| HOME | CATALOG | FESTIVAL | THEATRICAL | EDUCATIONAL | HOME VIDEO | NEWS | CALENDAR | ABOUT | CONTACT |
Shana Tova from your friends at 7th Art Releasing!
This holiday greeting coincides with a film announcement! We are excited to bring you a new film, TONY CURTIS: DRIVEN TO STARDOM. We look forward to sharing this amazing documentary with you soon. More information can be found below.
Tony Curtis: Driven to Stardom
Trapeze, Spartacus, Sweet Smell of Success, The Boston Strangler, Some Like It Hot. Tony Curtis, the man who influenced Elvis Presley and James Dean, was one of the very first teen idols and one of the last real movie stars. From his difficult upbringing in the Bronx, where he was born Bernie Schwartz, to his unprecedented fame and infamous way with women, TONY CURTIS: DRIVEN TO STARDOM presents Mr. Curtis's life in all its rags to riches glory. Interviews with Tony's family, friends and co-stars (Hugh Hefner, Harry Belafonte, Debbie Reynolds, Mamie Van Doren, Piper Laurie, Theresa Russell, Jill Curtis among others!) along with exclusive footage and film clips are given deeper meaning and clarity by the most honest and intimate interview the actor may have ever given. Here, in the definitive film about Tony Curtis, filmmaker Ian Ayres forms this incredible material into a revealing portrait of one of the greatest Hollywood celebrities of all time.
Have a wonderful holiday!
Click here for some Rosh Hashana wisdom!
The real Mardi Gras Chiefs, their culture and incredible music that inspired HBO's Tremé. BURY THE HATCHET is now available for booking from Seventh Art Releasing!
BURY THE HATCHET is a portrait of three Mardi Gras Indian "Big Chiefs". These New Orleans men are the descendants of runaway slaves who were taken in by the Native Americans of the Louisiana bayous. These African-American tribes were once plagued by violent gang-style clashes. Now, every year during Mardi Gras, they take to the backstreets of New Orleans, dressed in elaborate Native-American influenced costumes that they sew over the course of the year. Where they once fought with hatchets, they now battle over which Chief has the best suit.
Following the Mardi Gras Indians over the course of five years - before, during and after Hurricane Katrina - filmmaker Aaron C. Walker explores their art and philosophies, as well as their struggles within their communities: harassment by the police, violence amongst themselves, gentrification of their neighborhoods, disinterested youth, old age and natural disaster.
BURY THE HATCHET brings to light the real people, culture, and incredible music of the Mardi Gras chiefs that inspired the Emmy-nominated HBO show, Tremé, and its character, Big Chief Antoine Batiste.
Click here to watch the trailer!
"The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits"
PORTRAIT OF WALLY now available from 7th Art Releasing.
PORTRAIT OF WALLY, Egon Schiele's tender picture of his mistress, Valerie Neuzil, is the pride of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. But until last year the 1912 painting was locked up in New York, caught in a legal battle between the Austria museum and the Jewish family from whom the Nazis seized the painting in 1939.
The documentary PORTRAIT OF WALLY traces the history of this iconic image from Schiele's gesture of affection toward his young lover, to the theft of the painting from Lea Bondi, a Jewish art dealer fleeing Vienna for her life, to the post-war confusion and subterfuge that evoke THE THIRD MAN, to the surprise resurfacing of "Wally" on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1997.
The 13-year war over "Wally" was more than a dispute over property stolen from Jews during the Holocaust. It was a battle over history and memory. This time, the truth won.
The Klezmatics Celebrate 25 Years with 2-CD set The Klezmatics: Live At Town Hall; 25th Anniversary World Tour Runs July 2011 through March 2012; History-Making Ensemble in New Documentary, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground
Twenty-five years ago a group of curious musicians with diverse backgrounds in world music, jazz, classical and the avant-garde answered an ad in New York's Village Voice seeking players for a klezmer band. Craving new creative avenues, they infused the centuries-old traditional, celebratory Jewish music with elements of several other genres and more than a little downtown New York chutzpah. Today, 10 albums and countless touring miles later, The Klezmatics are virtually synonymous with klezmer itself. To mark their silver anniversary, the band that put klezmer back on the map is releasing Live at Town Hall, a guest-studded, retrospective commemoration of a remarkable NYC concert that salutes their remarkable history and hints at tantalizing future possibilities.
To celebrate the album's release on September 13th, the Klezmatics will embark on an extensive tour that will take them to such prestigious venues as Disney Hall (Los Angeles), Highline Ballroom (New York) and high-profile dates in Milan, Budapest, Riga, Prague and Amsterdam.
Many Klezmatics members have come and gone since their 1986 debut gig, but Live at Town Hall finds the two remaining founder, Frank London (trumpet, horns, keyboards, percussion, vocals) and Lorin Sklamberg (lead vocals, accordion, guitar, piano), joined by longtime bandmates Matt Darriau (clarinets, alto saxophone, kaval, vocals), Paul Morrissett (bass, tsimbl, vocals) and Lisa Gutkin (violin vocals), as well as two of the group's regular drummers, David Licht and Richie Barshay. In addition, early members David Krakauer (clarinets, vocals) and Margot Leverett (clarinet) are among the many friends of the band who stopped by to contribute to the festivities.
