborator for the project, Walter Horn, performed the piece at the Museum of the Moving Image on a commission from BAM Next Wave Festival. Since that first show, Lucas has performed the score as a live soundtrack to the film’s showing around the globe playing to audiences in Russia, Canada, Italy, Austria, England, Spain, Mexico, and the US where he recently performed at Atlanta’s Dragon*Con, the largest science fiction festival in the world.

Lucas enthuses, “I love performing with this film and have done it hundreds of times all over the world. The beauty is that it is about 50% improvised so it changes a lot each time I play it, which keeps it fresh for me. I am absorbed in the film while playing throughout, and the older I get, the more I enjoy playing to it. It is a real treasure that should be better known. I feel I have a deeper understanding of it as time goes on, and it is still incredibly relevant. The music, a collaboration with my childhood friend, composer/keyboardist Walter Horn, continues to be a joy to play.”

Lucas expresses that these performances have affected audiences differently. “I have had all sorts of reactions over the years,” he examines, “mainly positive but occasionally negative, but I think it is down to individual sensibilities at each show and not sentiments typical of the country, per say. I think the story appeals because it is a modern Prometheus myth in which the attempt to create life out of inanimate matter has always held a special fascination with audiences as it seems to be going against nature or the will of God with ensuing disastrous consequences.”

The story of “The Golem” has many similarities to Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein,” with the characters set in a Prague ghetto during the 16^th century. Lucas continues to tour with “The Golem,” in addition to working on other film projects which have included his score for Lon Chaney’s 1925 film “The Unholy Three” by Tod Browning, which Lucas premiered at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in October 2009. And his score for “Sounds of the Surreal,” a program commissioned by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in which Lucas improvises music to accompany the works of 3 short silent films from Rene Clair, Fernand Leger, and Ladislaw Starewicz. In February 2009, he played the score live to a packed audience in downtown Manhattan’s Wintergarden atrium at the World Financial Center.

Lucas tells about the projects which are commissioned by the Film Society of Lincoln Center that “It is an honor for me to be recognized by such a prestigious institution. I have always loved films going to my days as a little boy when I projected horror films in the basement of our house… Later on, I was a director of the Yale Film Society and established a weekly series of horror film screenings under the title, ‘Things That Go Bump In The Night’ with partner Bill Moseley that became big events around campus.”

Lucas purports, “These projects satisfy me creatively because I love recuperating lost treasures such as silent movies the world has largely forgotten and reanimating them with a contemporary feeling. That’s one of my preoccupations in my career, rescuing and shedding light on lost gems, polishing them again to make them shine in the world and give off light anew. I really get into the dreamscapes of those films. When I play I try and inhabit them and commune with the vanished wraith-like souls on the screen. It’s a very spiritual event for me to play to these films.”

Gary Lucas’ latest project is a new live score for Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film “Dracula” by Tod Browning and translated in the Spanish language by Enrique Tovar Avalos and Henry Melford. Lucas premiered his score during the film’s showing at the 35^th Havana Film Festival in December 2009, and received an invitation to perform his score at the 48^th New York Film Festival in Fall 2010.

A creator of original scores for classic and contemporary films, Gary Lucas displays a talent that enhances the viewing experience for audiences and modernizes a vintage art form. His foray into music began as a member of Captain Beefheart’s band in the late ‘80s which he segued into a number of collaborations with guitarist Jeff Buckley during the early ‘90s, but it is his work as a theater art musician which has made a vivid impression on audiences and has enabled Gary Lucas to shine on his own.