Our other exciting news is that award-winning documentary filmmaker, John McDonald, has asked The Crooked Jades to provide music for his current feature-length documentary, Call Me Mule. We love the film and are honored to participate in this amazing project.
The project, filmed over a 27-month period, is the story of one man’s struggle to roam freely with his mules, seeking a balance between the man-made world and the natural world. The film raises issues that concern all of us: preserving open space, individual freedom of movement, access to public land, and the system’s treatment of people living outside society’s norms.
Just last week I saw the beautiful film Nomadland, winner of two Golden Globes for best film and best director, Chloé Zhao, and realized one of the nomads, Swankie Wheels, a real life character, also appears in Call Me Mule. Swankie, is one of the growing population of “van dwellers” or “rubber tramps,” is apparently a big Mule fan. She gives him a ‘tour’ of her home/wheels during the film. This clip is from the video diaries of filmmaker John McDonald.
The film is still in post production but we will keep you posted on the release date.
This San Francisco-based band boldly goes where no old-time string band has gone before. The Crooked Jades new release “Bright Land” is a soundtrack of 20 songs and tunes for a 50-minute work of contemporary dances set to old-time music composed and re-arranged by The Crooked Jades. The project all started when acclaimed New York-based modern dance maven Kate Weare came out to see the Jades on their “Shining Darkness” tour at Café du Nord in San Francisco. A stranger to the band at the time, they all noticed her right away because she was inspired to get up and dance, not to a fast-driving fiddle tune like most audiences, but to a mournful Roscoe Holcomb ballad called Moonshiner. Later she told the band that she was moved by the skill, edge and depth of their music and felt inspired as a choreographer. So that’s what sparked this unlikely collaboration. And it really came to feel like the perfect union as the band was in turn inspired to reframe compositions to join Crooked Jades’ hypnotic old-time music with Kate Weare’s boldly poetic modern dance.
Jeff Kazor has been producing a new record for Kenny Feinstein(of the Water Tower Bucket Boys) involving performances by several of The Crooked Jades including Lisa Berman singing harmonies and playing slide, Erik Pearson on dobro, guitars and flutes, and Charlie Rose on bass. This ambitious project is a totally acoustic reconstruction of My Bloody Valentine’s seminal “Loveless” album from 1991 with absolutely no digital processing. One of the big challenges in keeping true to the album’s essence has been inventing an acoustic process that creates the ethereal blanket of swirling distortion behind those beautiful vocals and poppy melodies.