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The Undersung Heroes of Music: Soundbreaking (A DOC NYC Review)

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The Undersung Heroes of Music: Soundbreaking (A DOC NYC Review)

What defines a quality music producer? Well-informed and developed artistic taste? Phenomenal technical prowess in the recording studio? Is it someone who stands off to the side of the musicians, supporting and supplying yet allowing complete artistic freedom? Or is it someone who tugs, digs, bends, and sometimes breaks a top-marks result out of the performers concerned? To each his own, seems to suggest the brand-new eight-part PBS series Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music, the first two episodes of which premiered at this year’s DOC NYC Festival (full episodes are available for viewing here). 

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Mean Streets Music - Spoken and Sung

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Mean Streets' loud aural landscape with its intense songs and aggressive language, filled often with frustration, emphasizes Charlie’s (Harvey Keitel's) self-imposed separation, resulting from his quest to “save” his whacked-out pal Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro) and simultaneously do his own penance.  

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Led Zeppelin Played Here – or Did They?: An Interview with Jeff Krulik

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What is proof enough to determine that a historical event did indeed happen? The accounts of firsthand witnesses? Written documented records? Handed-down legends? Where the imperfect memories of human beings (and not much else) are involved, it becomes increasingly difficult to know for sure. In his latest film, and first feature-length one at that, documentarian Jeff Krulik employs all of these evidential elements in order to conclude whether or not Led Zeppelin played here.

The Guy Who Never Grew Up: Five Easy Pieces

“I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but because I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay,” says Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), the protagonist of Bob Rafelson’s 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces. Bobby Dupea is The Guy who Never Grew Up, and this line of dialogue spoken during a revelatory speech to his incapacitated father, perhaps best sums up his character, as well as the overall mood of the film. 

Ben Kingsley and Company on Learning to Drive

“The ferryman takes you from one bank of the river in his little craft, his boat, to the other bank of the river,” says Sir Ben Kingsley on this variety of the taxi-passenger experience. “You get off his boat and feel that your molecules have somehow been rearranged. You’ve learned something, something’s happened, there’s been a transition, though you might not be quite sure what it is.”