Notes on "Imagine the Sound"
Imagine the Sound (1981) is a collection of both live and in-studio performances punctuated by commentary by the artists: Paul Bley, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, and Cecil Taylor. The contrast in production style with the Ken Burns Jazz series is stark; the interview segments in Imagine are far more casual, with notable shots of Shepp and Bley smoking pipes and Taylor interrupting eloquent answers mid-sentence to light his cigarette, but no less illuminating and generally just more real-to-life. The majority of the film is performance footage, all of which is excellent. I remember seeing clips of Cecil Taylor performing solo from this documentary in Jazz years ago, and these performances are hard to forget not only because of the astonishing, up-close views of Taylor's physical exchanges with the instrument, but because they take place in an all-white studio space (it looks like the loading program from The Matrix ). I won't say much about the performances ...