E4 THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
was Mike Lang.
He is the kind of pianist
you will find nowhere else.
Like the original Piano
Spheres crew, he was a stu-
dent of the series’ founder,
Leonard Stein, who had been
an assistant of Arnold
Schoenberg when he taught
at UCLA in the 1930s. Though
a generation removed from
the Schoenberg students
such as David Raksin (of
“Laura” fame) and Leonard
Rosenman (of “Barry
Lyndon” fame) who went to
heap sophistication upon
Hollywood film music, Lang
reminds us of the seldom rec-
ognized but significant inter-
section between contempo-
rary music and Hollywood.
His day job has long been
as a studio musician who can
be heard on, his bio noted,
more than 2,000 film and tele-
vision scores or recordings.
He has accompanied Ella
Fitzgerald and John Lennon.
He was Henry Mancini’s go-
to pianist. He has led his own
jazz trio. Yet he also calls
himself a new-music junkie
who has performed at the
Monday Evening Concerts
and been on the board and
advisory committee of Piano
Spheres.
But he is also one of L.A.’s
great known unknowns, a pi-
anist and composer who
doesn’t often get the spot-
light. Joined by two other ver-
satile musicians, Michael Va-
lerio on bass and Jim Keltner
on drums, Lang offered on
Saturday a survey of what he
called the Great American
Song Book. It was, more
accurately, an illumination of
the Great Hollywood Song
Book.
First came a short atonal
improvisation, just because,
Lang explained. Much of the
evening was in tribute to jazz
and film composers he had
worked with or admired. But
front and center was Man-
cini, who seems to be having a
moment. Over the last two
weeks at the Bowl, Gustavo
Dudamel conducted the
theme from “Peter Gunn”
with such vivacity it seemed
to capture the soul of an era,
and John Adams coinciden-
tally included a nod to
“Gunn” in his recent piano
concerto “Why Must the Dev-
il Get All the Best Tunes?”
Then there is that other Lang
—Lang Lang, who recorded
Mancini’s “Moon River”
three years ago.
Mike Lang’s style is to sel-
dom give you much of the
tune at first. He dances
around it. His chords are
lushly colored with extra
notes he would not know if he
didn’t know atonality. His im-
provisations are wanders
through thickets, not lost but
absorbed in the harmonic
brush, picking up whatever is
available. One thing will re-
mind him of something else,
finding relationships where
others wouldn’t.
He introduced numbers
telling stories about life in the
film sessions, what it was like
to work with Mancini and
Jerry Goldsmith, which is
catnip to musical Angelenos.
Mancini’s “Days of Wine and
Roses” and a startlingly emo-
tional “Moment to Moment”demonstrated the potential
of chords let loose.
Elsewhere, Lang found
hidden melodic cores in Bill
Evans’ “Peace Piece” and
Miles Davis’ “Flamenco
Sketches” and hidden har-
monic ones underlying Char-
lie Parker’s “Bird of Paradise”
and Jerome Kern’s “All the
Things You Are.” The revela-
tion here, time and again,
was hearing our city’s musi-
cal identity lie in a single (or a
trio’s) voice. The packed hall
seemed equally divided be-
tween jazz buffs and new mu-
sic aficionados, both at
home.
The Schoenberg connec-
tion also included the Mon-
day Evening Concerts, in
which the composer had
participated. And it just so
happened that in a concert at
Hauser & Wirth held in con-
junction with a Guillermo
Kuitca exhibition, Schoen-
berg’s influence was at thecenter.
The sign in front of the
Arts District gallery said
both the 7 and 9 p.m. per-
formances had sold out. The
crowd once again was mixed
—new music and art world.
The gallery was flooded with
music-related art. A series of
Kuitca’s paintings of concert
venues includes a brush-
stroked Hollywood Bowl
mistily overgrown by green-
ery with blue oceanic turmoil
by the stage. A second exhib-
ition of work by David
Hammonswas inspired by
jazz great Ornette Coleman.
MEC stuck with Kuitca, a
Wagner obsessive. Though
not in the Hauser & Wirth ex-
hibition, one series of Kuitca
canvases increasingly blurs
the album jacket of a record-
ing of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.
This led to the starting place
for the concert program,
the prelude to “Tristan und
Isolde,” played on a harmo-nium by Piano Spheres mem-
ber Vicki Ray. The harmo-
nium, a favorite instrument of
Wagner’s, is powered by foot
pedals. When heard close up
in a corner of the gallery, it
helped to remind a listener of
just how radical this har-
monically unsettled music
was in 1865.
