“Do you see what I’m hearing?” An Evening of Film & Music with Gerry Fialka, Suzy Williams & Brad Kay

“Do you see what I’m hearing?” An Evening of Film & Music with Gerry Fialka, Suzy Williams & Brad Kay
7pm- 10pm, free admission, donations appreciated

7:00pm – Pixelvision: Electronic Folk Art As McLuhan – GERRY FIALKA, director of the 22 year old film festival PXL THIS, presents a fun interactive films screening and workshop on the Fisher Price PXL 2000 toy video camera. Delve deep into the significance of this raw DIY moving image art tool through the percepts of Marshall McLuhan, George Seaurat, Salvador Dali, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Frank Zappa  & more. The irresistible irony of PXL is that the camera’s ease-of-use and affordability, which entirely democratizes movie-making, has inspired the creation of some of the most visionary, avant and luminous films of our time.

8:30pm – The Lit Show – SUZY WILLIAMS & BRAD KAY play live jazz & blues in a celebration of song and literature. Suzy and Brad will perform songs based on words by Kurt Vonnegut, Edna St Vincent Millay, J.D. Salinger, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, Rudyard Kipling and more. Dorothy Parker wrote a song that Billie Holiday sang. Tennessee Williams wrote a song that Marlon Brando sang as a rambling troubadour in The Fugitive Kind. Lonely House was written by Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes. Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg wrote Pull My Daisy with David Amram. You’ve read the book, now hear the song.

SUZY WILLIAMS has played Carnegie Hall with Stormin’ Norman Zamcheck, performed with Pilobolus Dance Company, and has worked with Van Dyke Parks, Buster Poindexter, Marc Shaiman, Nicholas Ray, and Moses Pendleton among many others. Bette Midler, Horace Silver, Roosevelt Sykes, Ann Magnuson, Eubie Blake, Odetta and Hadda Brooks have praised her passionate singing and vibrant energy. One of the best interpreters of Bessie Smith, has been highly praised by seminal blues and jazz critics including Eubie Blake and Chris Albertson (Bessie Smith’s biographer.)
BRAD KAY, composer, pianist and historian, has led bands in Los Angeles since 1965. He has collaborated with Danny Elfman’s Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, jazz pioneer Gerald Wilson, writer Harlan Ellison, director Tim Burton and Suzy & Her Solid Senders. Kay plays cornet and piano with Janet Klein & Her Parlor Boys.

You can learn more on Gerry and Suzy’s website, here.

APPRAISE:

“Gerry Fialka’s Pixelvision: Electronic Folk Art As McLuhan is deeply thoughtful and very well planned. This presentation offered an enormous range of ideas and references. His ideas are well integrated and clearly stimulated critical thinking in new ways. I especially appreciate the way he involved the all forty plus students, something rarely achieved in the course of a full semester let alone during one evening. His selection of video pieces is expertly planned, both in terms of variety and in its length within the context of the larger presentation. The evening succeeded in being both a primer on the value and history of Pixelvision but also positioned it within a philosophical framework that gives it far more meaning than the work could have had on its own.” – Steve Anker, Dean of Film and Video, California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts).

“Suzy’s voice is vibrant and lusty…great gusto and bold emotion.” – Nat Hentoff.

“Williams’ energy must be seen to be believed…a natural performer.” – Robert Palmer, New York Times.

“Williams is an enormously amusing, endearing presence…with tough, belting authority.” – John Rockwell, New York Times.

“Suzy Williams and Brad Kay teach old standards (Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller) new tricks, but it’s their originals that will bring you back for more.” – Jazz critic Rex Butters

“No one I have ever met is more dedicated to music than the great pianist Brad Kay…he is ever searching for infinite harmonic variations, love and a soulful sense of humor in his music.” – George Winston.