"We wanted to celebrate with everyone who has been part of our family," says London. "It was impossible to bring some of those who live far away, but we managed to have just about everyone important who has ever been in or played with the Klezmatics on stage with us. It felt so good and natural and right. The energy was incredible, the love and mutual respect. We are blessed to be part of such a wonderful community."
Their second live album (the first, Brother Moses Smote the Water, was released in 2004), Live at Town Hall reaches all the way back for material to the Klezmatics' 1988 debut, Shvaygn=Toyt. The band also chose a handful of tunes from the pair of albums on which the Klezmatics crafted new music from previously unknown Woody Guthrie compositions, 2006's Grammy-winning Wonder Wheel and its followup, Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah. Those two critically lauded recordings found the Klezmatics not only singing in English,something they'd rarely done before" but breaking out of the klezmer mold nearly entirely. Their Grammy win for Wonder Wheel marked the first -- and only -- for a Jewish music group.
Most of Live at Town Hall, however, consists of the songs and sounds that have made the Klezmatics a huge success worldwide for the past two and a half decades, bringing them to more than 20 countries and winning them countless rave reviews and numerous awards along the way, including the Reis der Deutsches Schallplattenkritik (German Critics' Award) and the GLAMA Gay and Lesbian American Music Award, for their album The Well with Israeli folk singer Chava Alberstein. Klezmatics recordings have ascended to #1 in the Billboard Magazine World Music chart, the European World Music chart and the CMJ World Music chart.
But Live at Town Hall is more than a peek in the rear view mirror. The Klezmatics went overboard to make the gig and resulting album extra special. As Sklamberg points out, “Some of the songs, including Abe Ellstein's "Bobe Tanz" and the Woody Guthrie-Matt Darriau collaboration "Lolly Lo" make their first appearance on a Klezmatics CD here. And the presence of a large coterie of our friends singing backup makes for some great vocal moments, particularly a new Russian choral-inspired arrangement on "Dzhankoye"and the sheer joy of singing together on such favorites as "Fisherlid" "St. John's Nign," "Shnirele, perele" and "Tepel".
The concert also gave the Klezmatics an opportunity to feature some of their esteemed guests in a solo setting: Joanne Borts on the title song from The Well; Adrienne Cooper and Sklamberg recreating their duet on "Ain't Afraid"; Joshua Nelson's smoking "Elijah Rock" and Susan McKeown's passionate take on "Gonna Get Through This World." The show also featured Krakauer recreating "Fun tashlikh" from the band's classic album Rhythm + Jews. Perhaps the most transcendent moment arrives when all of the instrumentalists cut loose on "NY Psycho Freylekhs."
For the Klezmatics, the band's 25th anniversary serves as an affirmation that the initial hunch they had, that this was music that would resonate with a contemporary audience, was on the mark. When they first started out in the mid-80s, the klezmer revival was itself a new phenomenon; the musicians were still learning their way around the music, discovering how this traditional form with roots in Eastern European Jewish life applied in today's fast-paced world. Now, the Klezmatics are an institution, beloved by audiences with a direct connection to Jewish culture and by those who may not have been familiar with it at all before encountering their music.
Over the years, their collaborations have been legion: they've worked with everyone from folk singers Theodore Bikel and Arlo Guthrie to poet Allen Ginsberg, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, New York downtown scene fixtures John Zorn and Marc Ribot, and pop singer Neil Sedaka. In the area of theatre, they composed the score for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Kushner's adaptation of the classic Yiddish drama A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, and have worked in film and dance as well. They've appeared on TV programs as diverse as Late Night with David Letterman and Sex and the City, and teamed with classical violin icon Itzhak Perlman for the Emmy-winning PBS special Great Performances: In the Fiddler's House. They've also guested on numerous radio programs, including the BBC's John Peel Show and NPR's A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor.
Always looking for ways to expand and redefine, the Klezmatics have recorded two Yiddish dance standards with klezmer clarinet legend Ray Musiker for the album Klezmer Music: A Marriage of Heaven and Earth, Klezmaticized the Jamaican ska rhythm for a cover of the classic "Do the Ska (KlezSkaLypso)" on the Skatalites tribute CD Freedom Sounds and written music for the Pilobolus Dance Theatre's Davenen (which premiered at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center) and for a new work by choreographer Twyla Tharp in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Martha Graham's birth. Regardless of what they undertake, their creations bear the unmistakable stamp of the Klezmatics.
"Somehow," says Darriau, "we have arrived at a way of filtering ideas and influences so that no matter what we do, it has a Klezmatics sensibility to it."
Most recently, the group went before the cameras to serve as the subject of The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, a feature-length documentary by Erik Greenberg Anjou (Seventh Art Releasing) that is currently screening at film festivals around the world.
Says Gutkin, "The Klezmatics, are, for many, more than just another world music group. We are their family. In a different era we would be their aunts and uncles. They know what we do needs to be preserved."