Schoenberg’s string sex-
tet, “Transfigured Night,”
was the next big step in musi-
cal uncertainty 35 years later.
A heralding of atonality, it got
a terrific performance, again
for a small audience, its disso-
nances strikingly in our faces.
The atmosphere was one
thing, but so was the intent of
percussionist and MEC artis-
tic director Jonathan Hepfer,
who interspersed these
works with shocking short
percussion pieces by the con-
temporary German com-
poser Claus-Steffen
Mahnkopf. Just as Kuitca
smeared the old with paint,Mahnkopf accomplished the
same with sound.
In a final gallery, in front of
Kuitca’s “Retablo,” its ab-
stract design weirdly remi-
niscent of the style of Schoen-
berg’s paintings, Hepfer fur-
ther brought German music
up to date. Stockhausen’s
groundbreaking four-chan-
nel 1956 tape work, “Gesang
der Jünglinge” (Song of the
Youth), with its electronic
harmonic waves and haunt-
ing boy’s voice, was followed
by Hepfer’s riveting perform-
ance of Helmut Lachen-
mann’s percussion solo, “In-
térieur I,” written a decade
later.
It felt unfortunate to wan-
der out afterward into the in-
creasingly unimaginative
and barely hangout-worthy
Arts District. This kind of
programming is the stuff of a
summer festival. And this is a
city that wants one. Or how
about two?JONATHANHepfer, the Monday Evening Concerts artistic director, is backed by a Guillermo Kuitca artwork.Myung J. ChunLos Angeles TimesMIKE LANGamplified the Great Hollywood Song
Book in performance at Zipper Hall on July 27.
Bonnie PerkinsonL.A. needs
a summer
music fest
[Music,from E1]
and-classic-car-show-looted
journey is certainly an
homage to something.
Watching two middle-
aged white guys grapple with
a world that does not value
them as much as they believe
it should, it was tough not to
wonder if that something
was the same narrow, reduc-
tive and mythologized view
of history that has made red
MAGA hats the couture of
conservative fashion.
Oh, for the good old days.
It could have been Cliff ’s
easy trouncing of Asian
upstart Bruce Lee(Mike
Moh), or Rick’s constant
NIMBYcomplaints about all
these longhairs, or maybe it
was just the overkill of seeing
a Good Humor truck pull up
next to a milk truck while
hippies openly smoked weed
on Hollywood Boulevard.
(Wait, does Tarantino have a
problem with weed?) What-
ever the reason, as I shifted
in my seat waiting for the
film’s climax, Tarantino’s
elegy for a time when men
were men and women were
madonnas, whores or nags
and the only people who
spoke Spanish were waiters
—“Don’t cry in front of the
Mexicans” is an actual line
played for laughs — began to
feel ominously familiar.
If nothing else, “Once
Upon a Time ... in Holly-
wood” laid to rest the notion
of Hollywood liberalism —
any industry still so invested
in sentimentalizing a time of
studio fiefdoms, agents
played by Al Pacino in a
wig-hat and white-guy
buddy movies can hardly be
considered progressive.
Not that I don’t enjoy
buddy movies or the occa-
sional trip down local selec-
tive-memory lane — I too
have fond memories of west-
erns, Good Humor trucks
and ice-cube trays with
handles. I too admire the
strong competence of a man
who can leap from ground to
wall to rooftop to display
perfect abs before deftly
fixing a television antenna.
And as a journalist of a cer-
tain age, I understand the
frustration of having to
adjust to the changing de-
mands of a profession you
thought you’d mastered
while younger folks wonder
what it is you don’t get.
Nostalgia is fun, and fine
when used recreationally;
but it’s time to face the dan-
gers of our national addic-
tion to reveling in visions of
the past that are, at best,
emotionally curated by a
select few and, at worst,
complete nonsense.
Much has been said
about film and television
makers rummaging through
the cultural recycling bin for
proven hits — the other big
summer movie is a remake of
“The Lion King” and HBOeven has a new “Perry Ma-
son” in the works. But even
original, and often very fine,
works are fueled by our
wistful obsession with “vin-
tage.” Whether it’s the resur-
rection of leg warmers or
fedoras, the British class
system, Winona Ryder or,
heaven help us, Charles
Manson, nostalgia is the new
sex and the exquisite muse-
um-like quality of the detail
found in period films and
television series is its porn.
