Christmas jazz albums come and go with each end-of-year holiday season. And while they may make for good soundtracks to that holiday spirit, rarely do they stand up as much more than that, and certainly not as anything approaching a serious listen. ~ Amazon
A San Francisco nightclub launched one of the most exciting bands to come out the Northwest. Tommy Chong and Bobby Taylor formed Four Niggers & a Chink from Little Daddie & the Bachelors, who originated from the Shades, a Calgary/Edmonton based group. Little Daddie & the Bachelor's recorded a couple singles, including "Too Much Monkey Business" out of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Peter Weir's haunting and evocative mystery is set in the Australia of 1900, a mystical place where the British have attempted to impose their Christian culture with such tweedy refinements as a girls' boarding school. After gauzily-photographed, nicely underplayed scenes of the girls' budding sexuality being restrained in Victorian corsets, the uptight headmistress (Rachel Roberts) takes them on a Valentine's Day picnic into the countryside, and several of the girls, led by the lovely Miranda (Anne Lambert) decide to explore a nearby volcanic rock formation. It's a desolate, primitive, vaguely menacing place, where one can almost feel the presence of ancient pagan spirits. Something – and there is an unspoken but palpable emphasis on the inherent carnality of the place – draws four of the girls to explore the rock. Three never return. No one ever finds out why. The repercussions for the school are tragic, and of course Roberts reacts with near-crazed anger, but what really happened? Weir gives enough clues to suggest any number of explanations, both physical and supernatural.
Danish tenor sax-man Bent Jaedig left his mark while he was here. At his funeral in 2004, one speaker said, “He lived jazz, and he was a jazz musician with a capitol J so large, that it reaches the sky”. He was a sharp, modern jazz musician, and for long periods, his home and career were south of the Danish border. A true cosmopolitan and jazz nomad, from the mid-1950’s and on he played with the most important modern European jazz musicians and visiting American stars: Chet Baker, Benny Bailey, Lucky Thompson, Dusko Goykovich, Tete Monoliu, Don Byas, Bill Coleman, George Coleman, Carlos Ward, Mal Waldron, Philly Joe Jones and many, many more. He was offered Sal Nistico’s chair in Woody Herman’s orchestra but had to turn the offer down due to difficulties obtaining an American green card.
Al Pacino stars as Tony Montana, an exiled Cuban criminal who goes to work for Miami drug lord Robert Loggia. Montana rises to the top of Florida's crime chain, appropriating Loggia's cokehead mistress (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the process. Howard Hawks' "X Marks the Spot" motif in depicting the story line's many murders is dispensed with in the 1983 Scarface; instead, we are inundated with blood by the bucketful, especially in the now-infamous buzz saw scene. One carry-over from the original Scarface is Tony Montana's incestuous yearnings for his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). The screenplay for the 1983 Scarface was written by Oliver Stone.