Jazz trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas formed his band Keystone five years ago with cinema in mind -- specifically, a soundtrack for the silent films of comedy actor/director Fatty Arbuckle.
"It is a band with a sense of humor," Douglas said by phone recently. But Keystone's latest project is a "completely different animal," he said. Based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein story, "Spark of Being" -- a collaboration with experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison -- will receive only its second U.S. showcase Thursday at Walker Art Center.
"I did a major collaboration with [dancer/choreographer] Trisha Brown about 10 years ago and have done some work with painters, but 'Spark of Being' is a pretty deep interaction," Douglas said. "I like that neither the music nor the film takes over the experience."
The work seemed destined to be an intense democracy. Morrison, an avant-garde director acclaimed for his use of found, decaying film footage on features such as "Decasia," spent four years working at the New York jazz club the Village Vanguard and has collaborated with such jazz artists as Bill Frisell and Vijay Iyer. And Douglas is a notorious egghead and workaholic renowned for immersing himself in every aspect of his myriad projects.
"David had a more vested interest in the subject of filmmaking than any composer I've worked with," Morrison said in a separate interview. "He gave me things to read and bounced things off me, and I did the same thing to him. It was a high-maintenance relationship."
Frankenstein was the 'skeleton'
The two were teamed as artists in residence at Stanford University and commissioned to create what became "Spark of Being" as part of the Stanford Art + Invention initiative. (The Walker also provided funding.)
"Dave was very interested in how art and technology relate, which seemed very appropriate because so much of the new technology is being formed at Stanford," Morrison said. "We realized we needed an organizing principle. I had always wanted to make a found-footage film having to do with Frankenstein, using this idea of making a new creature out of parts of an older creature. I had some clips in a box marked 'The Gods of Time.' And we found out Mary Shelley was already talking about some of these issues that Dave and I were interested in.