The costumes, the cut-
lery, the signage, the slang
and, always, the music;
increasingly, viewers live for
the money shot of whatever
bit of cultural detritus will
send them reeling back to
their youth when go-go
boots/day drinking/pixie
cuts were cool the first time
around.
When times, it is implied
if not directly stated, were
simpler.Even though they wer-
en’t. Ever.
Unless you were a mem-
ber of the white, male, Chris-
tian, heterosexual, able-
bodied, culturally conform-
ing, non-addicted, mentally
well, moneyed elite, there
was literally no time in his-
tory that was simpler, better,
easier, or greater. For most
people, history is the story of
original oppression gradu-
ally lessened through a series
of struggles and setbacks.
“Once Upon a Time ... in
Hollywood” is a masterpiece
of nostalgia porn — the still
recent assassination of
Robert Kennedy, reduced to
a few snippets of radio re-
porting about the sentenc-
ing of Sirhan Sirhan, is noth-
ing compared to the wonders
of the parking lot of Musso
and Frank. And Tarantino
wields nostalgia on two
levels, adoring 1969 even as
he looks wistfully back toearlier days when Spahn
Ranch was a television set.
And he has chosen as his
driving force an actor upset
because he is no longer seen
as hero material and his loyal
stuntman companion, who
may or may not have mur-
dered his wife. That this
death is treated as a joke,
and the wife visible only
once, in flashback, as a bray-
ing nag in a bikini, could be
viewed as an indictment of
the Playboy-cartoon mi-
sogyny of the time. Could be,
if Cliff were not portrayed
with such charming tough-
guy chivalry. If this guy
murdered his wife, she prob-
ably deserved it.
So for Cliff ’s wife anyway,
not such a golden era.
Nor for Sharon Tate,
portrayed by Margot Robbie
as the ultimate golden-
haired girl next door.
By giving the ballad of
Rick and Cliff adjacency to
the Manson“family”— Rick
lives on Cielo Drive, Cliff
gives a comely Manson girl a
lift to the ranch — Tarantino
allows himself to bask in the
wonders of the Playboy
grotto as the audience pro-
vides the dread: We know
what’s going to happen, an
event so horrifying and
resonant that it will make
the problems of two little
people amount to less than a
hill of beans in this crazy
world.
Except, of course, it
doesn’t. Not content with
romanticizing history,
Tarantino, as he has before,
rewrites it.
Because that’s exactly
what we need at this mo-
ment in time: a little fake
history.
Rick and Cliff do not
become simply two of mil-
lions in a city terrorized by
the Manson murders. They
become good old-fashioned
heroes; Cliff grins in the face
of the real-life bogeyman(and women) before siccing
his dog on them. Then Rick
manages, with a movie prop,
to burn a woman to death
while she is in a pool. Talk
about the magic of Holly-
wood!
Do we wish someone had
somehow prevented the
murders of Sharon Tate, Jay
Sebring, Voytek Frykowski,
Steven Parent, Abigail Fol-
ger and Rosemary and Leno
LaBianca? Of course we do.
Just as we wish someone had
prevented the rise of Adolf
Hitler or outlawed at least
some of the types of guns
used in mass shootings,
including the one that
occurred in Gilroy the same
weekend “Once Upon a Time
... in Hollywood” opened.
But as powerful as film is,
it cannot rewrite the actual
events of history.
It can reveal the untold
stories, uncover hidden
truths, and clarify the con-
text of history by looking at it
in different ways, including
from previously margin-
alized, non-Classic-Holly-
wood-hero viewpoints.
Or it can wallow in nostal-
gia so completely that the
significance of actual events
becomes less important
than the brief flicker of mem-
ory sparked by the sight of a
few Hopalong Cassidy coffee
mugs or Damian Lewis
pretending to be Steve
McQueen (why?) or the
pleasure of watching two
handsome guys banter their
way through yet another
buddy movie.
Sure it’s a fairy tale. And
fairy tales are built to convey
moral messages in packages
easily digested by children.
The moral of “Once Upon a
Time ... in Hollywood” seems
to be “who doesn’t miss the
good old days when cars had
fins and white men were the
heroes of everything?”
Can I see a show of
hands?“ONCE”yearns for simpler times, the Golden Age. But the times were simpler
and the age was golden only for men like Leonardo DiCaprio, left, and Brad Pitt.Andrew CooperColumbia Pictures[‘Once,’from E1]
Nostalgia reeks of ‘Make America Great Again’